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In deciding to use the unsung Zarqawi as an excuse for launching a new front in the war against terrorism, the White House had managed to launch the career of one of the century’s great terrorists.
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Joby Warrick (Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS)
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Killing civilians and destroying infrastructure are not typically a terrorist organization’s end goals. Rather, they are a means to provoke a political reaction.
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Jessica Stern (ISIS: The State of Terror)
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The only thing that separates the Jews of Israel from the fate of the Christians, Yazidis, and other religious minorities in Iraq and Syria is the might of the Israel Defense Forces. Faced with murderous terrorists, Israelis are able to respond with F-16s, Merkava tanks, and one of the best-trained armies in the world.
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Jay Sekulow (Rise of ISIS: A Threat We Can't Ignore)
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A terrible and hidden reality of both America’s and Israel’s wars is that hundreds of soldiers have fallen, killed by terrorists, because they were being cautious with civilian lives
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Jay Sekulow (Rise of ISIS: A Threat We Can't Ignore)
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the biggest perceived enemy of the U.S. is called the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), or alternatively the Islamic State of the Levant (ISIL). They are bent on taking over territory by means of terror. If the Western countries did not need the oil that these terrorists control, the money that ultimately funds their operations would dry up. They could no longer operate as a terrorist state,
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Bill Nye (Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World)
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America must signal its zero tolerance for jihadists by investigating U.N. ties to terrorists, including the U.N.’s inexcusable actions in Gaza, such as allowing Hamas to store rockets in U.N. buildings, booby-trap U.N. facilities, and build terror tunnels from U.N. structures.
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Jay Sekulow (Rise of ISIS: A Threat We Can't Ignore)
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If you think that American Capitalism is the most dangerous Institution in the World, it just goes to show, that you haven't partied like there is no tomorrow with the fun loving posse of The Islamic Republic of Iran, North Korea, The Taliban, or ISIS. They all party off the hook!
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James Hauenstein
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Zarqawi had staked out a spot at the forefront of the global jihadist movement. No longer was he merely the leader of a particularly violent terrorist faction in Iraq. He was now a rival to Bin Laden himself as the terrorist that the West feared and young Islamists most wanted to emulate. Yes, Bin Laden had his videos, too: the Saudi appeared
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Joby Warrick (Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS)
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Dawa is happening not only in Muslim communities but also in Western prisons. Believing that religious education will benefit prisoners, the authorities mistakenly give agents of dawa access to Muslim prisoners. Like wolves in sheep’s clothing, they claim to be religious community representatives, all the while harboring links to terrorist organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, ISIS, and Hizb ut-Tahrir.
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Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights)
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When Donald Trump arrived, he turned over control of the Iraqi theater to Secretary of Defense “Madman” Maddux and told him to do whatever he thought would win the war against ISIS. Less than a year later, coalition forces drove the terrorists out of their last stronghold in Iraq and surrounded them in small pockets within Syria. As of this writing, the group is, for all intents and purposes, destroyed, forever underscoring what a pathetic, feckless strategy Obama employed.
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Matt Margolis (The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama)
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Ilhan Omar’s 100,000-strong Somali community in Minneapolis is the terrorist recruitment capital of the United States. It is a fertile base for both direct and online recruitment. FBI data show that more men from this community have joined, or sought to join, a foreign terrorist organization over the last dozen years there than in any other jurisdiction in the nation. From this community alone, 45 members left to join either the Somalia-based insurgency al-Shabab or the Iraqi and Syrian wing of ISIS.
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Dinesh D'Souza (United States of Socialism: Who's Behind It. Why It's Evil. How to Stop It.)
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Other countries must be laughing their heads off at us. Our “family reunification” policies mean that being related to a recent immigrant from Pakistan trumps being a surgeon from Denmark. That’s how we got gems like the “Octomom,” the unemployed single mother on welfare who had fourteen children in the United States via in vitro fertilization; Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who bombed the Boston Marathon, killing three and injuring hundreds, a few years after slitting the throats of three American Jews; and all those “homegrown” terrorists flying from Minnesota to fight with ISIS. Family reunification isn’t about admitting the spouses and minor children of immigrants we’re dying to get. We’re bringing in grandparents, second cousins, and brothers-in-law of Afghan pushcart operators—who then bring in their grandparents, second cousins, and brothers-in-law until we have entire tribes of people, illiterate in their own language, never mind ours, collecting welfare in America. We wouldn’t want our immigrants to be illiterate, unskilled, and lonesome.
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Ann Coulter (¡Adios, America!: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole)
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Pakistan is an Islamic country and the victim of an Easter terrorist attack. Groups like Isis or in this case the Taliban are not about religion. No more than the KKK is about Christianity. These groups are about hate! I did post on the Pakistani attack because it is really important to point out that brown and black people in the middle east and Africa are being killed. Terrorism isn't about Islam. It is about hate. SO let's fight this hate. Let's stand united with our Islamic brothers and sisters who are being slaughtered. Step back from judging a religion you are not exposed to. Understand that we need to work together. ALL faiths. That's how we defeat this
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Johnny Corn
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During Bill Clinton’s presidency, the Palestinian terrorist Yasser Arafat was invited to spend more time in the White House than any other foreign leader—thirteen invitations.303 Clinton was dead set on helping the Israelis and Palestinians achieve a lasting peace. He pushed the Israelis to grant ever-greater concessions until the Israelis were willing to grant the Palestinians up to 98 percent of all the territory they requested. And what was the Palestinian response? They walked away from the bargaining table and launched the wave of suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks known as the Second Intifada. And what of Osama bin Laden? Even while America was granting concessions to Palestinians—and thereby theoretically easing the conditions that provided much of the pretext for Muslim terror—bin Laden was bombing U.S. embassies in Africa, almost sank the USS Cole in Yemen, and was well into the planning stages of the catastrophic attacks of September 11, 2001. After President George W. Bush ordered U.S. forces to invade Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, respectively, bringing American troops into direct ground combat with jihadists half a world away, many Americans quickly forgot the recent past and blamed American acts of self-defense for “inflaming” jihad. One of those Americans was Barack Obama. Soon after his election, Obama traveled to Cairo, Egypt, where he delivered a now-infamous speech that signaled America’s massive policy shifts. The United States pulled entirely out of Iraq despite the pleas of “all the major Iraqi parties.”304 In Egypt, the United States actually backed the Muslim Brotherhood government, going so far as agreeing to give it advanced F-16 fighters and M1 Abrams main battle tanks, even as the Muslim Brotherhood government was violating its peace treaty with Israel and persecuting Egypt’s ancient Coptic Christian community. The Obama administration continued supporting the Brotherhood, even when it stood aside and allowed jihadists to storm the American embassy, raising the black flag of jihad over an American diplomatic facility. In Libya, the United States persuaded its allies to come to the aid of a motley group of rebels, including jihadists. Then many of these same jihadists promptly turned their anger on the United States, attacking our diplomatic compound in Benghazi the afternoon and evening of September 11, 2012—killing the American ambassador and three more brave Americans. Compounding this disaster, the administration had steadfastly refused to reinforce the American security presence in spite of a deteriorating security situation, afraid that it would anger the local population. This naïve and foolish administration decision cost American lives.
