The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Planned Parenthood: A Taxpayer-Funded Democrat Party Campaign Organization

Posted on | November 19, 2015 | 77 Comments

This subverts the legitimacy of government:

Planned Parenthood is planning to spend at least $20 million fighting Republicans at the ballot box next year as the group punches back against GOP efforts to end its federal funding.
“Extremists made the 2016 election about attacking reproductive rights,” Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards, who was grilled extensively on Capitol Hill in September, said in a video announcing the effort Tuesday.
The group is planning to focus on the White House and Senate races in a few key states, including New Hampshire, Ohio, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The states not only have potentially competitive Senate races, but are also key swing states on the presidential map.
The $20 million will be spent on a mix of volunteer and activist organizing in each state and advertising.
“Enough is enough,” Richards said in the video. “With our supporters, we’re launching ‘I Vote Planned Parenthood Action.’ We’ll organize and mobilize to elect lawmakers who are in our corner.”

Can anyone explain the logic of forcing taxpayers to fund an organization that in turns spends money to elect Democrats?

Besides which, Planned Parenthood kills babies. Cecile Richards speaks of “extremists,” but she is the totalitarian fanatic who wants to use government power to silence dissent and punish her critics.





 

Category: Abortion, Planned Parenthood

Hurt Feelings = Oppression?

Posted on | November 18, 2015 | 54 Comments

In her perpetual hunt for victimhood, Jessica Valenti devotes an entire column to a “perhaps more insidious” form of discrimination, “everyday slights women can’t tangibly attribute to sexism”:

These subtler forms of sexism that women face can be even more difficult to handle than explicit discrimination. If your pay is unfair or a boss makes a pass at you, most of the time you can go to human resources. There’s a process in place for how to handle the sexism we know about, but there’s less direction about what we can do about a work culture that doesn’t value women.

In her quest to encourage women to believe they are victimized, Valenti cites an account by former Gawker staffer Dayna Evans, “On Gawker’s Problem With Women.” That is worth reading if only because Gawker is a liberal organization and the complaints of sexism by Nick Denton and his minions thus demonstrate that it is misguided to blame conservatives for discrimination against women, as so many feminists are prone to do.

That Gawker is something of a “boy’s club” is not the least bit surprising, because we hear similar complaints about almost every major online news operation. We heard it, for example, when Michelle Fields left the Daily Caller. I recall such complaints at the Washington Times during my decade there; even though there were female editors and reporters who were manifestly successful and valued in the organization, there were other women who, dissatisfied with their jobs, complained they were treated unfairly. Without clear evidence of outright discrimination, it is always difficult to assess claims of “sexism” in any workplace, because you can’t quantify and measure hurt feelings — which is what these complaints so often are actually about.

Almost everybody, I assume, at times feel they have been treated unfairly by their employer, and perhaps rightly so. However, a corporation is not in the business of producing fairness.

A company makes profit by delivering goods and services to its customers. Nothing is more important than this goal, because if the company doesn’t succeed in producing profit for investors, the company will go out of business, and the employees will no long have a job to complain about. Of course, we could say that discrimination might negatively impact a company’s profitability in various ways. Discrimination could means that the company is failing to gain the maximum advantage of employees’ abilities, and obvious unfairness might be harmful to employees’ morale, undermining the sense of teamwork necessary to success. However, in a competitive marketplace, it would be foolish to think that real discrimination — bad treatment of good employees — could coincide with success, simply because the employee treated unfairly in one company would be hired by a competing firm, which would thereby gain an advantage. If Dana Evans is a productive employee and was treated unfairly by Gawker, we must assume, she would be able to find another employer happy to hire her — and, indeed, she now writes for New York magazine’s site The Cut. Here are Ms. Evans’ 10 most recent contributions there:

11/17/2015
Adele Knows That There Are More Interesting
Things to Think About Than Body Issues

11/17/2015 at 2:06 p.m.
Zayn Malik Is Shirtless, Pouting, and
Riding a Dirt Bike Back Into Our Hearts

11/17/2015 at 12:52 p.m.
Puppy Tries Desperately to Escape
Relationship With John Mayer

11/17/2015 at 9:27 a.m.
Like a Good Friend, Amy Schumer Is Helping
Amber Rose Work on Her Confidence

11/16/2015 at 6:05 p.m.
Eating Requires More and More Effort Every Day

11/16/2015 at 2:10 p.m.
$2,000 Seems Like Kind of a Lot of Money
for a Selfie With Justin Bieber

11/16/2015 at 11:35 a.m.
When the Rock Cries About the Special Bond
He Has With His Daughter, I Cry, Too

11/16/2015 at 10:47 a.m.
World’s Worst Husband Returns Late Wife’s
Glamour Women of the Year Award

11/13/2015 at 5:52 p.m.
The Supreme Court Will Hear
A Challenge to Texas Abortion Law

11/13/2015 at 4:42 p.m.
Diane Keaton, 69-Year-Old Actress,
Is Horny As Hell, and We Love It

Quick, somebody alert the Pulitzer Prize committee. We have a winner.

