The Realities of Terrorism
A mystery that continues to confound me even 40 years after Jimmy Carter ushered in the regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini by abandoning the Shah of Iran is why people continue to differentiate between ISIS, Al Qaeda, Boco Haram, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Taliban.
A mystery that continues to confound me even 40 years after Jimmy Carter ushered in the regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini by abandoning the Shah of Iran is why people continue to differentiate between ISIS, Al Qaeda, Boco Haram, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Taliban. While it’s true that they tend to terrorize different geographical locations, there is no real difference between any of these Islamic gangs.
It would be like Russia or North Korea talking about going to war with Kansas or Minnesota, as if all the other states wouldn’t be involved. So, when I hear people talk about the fight not being over because there are still 30,000 idiots fighting on behalf of ISIS, I assume they simply feel more comfortable pretending we merely have to contend with 30,000 discontents in Iraq and Syria, thereby ignoring the other billion Muslims in the world.
Speaking of Syria, I don’t know why it was so important for Mr. and Mrs. Trump to fly to Iraq to meet with the troops. I hear it boosted morale. And perhaps it did for the small number of troops he signed autographs for at the airbases in Iraq and Germany. But why take the risk? All it would have taken was a single lucky mortar hit to bring down Air Force One.
So far as I’m concerned, if someone has to traipse off to have photo ops with the troops or with first responders at natural disasters, let it be Mike Pence. He should do something to earn his paycheck.
When it comes to terrorism, not all of it is connected to Islam. And it certainly isn’t connected to the handful of misfits who still claim to belong to the Ku Klux Klan. It’s been a long time since the Klan committed any mischief worth mentioning. These days, the only purpose it serves is to allow Democrats to pretend it remains a grave threat to the Republic, while simultaneously pretending that it wasn’t solely a creation of, by and for Democrats.
While the media conveniently beats the drum over the hooded yokels in the Klan, it treats the masked terrorists in Antifa as if they constituted a branch of the Boy Scouts that dispensed merit badges for burning cars, beating up innocent bystanders and vandalizing stores and college campuses.
In the past, our allies, with the notable exception of Soviet Russia during WWII, were also our friends. In recent years, we tend to apply the term to any country with whom we’re not currently at war.
So it was that James Mattis took to the barricades to denounce Donald Trump when the President had the temerity to demand that the members of NATO actually live up to their obligation to kick in 2% of their GDP to finance the mutual defense organization. Apparently, Mattis thought it was okay that we had to pick up the difference for freeloaders like Germany (1.3%) and Canada (1%).
Although it was finally Trump’s insistence on pulling our troops out of Syria over Mattis’s objections that led to the Secretary of Defense quitting or Trump’s firing him, the differences between the two men were almost as numerous as Trump’s differences with Schumer.
For instance, Mattis, clearly a liberal sheep in wolf’s clothing, objected to Trump’s cutting loose from the Paris Climate Accords and the Iran Nuclear Deal. He even objected to Trump’s keeping the promise that several former presidents had made to finally move the American embassy form Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, I keep hearing that one of our obligations is to teach the native forces to wage war. Just how backward are these people? If in 17 years, they haven’t yet mastered the basics that our own soldiers learn in 16 weeks, why would anyone think they ever will?
Apparently the highly-touted Women’s March of 2017 is self-destructing before our very eyes. It is thanks to its close ties to the toxic Louis Farrakhan and its adoption of his anti-Semitic agenda, which should come as no surprise when you realize the leader of the group is the obnoxious Linda Sarsour, the daughter of Palestinian parents, who is herself such a faithful Muslim that she agreed to an arranged marriage at the age of 17.
When informed that the Chicago division of the Women’s March was canceling a 2019 event over the anti-Semitic bias of the leadership, Ms. Sarsour lied in her own defense, claiming “I, for one, have never even met the Minister, but facts don’t matter and people want to throw out the baby with the bath water.” Only some people, apparently, and only if the baby happens to be Jewish.
It so happens that Sarsour and Farrakhan shared the same stage at the National Mall in 2015, when Farrakhan hosted an event celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Million Man March.
We are all supposed to get all sad and weepy over those federal bureaucrats who will have to wait for the government shutdown to end before getting their back pay for not working. But no crying towel for me.
I suspect they will be able to put food on the table in the meantime, and that’s because the average salary of a federal employee in the nation’s capital is $84,153, and $119,934 when benefits are factored in. The national average income is a paltry $50,046. Is there another business anywhere in which the employees out-earn their employers by roughly 70%?
If these so-called Civil Servants are actually living paycheck to paycheck, the only possible reason is that they’re addicted either to heroin or gambling.
Bob Woodward, an embarrassment to pinheads everywhere, insists that James Mattis’s departure is a tragedy of such epic proportions that “it will go down in the history books.” Only, I’d suggest, if Woodward writes them.
Woodward, after all, thought that the break-in of the DNC headquarters at the Watergate, which should have provided the plot of a political farce along the lines of “The Great McGinty” or “The Senator Was Indiscreet,” was the crime of the century.
The biggest crime stemming from that incident was that it put a couple of twerps like Woodward and Carl Bernstein on the map, and motivated two generations of youngsters, who would have normally become social workers, beachcombers or shepherds, to take up journalism.