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Jay Sekulow (Rise of ISIS: A Threat We Can't Ignore)
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Our country, as well as the rest of the world, faces an enormous threat from ISIS and other radical Islamic terrorist organizations that aspire to achieve world domination. These were the same aspirations held by the followers of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. Our government must recognize the importance of directly and vigorously confronting these forces of evil. We must not make the mistake of avoiding necessary conflict; we did not get involved in World War I or World War II until we felt that American interests were directly threatened, and this proved to be the wrong choice, though we eventually were victorious. If a vicious enemy that is willing to decapitate people, burn people alive, and even crucify children is allowed to grow with only minor to moderate resistance, it will only become a more formidable adversary in the future. If during this period of tepid responses to terrorist expansion the radical Islamists manage to acquire nuclear weapons, providing for the common defense will take on an entirely new different meaning. The longer we wait to eliminate the threat, the more difficult that task will become and the more dangerous the world will be for our children and grandchildren. We must use all necessary resources to protect the lives of our people. Given the existence of enemies who have a stated goal of destroying our nation and our way of life, one way to provide for the common defense is to hide, which in our case would not be possible. A better option is to try to eliminate the threat, and the earlier the threat can be eliminated, the fewer lives will be lost in the conflict.
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Ben Carson (A More Perfect Union: What We the People Can Do to Reclaim Our Constitutional Liberties)
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ISIS was forced out of all its occupied territory in Syria and Iraq, though thousands of ISIS fighters are still present in both countries. Last April, Assad again used sarin gas, this time in Idlib Province, and Russia again used its veto to protect its client from condemnation and sanction by the U.N. Security Council. President Trump ordered cruise missile strikes on the Syrian airfield where the planes that delivered the sarin were based. It was a minimal attack, but better than nothing. A week before, I had condemned statements by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, who had explicitly declined to maintain what had been the official U.S. position that a settlement of the Syrian civil war had to include Assad’s removal from power. “Once again, U.S. policy in Syria is being presented piecemeal in press statements,” I complained, “without any definition of success, let alone a realistic plan to achieve it.” As this book goes to the publisher, there are reports of a clash between U.S. forces in eastern Syria and Russian “volunteers,” in which hundreds of Russians were said to have been killed. If true, it’s a dangerous turn of events, but one caused entirely by Putin’s reckless conduct in the world, allowed if not encouraged by the repeated failures of the U.S. and the West to act with resolve to prevent his assaults against our interests and values. In President Obama’s last year in office, at his invitation, he and I spent a half hour or so alone, discussing very frankly what I considered his policy failures, and he believed had been sound and necessary decisions. Much of that conversation concerned Syria. No minds were changed in the encounter, but I appreciated his candor as I hoped he appreciated mine, and I respected the sincerity of his convictions. Yet I still believe his approach to world leadership, however thoughtful and well intentioned, was negligent, and encouraged our allies to find ways to live without us, and our adversaries to try to fill the vacuums our negligence created. And those trends continue in reaction to the thoughtless America First ideology of his successor. There are senior officials in government who are trying to mitigate those effects. But I worry that we are at a turning point, a hinge of history, and the decisions made in the last ten years and the decisions made tomorrow might be closing the door on the era of the American-led world order. I hope not, and it certainly isn’t too late to reverse that direction. But my time in that fight has concluded. I have nothing but hope left to invest in the work of others to make the future better than the past. As of today, as the Syrian war continues, more than 400,000 people have been killed, many of them civilians. More than five million have fled the country and more than six million have been displaced internally. A hundred years from now, Syria will likely be remembered as one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes of the twenty-first century, and an example of human savagery at its most extreme. But it will be remembered, too, for the invincibility of human decency and the longing for freedom and justice evident in the courage and selflessness of the White Helmets and the soldiers fighting for their country’s freedom from tyranny and terrorists. In that noblest of human conditions is the eternal promise of the Arab Spring, which was engulfed in flames and drowned in blood, but will, like all springs, come again.
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John McCain (The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations)
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British / Pakistani ISIS suspect, Zakaria Saqib Mahmood, is arrested in Bangladesh on suspicion of recruiting jihadists to fight in Syria
• Local police named arrested Briton as Zakaria Saqib Mahmood, also known as Zak, living in 70 Eversleigh Road, Westham, E6 1HQ London
• They suspect him of recruiting militants for ISIS in two Bangladeshi cities
• He arrived in the country in February, having previously spent time in Syria and Pakistan
• Suspected militant recruiter also recently visited Australia
A forty year old Muslim British man has been arrested in Bangladesh on suspicion of recruiting would-be jihadists to fight for Islamic State terrorists in Syria and Iraq.
The man, who police named as Zakaria Saqib Mahmood born 24th August 1977, also known as Zak, is understood to be of Pakistani origin and was arrested near the Kamalapur Railway area of the capital city Dhaka.
He is also suspected of having attempted to recruit militants in the northern city of Sylhet - where he is understood to have friends he knows from living in Newham, London - having reportedly first arrived in the country about six months ago to scout for potential extremists.
Militants: The British Pakistani man (sitting on the left) named as Zakaria Saqib Mahmood was arrested in Bangladesh.
The arrested man has been identified as Zakaria Saqib Mahmood, sources at the media wing of Dhaka Metropolitan Police told local newspapers.
He is believed to have arrived in Bangladesh in February and used social media websites including Facebook to sound out local men about their interest in joining ISIS, according Monirul Islam - joint commissioner of Dhaka Metropolitan Police - who was speaking at a press briefing today.
Zakaria has openly shared Islamist extremist materials on his Facebook and other social media links.
An example of Zakaria Saqib Mahmood sharing Islamist materials on his Facebook profile
He targeted Muslims from Pakistan as well as Bangladesh, Mr Islam added, before saying: 'He also went to Australia but we are yet to know the reason behind his trips'.
Zakaria saqib Mahmood trip to Australia in order to recruit for militant extremist groups
'From his passport we came to know that he went to Pakistan where we believe he met a Jihadist named Rauf Salman, in addition to Australia during September last year to meet some of his links he recruited in London, mainly from his weekly charity food stand in East London, ' the DMP spokesperson went on to say.
Police believes Zakaria Mahmood has met Jihadist member Rauf Salman in Pakistan
Zakaria Saqib Mahmood was identified by the local police in Pakistan in the last September. The number of extremists he has met in this trip remains unknown yet.