 

Who is Dayna Evans? She attended New York University (annual tuition $46,170), graduating in 2009 with a B.A. in creative writing, worked a little more than two years for Simon & Shuster and, since leaving there in 2011, has worked 17 months teaching English in Bangladesh, seven months as web editor for a California gift shop, and 18 months at Gawker before leaving there in July. This kind of job-hopping resume is certainly not unusual for a 20-something liberal arts major (by the time I was 28, I’d worked eight different jobs since my college graduation, including a stint as DJ in a strip club), but how does this experience qualify Ms. Evans as an expert on discrimination? Her article about the alleged sexism at Gawker carries a preface explaining that executive editor John Cook declined to publish it because he was “done with Gawker writing about Gawker.” And her article also included this:

Diversity in general is a blind spot for Gawker Media. On Monday, John Cook published race and gender diversity statistics for the entire company: Overall it is 79 percent white and 57 percent male. In editorial, the staff is 61 percent male and 38 percent female, though given the fact that Jezebel.com is almost 100 percent female, excluding the women-focused site from his stats would skew editorial to being only 28 percent female. The statistics were released by Cook after BuzzFeed did the same for their company in October, in an equally unsatisfying look at who exactly runs the media.

And . . .? Your point is . . .?

Who cares what percentage of Gawker employees are white or black or Asian or female or gay? All that matters is profit.

If Nick Denton could outsource Gawker’s editorial work to Guatemalan peasants working in squalid huts for a few pesos a day, I’m sure he wouldn’t hesitate to do so. There is no feasible limit to Nick Denton’s unscrupulous greed, and this is why investors put their money into Gawker media, because they trust Nick will be absolutely ruthless in his quest to make a dollar, and “diversity” is only of interest to Gawker’s investors if it somehow impacts Nick’s ability to produce revenue.

At what point do we conclude that complaints about “sexism” are in fact complaints about capitalism? Because if Gawker is successful as a commercial enterprise — if it is competitive in the marketplace — this suffices to justify the company’s policies, from a capitalist perspective. It is only when we judge the company by a political calculus of “social justice” that there is any reason to demand that Gawker justify itself in terms of “diversity.” Well, I’ve got news for Jessica Valenti and Dayna Evans: Social justice is a mirage.

There is no such thing in the world. Never has been and never will be. You can run your mouth about “equality” until you’re blue in the face, but you cannot thereby conjure equality into existence. Sometimes hurt feelings are just hurt feelings. You are not a victim of injustice.

You can bet Nick Denton is glad he got rid of Dayna Evans, and after she eventually leaves New York magazine, they’ll be glad she’s gone, too. Nobody likes a whiner.





 

Category: Sex Trouble

TERROR RAID: French Police Kill Two, Arrest Seven Suspects in Saint Denis

Posted on | November 18, 2015 | 73 Comments

 

In a pre-dawn raid reportedly aimed at the mastermind of the Nov. 13 terrorist attacks in Paris, at least two suspects were killed and five arrested in the suburb of Saint Denis. CNN initially reported three suspects had been killed, including one female who blew herself up with a bomb, during the raid targeting Abdelhamid Abaaoud, suspected of organizing the Paris attacks. The Washington Post reports:

Gunshots and explosions rang out from the northern suburb of Saint-Denis early Wednesday as more than 100 French police and army troops laid siege to an apartment with at least six terror suspects, potentially including the alleged ringleader of Friday’s deadly attacks in Paris.
The narrow streets of Saint Denis were clogged with police vehicles and ambulances as witnesses reported multiple explosions. The operation began around 4:30 a.m. [11:30 p.m. ET], and left several police officers wounded and at least two suspects dead. The dead included a woman who blew herself up, according to the Paris prosecutor’s office.
The prosecutor’s office said three men were removed from the besieged apartment block and taken into custody. Their identities were not given. A man and a woman were arrested next to the apartment and also taken into custody. One suspect appeared to be still holed up.
Police may have been targeting Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian man authorities believe has led the Islamic State’s effort to terrorize Europe, according to an official familiar with the operation. He is seen as the “guru” of Friday’s deadly attacks at a stadium, concert hall and bars and restaurants in Paris, which killed at least 129 people and wounded more than 300 others.
French police have not officially confirmed who was the target of the raid.