Zakaria Saqib Mahmood uses charity food stand as a cover to radicalise local people in Newham, London.
Investigators: Dhaka Metropolitan Police believe Zakaria Saqib Mhamood arrived in Bangladesh in February and used social media websites including Facebook to sound out local men about their interest in joining ISIS
The news comes just days after a 40-year-old East London bogus college owner called Sinclair Adamson - who also had links to the northern city of Sylhet - was arrested in Dhaka on suspicion of recruiting would-be fighters for ISIS.
Zakaria Saqib Mahmood, who has studied at CASS Business School, was arrested in Dhaka on Thursday after being reported for recruiting militants.
Just one day before Zakaria Mahmood's arrest, local police detained Asif Adnan, 26, and Fazle ElahiTanzil, 24, who were allegedly travelling to join ISIS militants in Syria, assisted by an unnamed Briton.
It is understood the suspected would-be jihadists were planning to travel to a Turkish airport popular with tourists, before travelling by road to the Syrian border and then slipping across into the warzone.
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Zakaria Zaqib Mahmood
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The counter terrorist units received very little attention till terrorism in Punjab blew up on the face of its creators. The Operations Cells, specialised in combating indigenous terrorism, were put on the rails around 1986, after Operation Blue Star and the assassination of Indira Gandhi. Specialised cells to combat ISI operations in India and Pakistan sponsored Islamist terrorism had taken shape only after the Bombay serial bomb blasts in 1993. The political infrastructure and its intelligence edifices responded very slowly to the emerging geopolitical needs.
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Maloy Krishna Dhar (Open Secrets: The Explosive Memoirs of an Indian Intelligence Officer)
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It is true that ISIS participants are younger, a less professional generation of jihadist than the traditional al-Qaeda terrorist. A more apt description is that they resemble a terror mob, but what they lack in professional skill they make up for in an almost berserker-like frenzy of passion to slaughter anyone who stands in their path, including their own. The invasion of Iraq was not just an exhausting failure, unsuccessful in stamping out insurgency and terrorism; it actually created the entire legion of terror and tyranny that we know as the Islamic State. Had the invasion not toppled the existing social, political, and tribal structure of Mesopotamia, there would be no ISIS to fight. Al-Qaeda
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Malcolm W. Nance (Defeating ISIS: Who They Are, How They Fight, What They Believe)
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President Obama’s proposed deal makes military conflict with Irana virtual certainty. Under the terms that have been publicly announced, Iran will keep its nuclear centrifuges, will keep its enriched uranium, and will keep developing its ICBM program (which exists for the sole purpose of carrying a nuclear weapon to America). Under the terms of the deal, Iran will receive billions of dollars — which it will surely use to keep developing nuclear weapons. And, becauseIran will remain the leading state sponsor of terrorism (the deal does nothing to change that), those billions of dollars will also be funneled directly to Hezbollah and Hamas and radical Islamic terrorists across the world. Along
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Ted Cruz (TED CRUZ: FOR GOD AND COUNTRY: Ted Cruz on ISIS, ISIL, Terrorism, Immigration, Obamacare, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Republicans,)
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So, if people don't want a war - are opposed to a war - how do you get away with it? You change public opinion and manufacture consent, that's how. You construct a carefully organised deception. A well-crafted and perfectly executed lie. Stage a false flag attacks, created by our own security services, blame it on terrorists, blow up British or US soldiers, bomb our buildings, fly planes into them, lie about weapons of mass destruction that can annihilate us in forty-five minutes flat. And bombard people with it in the media. Terrorists! Terrorism! Cells! Al-Qaeda! Isis! So every single time you turn on the new or read a paper, it's there. Despite the fact that statistically, you're more likely to be killed in a car accident or by your own bathtub than killed by a terrorist! And all the while, they're hiding the real reasons. Oil and gas. Gold. Regime change. Land. Power. Money. So they carry on until the public gets scared and angry, and yes, let's bomb these bastards! And how dare these people threaten and attack us! Then they want the war. The public are practically begging for it by then! Like George Orwell said, "The people believe what the media tells them". And if you control the media, the money, the politics, and the military, you control the whole systems.
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Sibel Hodge (Untouchable)
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The hallmark of these European conservative demagogues was a single-issue hatred of Muslim immigrants, particularly since the Syrian and Libyan migration crises, which led millions of people to flee to Europe. Add to this the rise of ISIS in Syria that led Muslim nationals born in France, Belgium, and Germany to carry out terrorist attacks in their countries of birth.
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Malcolm W. Nance (The Plot to Destroy Democracy: How Putin and His Spies Are Undermining America and Dismantling the West)
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One could call them Vanilla ISIS.
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Malcolm W. Nance (They Want to Kill Americans: The Militias, Terrorists, and Deranged Ideology of the Trump Insurgency)
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The C.I.A.’s main target that spring was a long-haired, charismatic militant leader of the Wazirs named Nek Mohammad. He ruled Wana and distrusted the Pakistan Army. He was a complicated figure—a tribal nationalist who consorted with international terrorists. He accepted Al Qaeda and Uzbek refugees. In Islamabad, C.I.A. station chief Rich Blee used the assassination attempts against Musharraf to try to motivate the president and I.S.I. to strike back: “You have to kill them or they’re going to kill us.
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Steve Coll (Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001-2016)
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[Michael] German observed how blinkered our national culture—not just within law enforcement, but within the halls of officialdom and in the national media—has become about the real threat posed by white nationalists:
If the government knew that al-Qaeda or Isis had infiltrated American law enforcement agencies, it would undoubtedly initiate a nationwide effort to identify them and neutralize the threat they posed. Yet white supremacists and far-right militants have committed far more attacks and killed more people in the U.S. over the last 10 years than any foreign terrorist movement. The FBI regards them as the most lethal domestic terror threat. The need for national action is even more critical.
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David Neiwert (The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Right's Assault on American Democracy)
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On the morning of September 11, 2014, the thirteenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, residents of Saint Mary Parish, Louisiana, began receiving texts stating that a chemical fire was underway and that they should take shelter from toxic fumes. The original messages said to check the website “columbiachemical.com” for information. At around the same time, hundreds of Twitter accounts tweeted that a disaster was unfolding in real time. “A powerful explosion heard from miles away happened at a chemical plant in Centerville, Louisiana #ColumbianChemicals,” someone using the name of Jon Merritt wrote. A search for that same hashtag revealed multiple eyewitness accounts of the explosion and fire. There were photos of flames and videos of surveillance footage from a nearby gas station showing the initial flash of the conflagration; there were images of plumes of black smoke rising skyward over what appeared to be the Louisiana bayou. One Twitter account posted a screenshot of CNN’s landing page, appearing to show that the explosion was now national news and that, to commemorate the 9/11 attacks, ISIS had taken responsibility. It was, according to a flurry of contemporaneous accounts, the latest terrorist attack on the US homeland. But it was all fake. The IRA, in far-off Saint Petersburg, had made it all up—the alerts, the photographs, the eyewitness accounts.III Why did they do it? Perhaps it was just to prove they could and to sow whatever panic that followed. Or maybe they were practicing.
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Aaron Zebley (Interference: The Inside Story of Trump, Russia, and the Mueller Investigation)
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Isolationism appeals to every instinct we have to cut our risks and maximize our benefits, but it is dangerously naïve to believe that the world will simply leave us alone. No country can do more than America to lead an international fight against terrorism, and it must be done. Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria can threaten the stability of the entire Middle East and could eventually promote terrorist attacks inside America and Europe. Washington can’t continue to ignore this region’s small problems until they turn into big ones. The United States can and should lead an international effort to ensure that ISIS remains isolated, even if it can’t immediately be dismantled and destroyed.
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Ian Bremmer (Superpower: Three Choices for America's Role in the World)
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If Christians understood the purpose and goals of these terrorist groups, we would be driven to our knees to cry to God for a mighty outpouring of His Spirit. ISIS terror leaders have claimed to establish a “caliphate” (khilafa in Arabic, which means succession) in Syria and Iraq.
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Sammy Tippit (The Approaching Darkness)
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One of the main recruitment centers and organizing hubs for ISIS is prisons. Whether by accident or design, jailhouses in the Middle East have served for years as virtual terror academies, where known extremists can congregate, plot, organize, and hone their leadership skills “inside the wire,” and most ominously recruit a new generation of fighters. ISIS is a terrorist organization,
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Michael Weiss (ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror)
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When Iran exported its jihad to Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, and the Muslim Brotherhood in several regions around the world, these all indirectly threatened the United States. These terrorists threatened our greatest ally in the region, Israel, while destabilizing countries we depend on to help bring security to that area. These terrorists harm our allies with violence while sowing hatred for our values, thus hurting our national interests abroad. Until 2001, these organizations had not historically attempted to carry out terrorist attacks on the American homeland. With the Sunni-Shiite divide once again put on the back burner to tackle a bigger enemy, the relationship between al-Qaeda, another Sunni terrorist organization, and the Shiite regime in Iran is all about destroying the United States of America. Their relationship began a long time before the United States even knew about al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden as public enemy number one.1 Today, ISIS is perhaps public enemy number one. Yet the most interesting trait common to ISIS, al-Qaeda, Iran, and every other Islamic terrorist group is this: they are all motivated by the same anti-Western, jihadist ideology.
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Jay Sekulow (Unholy Alliance: The Agenda Iran, Russia, and Jihadists Share for Conquering the World)
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Islam divides the world into two parts: dar al-Islam (house of Islam), places where Sharia is the highest authority, and dar al-harb (house of war), places where Sharia is not the highest authority and must be brought within the fold of Islam.73 The distinction between dar al-Islam and dar al-harb proves that the Muslim ummah (community) is not limited by national boundaries or identities. Rather it is unified by Islam. That is why Muslim individuals from around the world leave their home countries to join ISIS and other terrorist groups to participate in jihad against the infidels. From the radical Muslim’s perspective, the jihad to transform dar al-harb into dar al-Islam does not end until the mission is fully accomplished. Although most Islamic jurists agree that only the head of state or the caliph (head of the Islamic ummah) has the authority to wage a holy war (jihad),74 radical Muslims argue that when the head of the state fails to faithfully perform his duties (one of which is to proclaim Sharia everywhere), it becomes incumbent on individual Muslims (members of the ummah) to carry out Allah’s commands.75 Only Allah is the legislator, and the prophet and his successors are vicegerents who enforce his law. Hence, peace occurs only when everything is either subject to Allah’s law or, for temporary periods, when Muslims regroup and prepare for the next campaign. Until then, a constant state of war between the ummah and nonbelievers exists. Israeli author and scholar of Arabic literature Mordechai Kedar said: Peace in their mind is not between Muslims and infidels. Peace is when infidels live under the umbrella of Islam. The conquest brings peace in their minds. Theoretically there cannot be [peace] between Islamic State, the Caliphate state, and other infidel states. Eternal war should be between them. Peace can reign only when everybody comes under the umbrella of Islam.76 Accordingly, the people who live in dar al-harb and do not accept Sharia are not considered innocent and can be killed or subdued. The Western mind views suicide bombing as an act of terrorism designed to kill innocent people. To the radical Muslim mind, however, Western victims of suicide bombings are not innocent because they have not surrendered to Sharia and Muslim rule. They are still part of the house of war (dar al-harb). As a result, they have not acquired protected status under Islam, and accordingly, they are morally complicit in their own destruction. So the distinction between combatant and noncombatant status, as defined by international law, has no meaning to the Islamic radical’s mind.
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Jay Sekulow (Unholy Alliance: The Agenda Iran, Russia, and Jihadists Share for Conquering the World)
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Let’s begin with ISIS. As of the writing of this book, the terrorists of ISIS—once known as al-Qaeda in Iraq—control territory as large as an entire nation-state, with much of northern Syria and northern Iraq under its control. It is threatening Baghdad and the Kurdish capital city of Erbil, and it recently controlled (and still threatens) a poorly constructed dam near Mosul (one of Iraq’s largest cities). If that dam is blown, it would drown an entire region in a wall of water, killing hundreds of thousands. ISIS is brutal beyond imagination to anyone—Christian, Jew, Yazidi, and even Shiite Muslim—who is not aligned with its jihadist form of Sunni Islam. In Syria, ISIS has slaughtered Shiites, Christians, and Alawites (an obscure Islamic sect). In Iraq, it has done the same, giving Christians in conquered territories a chilling ultimatum: “Convert, leave your homes, or die.
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Jay Sekulow (Rise of ISIS: A Threat We Can't Ignore)
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Talk to virtually any American or Israeli veteran of a combat unit and he can tell you several stories that are remarkably similar. And they usually do not have happy endings. Soldiers ambushed from mosques have to return fire. Terrorist leaders surround themselves with civilians so often that troops face the terrible choice of either allowing terrorists to roam free and execute deadly attacks, or having to kill them and face the reality of civilian deaths. A terrible and hidden reality of both America’s and Israel’s wars is that hundreds of soldiers have fallen, killed by terrorists, because they were being cautious with civilian lives. This is an impulse that is utterly alien to jihadists, but is a core value for Americans and Israelis. Terrorists take a life for the purpose of taking a life. American and Israeli soldiers take a life in the effort to save civilians.
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Jay Sekulow (Rise of ISIS: A Threat We Can't Ignore)
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The objective was simple: capture or kill the brutal leader of a kidnapping ring with ties to the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), a terrorist group devoted to the overthrow of the democratically elected Iraqi government. By September 2007, many of the sectarian militias and insurgent groups had been pushed out of central Baghdad and into havens outside the capital. Samarra, a historic city on the Tigris River, eighty miles north of Baghdad became the refuge for a particularly vicious insurgent faction.