UPDATE: The New York Times reports:

After a series of gun battles early Wednesday, the French police arrested five suspects hiding out in an apartment in the northern Paris suburb of St.-Denis in an operation aimed at detaining the Belgian militant suspected of organizing the attacks that killed 129 people on Friday. One woman died in the police assault when she detonated an explosive vest.
The raid began at 4:20 a.m., the Paris prosecutor’s office said, as special police forces, backed by truckloads of soldiers, cordoned off an area near Place Jean Jaurès, a main square in St.-Denis not far from the Stade de France, where three of the seven attackers who died on Friday blew themselves up. The shooting went on for 20 minutes, residents said, and continued in bursts until 7:30 a.m., when there were several explosions and gunfire.
Three men hiding out in the apartment were taken in by the police, the prosecutor’s office said, without identifying any of the three. A man and a woman were also captured near the apartment and have been taken in, the authorities said. Five police officers were lightly wounded, the police said.

UPDATE II: CNBC reports seven arrests:

The Paris prosecutor’s office confirmed one woman has died after detonating a suicide bomb, while sources told Reuters earlier a man had also been killed.
It also confirmed that five people have been placed under police custody following the raid. Two more have were arrested later in the morning, according to Reuters. . . .
Some more reports from Reuters about the suspects in the St. Denis raid. The news agency, citing a source, says they had planned an attack on the French business district.

The BCC reports:

The female suicide bomber who was killed in the Saint Denis raids was a relative of lslamic State militant Abdelhamid Abaaoud, BFM TV in France reports. Abaaoud is suspected of masterminding Friday’s attacks. . . .
Seven people were arrested in the raid, police are quoted by the AP news agency as saying. . . .
Several police officers were injured and a police dog killed.

PREVIOUSLY:




 

Category: France, Islam, Terrorism

In The Mailbox: 11.17.15

Posted on | November 18, 2015 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 11.17.15

— compiled by Wombat-socho


In The Mailbox will be on hiatus at least until next Tuesday, since I’m decamping to Portland, Oregon for a long weekend of hipster huntingwith family and friends, and not taking the laptop with me. The FMJRA and Rule 5 Sunday will likewise be delayed.


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Why Does Obama Still Want To Bring In Syrian Refugees?
The Camp of the Saints: On Paris And The Lie As Our Form Of Existence
Michelle Malkin: A Reminder Of The RefuJihadis Who Have Already Waged War On American Soil
Twitchy: Washington Post Rips “Petulant-Sounding” Obama On Paris Attacks, ISIS


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Heretic
American Thinker: Resettlement Contractors Lie To Protect Their Franchise
Conservatives4Palin: Governor Palin – You Have To Hand It To Putin
Don Surber: Any Apologies To Brigitte Bardot?
Jammie Wearing Fools: Democrats Whine That Benghazi Panel Has Cost $5 Million, Silent While Obama’s Syrian “Refugee” Plan Estimated At $55 Billion
Joe For America: Are You Scared? A Simple Question From Joe The Plumber
JustOneMinute: Outside The Box – Why Not Deliver To ISIS Their Apocalypse?
Pamela Geller: Obama vs. America – 30 Governors Now Refuse To Take Refugees, Paul Ryan Calls For “Pause” On Refugees
Protein Wisdom: Obama Calls Paris Islamist Attack Incident A “Setback”
Shot In The Dark: Compare And Contrast
The Gateway Pundit: Syrian “Refugee” Already Missing In Louisiana
The Jawa Report: That Escalated Quickly…
The Lonely Conservative: High Deductible Obamacare Plans Useless For Many
This Ain’t Hell: “Fighting Knights” Sign On Army Base Removed
Weasel Zippers: Clinton Foundation Failed To Report $20 Million In Donations From Foreign Governments
Megan McArdle: Deductibles Are The Price You Pay For Obamacare
Mark Steyn: Mark On Fox & Friends


Fire Essentials Bundle including Fire 7″ Tablet – $89.99

Category: Linkagery

The Worst President Ever

Posted on | November 17, 2015 | 24 Comments

Ace of Spades on Monday’s presidential press conference:

A man who keeps offering the same empty answers — “allies have to step up,” “a warped ideology on the wrong side of history,” “contrary to our values,” etc. — cannot complain this petulantly about being asked the same questions. . . .
He is the apotheosis of progressivism, the avatar and godling that is the living embodiment of all their cowardices, lies, hypocrisies, self-flatteries, and stupidities.
One self-flattery they’re fond of is claiming they have “evidence-based” reasoning, not ideology-based reasoning, and that their minds are supple things that readily incorporate new information and plot new strategies accordingly.
Obama is the ultimate exemplar of this fiction. He claims that he’s always interested in “whatever works” and he’s constantly engaging in high-level cognition about the world, and yet no matter what the news, no matter how badly his strategies and ideological priors have been shown to fail, he clings to them with the devotion of a child to his woobie.

You can read the whole thing. I generally refrain from commenting about things President Obama says, because I generally cannot stand to listen to what he says. But yesterday, I had my office TV on CNN during that press conference and heard enough of it to become irritated by the way he simply asserted that his policy is the only feasible and pragmatic policy, contrasting it with straw-man alternatives. If you believe Obama (and of course, I don’t mean to insult my readers by implying that any of you are stupid enough to believe Obama) every serious military strategist on the planet approves of his policy, as opposed to the Obviously Wrong Policies favored by those Crude and Clumsy Warmongers in the Republican Party. We are expected to believe that the choices are either (a) do exactly what Obama is doing, or (b) it’s back to the Neocon Cowboy days, with a Bush-type massive invasion/occupation thing like the Iraq war. Basically, it was a campaign speech of the kind Obama might have given to an audience of college students in 2007.

What is being ignored, of course, is that the current situation with ISIS is a direct result of the 2011 “Arab Spring” uprising that the Obama administration orchestrated as surely as the Kennedy administration orchestrated the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963. Is there anyone so stupid as to believe that there could have been simultaneous rebellions against the governments of Libya, Egypt, Syria, etc., without the CIA (and Hillary Clinton’s State Department) working behind the scenes to make it happen? This is not a paranoid conspiracy theory. The Obama administration was quite open in its support of the “Arab Spring,” and all I’m saying (beyond what is already public knowledge) is that U.S. covert agencies operated in that situation the way U.S. covert agencies normally operate. The 1953 coup in Iran, the 1954 coup in Guatemala, the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion — there is a long history of such clandestine operations, and if you think Obama and Hillary wouldn’t use the CIA to overthrow governments they disliked (which is what the “Arab Spring” was really about) you are hopelessly naïve.

Once we recognize the “Arab Spring” as a U.S. policy initiative (rather than buying into the media-manufactured myth of “spontaneous” uprisings in several different countries), then we also recognize that the Obama’s avowed desire to topple the Assad regime in Syria led them to discount the danger posed by Islamic extremists in Syria, which is how ISIS became the serious menace that it now is. But this interpretation of events, as obvious as it seems to me, never gets mentioned when discussing how ISIS — a rather obscure Iraqi militant force prior to 2011 — has emerged as the world’s most dangerous Islamic terrorist group.

Obama’s Middle East policy is a catastrophic failure, and for him to defend it as if it were successful — and imply that there is no feasible alternative — is an infuriating insult. Anyway, now you see why I generally refrain from commenting on what Obama says.





 

Category: Barack Obama, Islam, Syria, Terrorism

College Campus Cop Tells the Truth About ‘Rape Culture’ and Gets Fired

Posted on | November 17, 2015 | 67 Comments

Saying Things No One Is Allowed to Say in 2015:

The campus police chief has been fired at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College, in Georgia, after he was quoted in the student newspaper as saying that most sexual assaults are not rape but “women waking up the next morning with a guilt complex.” The chief, Bryan Golden, was dismissed on Friday, according to The Tifton Gazette.
Chief Golden was quoted in an article in the student paper, The Stallion, about sexual assault on college campuses. The full quotation was: “I might sound insensitive, but I’m not. Most of these sexual assaults are women waking up the next morning with a guilt complex. That ain’t rape, that’s being stupid. When the dust settles, it was all consensual. It [forcible rape] doesn’t happen here. It doesn’t show up here. They’re about as much a rape as a goat roping.”

Chief Golden contested the accuracy of the quotation, but without regard to that issue, is he not allowed to speak on the basis of his own knowledge and experience as a law-enforcement official?