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Oliver North (American Heroes in Special Operations)
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Terrorists from the Islamic State (formerly ISIS) have killed at least 500 members of Iraq's Yazidi ethnic minority during their offensive in the north, Iraq's human rights minister told Reuters on Sunday.
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Anonymous
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LAST DAYS’ LAWLESSNESS There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. . . . 2 Timothy 3:1–4 It’s certainly hard to argue we’re not living in the last days as described in the Bible. Everything in these verses matches up with our current circumstances; there’s a never-ending road of examples lately. Our culture, and Western civilization as a whole, has been declining for a long while—but things can look especially grim today. We do seem to live in evil times when evil is celebrated—whether it’s in the brazen rejection of the Gospel or in the unashamed brutality of terrorist groups like ISIS. A surprising number of our fellow Americans don’t like the word “evil.” They’re always voicing the need for “tolerance” or “understanding”—or what you and I would call “moral relativism.” But these same people sure are keen on trying to legislate “evil” away when it comes to issues like guns, as if gun control laws (that only the good guys will follow) are a solution rather than an added problem.
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Sarah Palin (Sweet Freedom: A Devotional)
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Islam divides the world into two parts: dar al-Islam (house of Islam), places where Sharia is the highest authority, and dar al-harb (house of war), places where Sharia is not the highest authority and must be brought within the fold of Islam.73 The distinction between dar al-Islam and dar al-harb proves that the Muslim ummah (community) is not limited by national boundaries or identities. Rather it is unified by Islam. That is why Muslim individuals from around the world leave their home countries to join ISIS and other terrorist groups to participate in jihad against the infidels. From the radical Muslim’s perspective, the jihad to transform dar al-harb into dar al-Islam does not end until the mission is fully accomplished.
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Jay Sekulow (Unholy Alliance: The Agenda Iran, Russia, and Jihadists Share for Conquering the World)
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We still don’t have the full story on Benghazi, but thanks to the dogged efforts of Judicial Watch we know a lot more and are in a position to continue to crack open the Benghazi cover-up. Take the email that showed the military was prepared, indeed was in the process of launching timely assistance that could have made a difference, at least at the CIA annex where two Americans died. The Washington Examiner correctly noted that the email “casts doubt on previous testimony from high level officials, several of whom suggested there was never any kind of military unit that could have been in a position to mount a rescue mission during the hours-long attack on Benghazi.” All this goes to underscore the value of Judicial Watch’s independent watchdog activities and our leadership in forcing truth and accountability over the Benghazi scandal. The lies and inaction by President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Susan Rice (who is now Obama’s national security adviser) were monstrous. Rather than tell the truth, and risk political blowback for the Libya mess and the lack of security, the Obama administration abandoned those under fire and pretended that the attack had nothing to do with terrorism. Judicial Watch saw through the lies and began what has become the most nationally significant investigation ever by a non-governmental entity. Our Benghazi FOIA requests and subsequent lawsuits changed history. Our disclosure of White House records confirming that top political operatives at the White House concocted the talking points used by Susan Rice to mislead the American people in order save Obama’s reelection prospects rocked Washington. These smoking-gun documents embarrassed all of Congress and forced Speaker John Boehner to appoint the House Select Committee on Benghazi. And, as you’ll see, the pressure from our Benghazi litigation led to the disclosure of the Clinton email scandal, the historical ramifications of which we are now witnessing. If the American people had known the truth—that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and other top administration officials knew that the Benghazi attack was an al-Qaeda terrorist attack from the get-go—and yet lied and covered this fact up—Mitt Romney might very well be president. Our Benghazi disclosures also show connections between the collapse in Libya and the ISIS war—and confirm that the US knew remarkable details about the transfer of arms from Benghazi to Syrian jihadists.
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Tom Fitton (Clean House: Exposing Our Government's Secrets and Lies)
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Amman’s own file on the state sponsorship of al-Zarqawi’s terrorist activities during the lead-up to the Iraq War stood in marked contrast to what Powell had presented earlier. It wasn’t Baghdad America should have been looking at, the Jordanians said; it was Tehran. A high-level GID source told the Atlantic magazine in 2006: “We know Zarqawi better than he knows himself. And I can assure you that he never had any links to Saddam. Iran is quite a different matter. The Iranians have a policy: they want to control Iraq. And part of this policy has been to support Zarqawi, tactically but not strategically. . . .In the beginning they gave him automatic weapons, uniforms, military equipment, when he was with the army of Ansar al-Islam. Now they essentially just turn a blind eye to his activities, and to those of al-Qaeda generally. The Iranians see Iraq as a fight against the Americans, and overall, they’ll get rid of Zarqawi and all of his people once the Americans are out.
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Michael Weiss (ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror)
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Why are They Converting to Islam? - Op-Eds - Arutz Sheva One of the things that worries the West is the fact that hundreds and maybe even thousands of young Europeans are converting to Islam, and some of them are joining terror groups and ISIS and returning to promote Jihad against the society in which they were born, raised and educated. The security problem posed by these young people is a serious one, because if they hide their cultural identity, it is extremely difficult for Western security forces to identify them and their evil intentions. This article will attempt to clarify the reasons that impel these young people to convert to Islam and join terrorist organizations. The sources for this article are recordings made by the converts themselves, and the words they used, written here, are for the most part unedited direct quotations. Muslim migration to Europe, America and Australia gain added significance in that young people born in these countries are exposed to Islam as an alternative to the culture in which they were raised. Many of the converts are convinced that Islam is a religion of peace, love, affection and friendship, based on the generous hospitality and warm welcome they receive from the Moslem friends in their new social milieu. In many instances, a young person born into an individualistic, cold and alienating society finds that Muslim society provides – at college, university or community center – a warm embrace, a good word, encouragement and help, things that are lacking in the society from which he stems. The phenomenon is most striking in the case of those who grew up in dysfunctional families or divorced homes, whose parents are alcoholics, drug addicts, violent and abusive, or parents who take advantage of their offspring and did not give their children a suitable emotional framework and model for building a normative, productive life. The convert sees his step as a mature one based on the right of an individual to determine his own religious and cultural identity, even if the family and society he is abandoning disagree. Sometimes converting to Islam is a form of parental rebellion. Often, the convert is spurned by his family and surrounding society for his decision, but the hostility felt towards Islam by his former environment actually results in his having more confidence in the need for his conversion. Anything said against conversion to Islam is interpreted as unjustified racism and baseless Islamophobia. The Islamic convert is told by Muslims that Islam respects the prophets of its mother religions, Judaism and Christianity, is in favor of faith in He Who dwells on High, believes in the Day of Judgment, in reward and punishment, good deeds and avoiding evil. He is convinced that Islam is a legitimate religion as valid as Judaism and Christianity, so if his parents are Jewish or Christian, why can't he become Muslim? He sees a good many positive and productive Muslims who benefit their society and its economy, who have integrated into the environment in which he was raised, so why not emulate them? Most Muslims are not terrorists, so neither he nor anyone should find his joining them in the least problematic. Converts to Islam report that reading the Koran and uttering the prayers add a spiritual meaning to their lives after years of intellectual stagnation, spiritual vacuum and sinking into a materialistic and hedonistic lifestyle. They describe the switch to Islam in terms of waking up from a bad dream, as if it is a rite of passage from their inane teenage years. Their feeling is that the Islamic religion has put order into their lives, granted them a measuring stick to assess themselves and their behavior, and defined which actions are allowed and which are forbidden, as opposed to their "former" society, which couldn't or wouldn't lay down rules. They are willing to accept the limitations Islamic law places on Muslims, thereby "putting order into their lives" after "a life of in
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Anonymous
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It’s one thing to be afraid of ISIS and their terrorist methods. But how do you deal with the terror of a family member you can’t trust? Or are you just plain paranoid? That’s the other side of the domestic thriller. Maybe the evil that resides inside your own home doesn’t exist at all. Perhaps it’s just a figment of your imagination. Perhaps the evil resides entirely within. One thing that’s for certain, domestic thrillers are always described with adjectives like, “gripping,” “riveting,” “page turner,” “disturbing,” and of course, “horrifying.” They also provide us with something that other varieties of thriller cannot. They make us question our own personal belief in right versus wring. In a word, we can relate on a personal level to domestic thrillers. And that’s what scares us the most.
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Anonymous
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What these followers do not realize is that the Islamic faith is mostly a peaceful religion. The violent tactics spread by Islamic radicals is a common misconception of the religion that has made it hard for most Islamic cultures around the world to continue peacefully. The misinformed assume that all Muslims, followers of Islam, are dangerous threats. Yet the truth is that the words of Islamic faith are about peace, not war.
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Jordan Keller (ISIS: Origins of Terrorism, Historical Events, and The Individuals Behind the Largest Terrorist Threat of Our Time)
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What was the name of that terrorist organization? Al-Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI. And after al-Qaeda rejected AQI because of tactics such as this, tactics so depraved and brutal that they even repulsed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, what did AQI become? The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. It became ISIS.
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Jay Sekulow (Rise of ISIS: A Threat We Can't Ignore)
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That is life in southern Israel in the shadow of Hamas, a terrorist organization that digs tunnels with openings near homes and schools.
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Jay Sekulow (Rise of ISIS: A Threat We Can't Ignore)
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Hamas hides its rockets and bombs in schools and mosques, builds tunnels under United Nations facilities, and often surrounds its fighters with children and other civilians, using them as human shields. It hopes that Israel will either refrain from firing on known terrorists or that, if Israel does fire, enough children will die for the world to express outrage against Israel. In other words, this organization launches rockets hoping to kill children, and when Israel responds, it does all it can to make sure that only Palestinian children die.
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Jay Sekulow (Rise of ISIS: A Threat We Can't Ignore)
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Telegram is a secure, encrypted chat, audio, and file sharing program for mobile phones that quickly became the preferred ISIS communications application. In September 2015, ISIS added the ability to create channels, which changed the app from simply a secret messaging app to a massive hidden forum platform ripe with content from the world’s active terrorist organizations. Multitudes of groups post in channels that are outside the scrutiny of Google and other search engines. Yet if you sign in on the phone app or via Telegram’s website today, you’ll find not only ISIS, AQ, and other terrorist channels, but a wide range of conversations. The
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Malcolm W. Nance (Hacking ISIS: How to Destroy the Cyber Jihad)
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On September 11, 2001, there were no more than a few hundred al Qaeda members hiding out in Afghanistan. Three months later, when the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) paramilitaries, U.S. Army Delta Force and U.S. Air Force finished bombing them, and Osama bin Laden had escaped to Pakistan, there were not enough of the terrorists left alive to fill a 757. Now, 20 years after that brief, one-sided victory, there are tens of thousands of bin Ladenite jihadists thriving in lands from Nigeria to the Philippines. Recently, and for almost three years, some even claimed their own divinely ordained caliphate, or Islamic State, temporarily erasing the border between Iraq and Syria. Local chapters of their group keep popping up all over the region. The State Department consistently reports a vast increase in the number of global terrorism incidents compared to the pre-September 11th era. Al Qaeda, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and their “lone wolf” copycats have carried out multiple, deadly attacks in more than a dozen major Western cities in the past decade, including Brussels, Paris, Berlin, London, San Bernardino, Orlando, New York City, Pensacola and Corpus Christi. Something must be wrong. The problem is that our government is ignoring and misrepresenting the real causes of the terrorists’ war against the United States.
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Scott Horton (Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism)
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General Flynn had commented that the Obama Administration had armed al-Qaeda and ISIS terrorists. Those terrorists had perpetrated a genocide of Christians across the Middle East.
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Mary Fanning (THE HAMMER is the Key to the Coup "The Political Crime of the Century": How Obama, Brennan, Clapper, and the CIA spied on President Trump, General Flynn ... and everyone else)
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Then there was Obama being Obama the day after the election: "We have to remember that we're actually all on one team." A man's character is his fate, as Heraclitus said, and what a sick, twisted fate indeed that Barack Obarna-cerebral, disciplined, cool, ever seeking to reconcile and accommodate (as an African-American pastor in Charleston drily commented, once his presidency is over, Obama will no longer have "to be the least threatening black man in America't has had to contend these past eight years with a political opposition that regards him as very much not on the team. Not even American: "His grandmother in Kenya said, 'Oh, no, he was born in Kenya and I was there and I witnessed the birth.' She's on tape. I think that tape's going to be produced fairly soon.."5 Or not a "real" American, but a "man who is a closet secular-type Muslim, but he's still a Muslim. He's no Christian. We're seeing a man who's a Socialist Communist in the White House, pretending to be an American. That terrorist fist-bump, remember? Oh, and he was the founder of ISIS, an aspiring tyrant aiming for a Nazi-or Soviet-style dictatorship, and looks like a skinny ghetto crackhead.Z "All this damage he's done to America is deliberate," said Marco Rubio during a Republican debate,a which had to be one of the dumbest things anyone said during the whole campaign. If Obama wanted to destroy the U.S., all he needed to do was sit on his hands in 2009 and let the hot mess of the Bush economy melt the country down to slag. But the issue is bigger than any particular president. After his "all on one team" remark, Obama continued:
The point, though, is that we all go forward with a _presumption of goodfrith in our fellow citizens, because that, of good faith is essential to a vibrant and finctioning democracy.