What Chief Golden said — however awkwardly he phrased it, or how accurately he was quoted — is reflected in case after case we have seen in lawsuits filed against universities by male students who say they were wrongly accused of sexual assault. In most of these cases, the story is very similar: College boy and college girl go to a party, where both of them get drunk, then go back to a dorm room and have sex; subsequently (sometimes several months later) college girl reports that this hookup was rape, an accusation that college boy denies. Almost always, it is a “he-said/she-said” situation, with no corroborating evidence, and college boy finds himself expelled as a result of a Title IX procedure in which he is denied the due-process rights that would be guaranteed to any common criminal in a court of law. Robert Tracinski has observed: “Dubious claims about ‘rape culture’ are an attempt to create an all-purpose scapegoat for the emotional dark side of promiscuity.”

 

So-called “pro-sex feminism” helped turn college campuses into a carnival environment where it was taken for granted that young women were eager to engage in drunken hookups. For years, college girls have complained about the death of romance on campus. Old-fashioned “dating” and other more traditional relationship patterns were replaced by casual sex and “friends with benefits” arrangements, but young people who complained about this were mocked as puritanical prudes by feminists who denounced Judeo-Christian morality and advocated selfish hedonism. In recent years, the emotional costs of this porn-influenced culture have become impossible to ignore. Rather than admit their own complicity in the psychological damage that this “pro-sex” mentality has inflicted on vulnerable young women, however, feminists instead blame young men whom they accuse of creating a “rape culture.”

Chief Golden tried to explain the reality that feminist rhetoric has obscured. Contrary to what has been claimed, there is no “campus rape epidemic,” but there does seem to be an epidemic of Morning-After Guilt Complex that feminists are seeking to exploit for political purposes. Prominent feminist leaders (including Jaclyn Friedman and Jill Filipovic) do not even try to hide the fact that they are refining “rape” and “consent” in such a way as to criminalize normal sexual behavior (see “Moving the Goalposts: What Feminist ‘Rape Culture’ Discourse Is About”). Every heterosexual male student is subject to expulsion if any female student should ever complain about his behavior. Ashe Schow, who has covered the “rape culture” hysteria as extensively as anyone, has warned that students “need to stop viewing sex merely as pleasure or as an expression of affection or love, and begin seeing it as a potentially life-ruining moment.” Nothing can protect young men against this threat, except completely avoiding female college students.

The Sexual Revolution is over, and sex lost. Chief Golden is just collateral damage in feminism’s War Against Human Nature.

+ + + + +

My research into radical feminism is funded by readers in response to the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

Whatever you give — $5, $10, $20 — is most sincerely appreciated.




 

Category: Sex Trouble

Confirmed: Charlie Sheen Has HIV

Posted on | November 17, 2015 | 63 Comments

 

It was Regular Right Guy who tipped me to the rumor two weeks ago that Charlie Sheen has the AIDS virus, and I wrote:

The recklessness of Sheen’s life — cocaine and whores — was bound to catch up with him sooner or later, and if he is indeed infected with HIV, this would not be particularly surprising.

Tragic, but not surprising. The news this week:

Charlie Sheen is expected to disclose that he is HIV positive in an exclusive “Today” Show interview on Tuesday, a source with direct knowledge of the interview told CNNMoney.
On Monday, NBC announced that the actor would be making a “revealing personal announcement” on the “Today” show Tuesday morning.
The source told CNNMoney that Sheen is expected to discuss his HIV condition when he sits down with Matt Lauer live from the “Today” show studio in New York City.
In addition, Hollywood public relations specialist Howard Bragman was quoted in People Magazine saying that Sheen “is getting treatment, and a lot of people in his life know about it.”

So, Regular Right Guy is right again. Always trust your blog buddies. Sources say Sheen’s ex-wife had known he was infected:

As Charlie Sheen gets ready to announce to the world that he is HIV positive, a source tells Access Hollywood that Sheen’s ex-wife, Denise Richards, has known Sheen had the disease for a “number of years.”
A source close to Richards told Access Hollywood that the actor contracted the disease in the years after he and Richards divorced in 2006.
Sheen and Richards have “not been intimate” since the divorce, the source added.
Sheen and Richards first met in 2000, but didn’t begin dating until October 2001, when Richards appeared on Sheen’s sitcom “Spin City.” The couple got engaged on December 26, 2001 and tied the knot on June 15, 2002.
In March 2005, Richards filed for divorce. The divorce was finalized in November 2006.

To me, that’s the real kick in the head of this story. By the time he met Denise Richards, Charlie Sheen had spent enough years as Hollywood’s roguish bad boy that you might have thought he would be more than happy to hang up his spurs and retire from the rodeo.