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Ben Fountain (Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution)
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Then there was Obama being Obama the day after the election: "We have to remember that we're actually all on one team." A man's character is his fate, as Heraclitus said, and what a sick, twisted fate indeed that Barack Obarna-cerebral, disciplined, cool, ever seeking to reconcile and accommodate (as an African-American pastor in Charleston drily commented, once his presidency is over, Obama will no longer have "to be the least threatening black man in America” has had to contend these past eight years with a political opposition that regards him as very much not on the team. Not even American: "His grandmother in Kenya said, 'Oh, no, he was born in Kenya and I was there and I witnessed the birth.' She's on tape. I think that tape's going to be produced fairly soon...» or not a "real" American, but a "man who is a closet secular-type Muslim, but he's still a Muslim. He's no Christian. We're seeing a man who's a Socialist Communist in the White House, pretending to be an American. That terrorist fist-bump, remember? Oh, and he was the founder of ISIS, an aspiring tyrant aiming for a Nazi-or Soviet-style dictatorship, and looks like a skinny ghetto crackhead. "All this damage he's done to America is deliberate," said Marco Rubio during a Republican debate, which had to be one of the dumbest things anyone said during the whole campaign. If Obama wanted to destroy the U.S., all he needed to do was sit on his hands in 2009 and let the hot mess of the Bush economy melt the country down to slag. But the issue is bigger than any particular president. After his "all on one team" remark, Obama continued:
The point, though, is that we all go forward with a presumption of good faith in our fellow citizens, because that, of good faith is essential to a vibrant and functioning democracy.
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Ben Fountain (Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution)
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a marked change occurred between 2019 and 2020. The dual crises of the pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests ran slam into the twin dangers of Q-Anon and the consolidation of the Trump paramilitary. In 2019, there were sixty-five incidents of domestic terrorism or attempted violence, but in the run-up to the election in 2020, that number nearly doubled, according to a study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Twenty-one plots were disrupted by law enforcement.5 Violent extremists in the United States and terrorists in the Middle East have remarkably similar pathways to radicalization. Both are motivated by devotion to a charismatic leader, are successful at smashing political norms, and are promised a future racially homogeneous paradise. Modern American terrorists are much more akin to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) than they are to the old Ku Klux Klan. Though they take offense at that comparison, the similarities are quite remarkable. Most American extremists are not professional terrorists on par with their international counterparts. They lack operational proficiency and weapons. But they do not lack in ruthlessness, targets, or ideology. However, the overwhelming number of white nationalist extremists operate as lone wolves. Like McVeigh in the 1990s and others from the 1980s, they hope their acts will motivate the masses to follow in their footsteps. ISIS radicals who abandon their homes and immigrate to the Syria-Iraq border “caliphate” almost exclusively self-radicalize by watching terrorist videos. The Trump insurgents are radicalizing in the exact same way. Hundreds of tactical training videos easily accessible on social media show how to shoot, patrol, and fight like special forces soldiers. These video interviews and lessons explaining how to assemble body armor or make IEDs and extolling the virtues of being part of the armed resistance supporting Donald Trump fill Facebook and Instagram feeds. Some even call themselves the “Boojahideen,” an English take on the Arabic “mujahideen,” or holy warrior. U.S. insurgents in the making often watch YouTube and Facebook videos of tactical military operations, gear reviews, and shooting how-tos. They then go out to buy rifles, magazines, ammunition, combat helmets, and camouflage clothing and seek out other “patriots” to prepare for armed action. This is pure ISIS-like self-radicalization. One could call them Vanilla ISIS.
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Malcolm W. Nance (They Want to Kill Americans: The Militias, Terrorists, and Deranged Ideology of the Trump Insurgency)
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This is pure ISIS-like self-radicalization. One could call them Vanilla ISIS.
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Malcolm W. Nance (They Want to Kill Americans: The Militias, Terrorists, and Deranged Ideology of the Trump Insurgency)
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What about the one that killed al-Baghdadi, you know, that ISIS terrorist? We sent that beautiful, I think it was a shepherd, into that tunnel?” (It was a Belgian Malinois.)
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Jesse Watters (Get It Together: Troubling Tales from the Liberal Fringe)
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@realDonaldTrump destroyed #ISIS
@netanyahu will destroy #HamasTerrorist
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BETA METANI
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It’s one thing to confront militant Islamists on pickup trucks, armed with Kalashnikov rifles,” I said, referring to the ISIS terrorist threat that still captured the world’s attention. “It’s another thing to confront militant Islamists armed with weapons of mass destruction. Imagine how much more dangerous the Islamic state of ISIS would be if it possessed chemical weapons. Now imagine how much more dangerous the Islamic state of Iran would be if it possessed nuclear weapons.”3 But there was a silver lining. “I believe we have an historic opportunity,” I said. “After decades of seeing Israel as their enemy, leading states in the Arab world increasingly recognize that together we face the same dangers, a nuclear-armed Iran and militant Islamist movements.” Foreshadowing the Abraham Accords, I said, “Many have long assumed that an Israeli-Palestinian peace can help facilitate a broader rapprochement between Israel and the Arab world. I think it may work the other way around: a broader rapprochement between Israel and the Arab world may help facilitate an Israeli-Palestinian peace. To achieve that peace, we must look not only to Jerusalem and Ramallah, but also to Cairo, Amman, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh and elsewhere.”4 Two days later I repeated these themes in my meeting with Obama in the White House. As usual, my main emphasis was on Iran. “As you know, Mr. President,” I said, “Iran seeks a deal that would lift the tough sanctions that you worked so hard to put in place and leave it as a threshold nuclear power, and I fervently hope that under your leadership that will not happen.”5 While my warnings on Iran didn’t move Obama, they registered loud and clear in American public opinion and in Congress. This was soon to have momentous consequences.
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Benjamin Netanyahu (Bibi: My Story)
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There are varying degrees of evil in the world. The distinction between levels of evil is perhaps the primary moral responsibility incumbent upon each of us. Every child knows that cruelty is bad and contemptible, while its opposite, compassion, is commendable. That is an easy and simple moral distinction. The more essential and far more difficult distinction is the one between different shades of gray, between degrees of evil. Aggressive environmental activists, for example, or the furious opponents of globalization, may sometimes emerge as violent fanatics. But the evil they cause is immeasurably smaller than that caused by a fanatic who commits a large-scale terrorist attack. Nor are the crimes of the terrorist fanatic comparable to those of fanatics who commit ethnic cleansing or genocide.
Those who are unwilling or unable to rank evil may thereby become the servants of evil. Those who make no distinction between such disparate phenomena as apartheid, colonialism, ISIS, Zionism, political incorrectness, the gas chambers, sexism, the 1 percent's wealth, and air pollution serve evil with their very refusal to grade it.