 

And what a fairly tale ending that would have been, eh? The notorious womanizer finally settling down to family life, married to one of the most beautiful young actresses on the planet. But it wasn’t enough for Charlie. His oversized ego, and the bad habits he acquired as a young prince of Hollywood, could not adapt to the constraints of domestic tranquility. He wrecked his marriage and ruined his career and, somewhere in this celebrity tragedy, there may be a lesson worth studying.

Money won’t buy happiness, and it won’t buy silence, either:

Charlie Sheen kept his HIV status under wraps, but everything unraveled when some former partners threatened him with lawsuits . . .
Charlie confided in several friends he thought were confidants … it turned out they weren’t, and spread the word he was HIV positive.
That led to several of Charlie’s former partners contacting him and threatening a lawsuit because they were unaware of his status when they had interaction with him. Our sources say Charlie settled several of the cases and, in return for money, got confidentiality agreements.
We’re told one of the settlements occurred late last month.

 

Category: Celebrities

FRANCE AT WAR: Jets Strike ISIS Stronghold; Terror Suspects Raided

Posted on | November 16, 2015 | 133 Comments

 

Friday’s attack in Paris has prompted French authorities to take military action against the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa:

France bombed the Syrian city of Raqqa on Sunday night, its most aggressive strike against the Islamic State group it blames for killing 129 people in a string of terrorist attacks across Paris only two days before. . . .
While France has been conducting scores of airstrikes against the Islamic State in Iraq, it had been bombing inside Syria only sparingly, wary of inadvertently strengthening the hand of President Bashar al-Assad by killing his enemies.
But after militants with AK-47 rifles and suicide explosives vests shattered the peaceful revelry of Paris on Friday night, killing dozens of civilians in restaurants and at a concert hall, France seemed intent on sending a clear message of its determination to curb the Islamic State and its ability to carry out attacks outside the territory it controls.

The previous reluctance to hit ISIS in Raqqa, in other words, reflected the fact that the Syrian extremists were tacitly supported by the West since 2011, when the “Arab Spring” uprisings were orchestrated to overthrow the governments of Libya, Egypt and Syria. More on the French air strikes on Raqqa:

Twelve aircraft including 10 fighter jets dropped a total of 20 bombs in the biggest air strikes since France extended its bombing campaign against the extremist group to Syria in September, a Defense Ministry statement said. The jets launched from sites in Jordan and the Persian Gulf, in coordination with U.S. forces. . . .
French foreign minister Laurent Fabius said France had the “legitimacy” to take action against ISIS after Friday’s terror attacks in Paris.
Fabius said Sunday on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Turkey that the decision to conduct airstrikes in Raqqa against Islamic State targets was a “political” one and that France had to be “present and active” following Friday’s attacks.

Ace of Spades points out that Raqqa is “a city the jihadis have kept in reasonably good shape . . . a showcase city . . . their military headquarters,” so that the previous failure to target Raqqa would seem rather inexplicable. As I say, however, ISIS was tacitly supported in the effort to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria, which was part of the Obama administration’s “Arab Spring” policy dating back to 2011. That this policy has been a catastrophic failure, in effect arming ISIS terrorists, is something the administration and its former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, have been understandably reluctant to admit. Meanwhile, in France, authorities are rounding up the usual suspects:

French police launched more than 150 raids across the country overnight as part of a manhunt in the wake of Paris’s deadly terror attacks, NBC News reported.
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls confirmed the raids to RTL Radio, according to NBC News. . . .
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said that 23 people had been arrested — while 104 others remained for questioning — over a 48-hour period. He added that guns, bulletproof vests and even a rocket launcher had been seized.
“This is just the beginning,” Cazeneuve said. “The response of France will be total. Those who attack France, we will catch them and we will be unrelenting with them … Terrorists will never destroy the Republic, because the Republic will destroy them.”
Searches took place throughout the country, including in Toulouse, Grenoble, Bobigny and Lyon.

The hunt for the Paris terrorist Salah Abdeslam continues. There were reports this morning that Abdeslam had been cornered by Belgian police in the Brussels suburb of Molenbeek, but officials there said the raid failed to nab him.

PREVIOUSLY:




 

 

Category: France, Islam, Syria, Terrorism
« go back — keep looking »

    About

    This is an area on your website where you can add text. This will serve as an informative location on your website, where you can talk about your site.

    Subscribe to our feed

    Search

    Admin