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Amos Oz (שלום לקנאים)
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FBI data show that more men from this community have joined, or sought to join, a foreign terrorist organization over the last dozen years there than in any other jurisdiction in the nation. From this community alone, 45 members left to join either the Somalia-based insurgency al-Shabab or the Iraqi and Syrian wing of ISIS.37
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Dinesh D'Souza (United States of Socialism: Who's Behind It. Why It's Evil. How to Stop It.)
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In his mind, force should never be used to stop the objectives of IRA, Palestinian or ISIS terrorists.
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Tom Bower (Dangerous Hero: Corbyn’s Ruthless Plot for Power)
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Pulse shooter Omar Mateen does not seem to have received any direction or support from ISIS or any other international terrorist organization. ISIS inspired Mateen, but Mateen did not report to ISIS, even to the extent that there was any ISIS to report to. Mateen exemplified a new kind of international terrorist movement: a virtual movement that shared ideas and rhetoric rather than money and weapons. Just such a movement of international terror would kill hundreds of people worldwide in the Trump years, a movement of white racial resentment that often looked to Donald Trump as its inspiration and voice. The year 2019 suffered a peak in mass shootings in the United States, forty-nine shootings in total according to computations by the Associated Press, USA Today, and criminologists at Northeastern University. (The researchers defined a “mass killing” as taking four or more lives apart from the perpetrator’s.) The majority of those killed died at the hands of a stranger—typically a white male loner impelled by grievances against society.3 The deadliest mass shooting in US history (as of the end of 2019) occurred in October 2017. Stephen Paddock, a sixty-four-year-old white man, opened fire at a music festival in Las Vegas from a thirty-second-floor hotel room. Paddock killed 58 people and wounded 413. More than 400 other people were injured in the rush to escape the attack. After firing thousands of rounds in only ten minutes, Paddock killed himself by a gunshot in his mouth.
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David Frum (Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy)
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This waiver could prove problematic, according to the Washington Examiner, since a significant portion of the Syrian opposition has been connected to radical Islamic terrorist groups including al-Qaeda and ISIS [the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham].
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Jim Marrs (Population Control: How Corporate Owners Are Killing Us)
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When the two occur at the same time—and the terrorists belong to the same ethnic or religious group as the new immigrants—the combination of fear and xenophobia can be a dangerous and destructive force. Fear of fundamentalist Islam (which poses a genuine security threat) and animosity toward refugees (who generally do not) have been conflated in a way that allows populist far-right leaders across the world to seize upon ISIS attacks as a pretext to shut their doors to desperate refugees who are themselves fleeing ISIS.
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Sasha Polakow-Suransky (Go Back to Where You Came From: The Backlash Against Immigration and the Fate of Western Democracy)
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In this age, women like Khaled and Bouhired would certainly be called terrorists. But in the 1960s and 1970s, their popular appeal reflected a worldview that was more understanding of armed struggle. Such opposition, in those years, was seen as an expression of legitimate political aspirations—a symptom of asymmetrical conflict rather than evil ideology.
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Azadeh Moaveni (Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS)
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The “sex jihad” coverage emanated from media outlets associated with either the Tunisian security services or the Syrian state, both of which were keen to portray the fighters and women flowing into Syria as deviants or terrorists, or, in this instance, deviant-slut terrorists.
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Azadeh Moaveni (Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS)
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No Saudi king ever came to power facing greater regional instability than Salman bin Abdulaziz. In January 2015, the very existence of Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, and Yemen was in question. The Islamic State, or ISIS, had become the first terrorist organization with its own capital city and oil production. Iran was supporting the Houthi insurgents in Yemen, who had just taken the capital, Sanaa, and were on the verge of capturing the entire country. Not since the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century had the Arab world seen such widespread chaos—and all of it threatened Saudi security.
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David Rundell (Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads)
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People floated through the tiny waiting room looking for news of their loved ones, their eyes haunting and desperate. One aging man, dressed in his most elegant suit, pulled out his phone and started showing me photographs of smiling children. All eight of them had been missing since the morning ISIS marauded through their village two summers ago. The goats on his farm had mostly died, he said. Maybe of heartache. Maybe of dehydration. Another, younger man in farmer’s trousers stared out into the sunshine, nervously yanking at strands of hair until small chunks fell upon his plaid suit coat as he slowly went mad with infirmity.
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Hollie S. McKay (Only Cry For The Living)
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The problem is that the ISIS network defies conventional counter-terrorist tactics. Contrary to popular belief, this is not because its relies on ‘lone wolves’, who by their very nature are hard to detect. The Paris attacks of November 2015 were a well-planned operation involving around eighteen people in addition to the nine attackers.
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Niall Ferguson (The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook)
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That is the central component of the “war on terror.” It was certain to stimulate terror, just as the invasion of Iraq did, and as resort to force does quite generally. Force can succeed. The existence of the United States is one illustration. The Russians in Chechnya is another. But it has to be overwhelming, and there are probably too many tentacles to wipe out the terrorist monster that was largely created by Reagan and his associates, since nurtured by others. ISIS is the latest one, and a far more brutal organization than al-Qaeda. It is also different in the sense that it has territorial claims. It can be wiped out through massive employment of troops on the ground, but that won’t end the emergence of similar-minded organizations. Violence begets violence.
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Noam Chomsky (Optimism over Despair: On Capitalism, Empire, and Social Change)
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[Jeff Sessions’] major interest in any given topic tended to be the immigration angle, even when there was no immigration angle. Before disruptions of US-based counterterrorism cases, we would brief him. Almost invariably, he asked the same question about the suspect: “Where’s he from?”
The vast majority of suspects are US citizens or legal permanent residents. If we would answer his question, “Sir, he’s a US citizen. He was born here,” Sessions would respond, “Where are his parents from?”
The subject’s parents had nothing to do with the points under discussion. We were trying to get him to understand the terrorist threat overall, trying to explore the question: Why are Americans becoming so inspired by radical Islam and terrorist groups such as ISIS that they’re going out and planning acts of terrorism against other Americans right here in this country? That question cannot be exhaustively explored by reference solely to immigration policy.
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Andrew G. McCabe (The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump)
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Directorate S seeks to provide a thorough, reliable history of how the C.I.A., I.S.I., and Afghan intelligence agencies influenced the rise of a new war in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, and how that war fostered a revival of Al Qaeda, allied terrorist networks, and, eventually, branches of the Islamic State.
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Steve Coll (Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001-2016)
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Another 12 ISIS terrorists were killed in the hill and inside the village and their bodies were seized by our YPG fighters besides of big amount of ammunition including 3000 bullets, 17 magazine, 2 BKC, 5 RPG launchers with 17 missiles, 7 grenades, 3 wireless devices, 1 night binocular, 19 AK47 and 1 armored vehicle.
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Anonymous