“Dealing with what’s happening requires going back to the root causes, which means tackling the ideology,” said Ghanem Nuseibeh. That is true, but in the U.S., John Kerry, Joe Biden, Barack Obama and everyone else in positions of political power and influence assure us that the ideology that inspires attacks such as these is absolutely benign and doesn’t really inspire these attacks at all. The implications of the fact that the bomber screamed “Allahu akbar” will not be considered — in fact, this small, salient detail was even assumed to be so insignificant, or so embarrassing to moderate Muslims, or both, that it was removed from a later iteration of this Bloomberg story.
“Dozens killed in attacks by Islamic militants in four countries,” by Alaa Shahine, Bloomberg, June 26, 2015 (thanks to Anne Crockett):
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — It was the day when Islamic extremists struck terror in four countries.
As French police pieced together what happened in an attack at a factory near Lyon where one man was decapitated, at least 27 beachgoers were gunned down in Tunisia. A suicide bomber at a Shiite mosque in Kuwait left 25 people dead, while al-Shabaab militants killed 30 peacekeepers in Somalia.
There’s no suggestion the attacks were coordinated, yet they all bore similar hallmarks. They also come a year after Islamic State officially declared its caliphate in Syria and Iraq and has renewed its push to take more territory. The deaths underscore the difficulty security services face in tackling what’s become a franchise as the extremist group lured thousands of fighters from the Middle East and Europe.
“You should expect more of these attacks unfortunately,” said Ghanem Nuseibeh, founder of Cornerstone Global Associates, which advises clients on risk in the Middle East. Most of the attacks over the past year “have been carried out by lone individuals or small groups and that’s the difficulty here. Dealing with what’s happening requires going back to the root causes, which means tackling the ideology,” Nuseibeh said.
Yes, but that’s the last thing anyone in the West wants to do. Western authorities are instead busy ignoring, denying, and downplaying the ideology that motivates these attacks.
The deadliest attack was in Tunisia, where gunmen opened fire on a beach in the Mediterranean tourist town of Sousse. It follows the murder of a group of foreign tourists at a museum in the north African country in March.
In Kuwait, a bomb ripped through a Shiite mosque during Friday prayers, echoing recent incidents in Saudi Arabia.
One person was decapitated and two others were injured in an attack on a gas plant near Lyon in southeastern France. The attackers beheaded a man and posted the severed head at the factory’s entrance with an inscription in Arabic pinned to it before driving at high speed into gas cannisters.
The bombing in Kuwait was claimed by Islamic State, according to regional television channel Arabiya. In addition to the death toll, the Interior Ministry also said more than 200 people were injured. Al-Shabaab said it carried out the assault in Somalia. There was no statement of responsibility for the attacks in Tunisia and France….
A survivor of the Kuwait attack, the first in the emirate in at least a decade, said a bomber had detonated his explosives after shouting “Allahu Akbar,” the Arabic phrase meaning “God is Great.”
Fully veiled women could be heard weeping outside the mosque, where shattered glass covered the entrance. Shiites gathered outside called on the government to stand with them and shouted that it was time to wage war against “extremism” in the country.
Angemon says
Well, it is ramadan…
Shane says
But, but, Islam is a religion of peace? How can this be happening?
jihad3tracker says
We are currently in the middle of a Ramadan-Bombathon — as several persons have already observed — and there is reporting on those incidents at www (dot) msn (dot) com.
Most commenters have a firm grip on the reality of Islam — but a few apologists still parachute in with malarkey. If you want to have a bit of fun, add your own dose of truth to the hullaballoo . . . AT MSN YOU CAN WRITE YOUR REMARKS FIRST AND THEN LOGIN BY A FACEBOOK ACCOUNT.
And give Jihad Watch a mention in the observations you make over there. As a precaution against possible blocking as spam, it is likely better to give Robert’s web address with (dot) inserted — as I did above with MSN — rather than as a hotlink.
jihad3tracker says
And if your inner mischievous imp takes the steering wheel upon bumping into a Muslim sycophant tooting the Christianity/Islam equivalence one-God riff on one of those comment threads, have a bit of “good sport” — as David Cameron probably says when he plays an online game of virtual quail shooting :
WITHOUT GIVING AWAY YOUR COUNTER JIHAD STANCE, ASK THAT MUSLIM THESE QUESTIONS : 1. What should happen to Pam Geller, organizer of the cartoon contest ? 2. Is Islam’s Sharia better than our current Constitutional laws ? Then, depending on how clearly the answers embody supremacist ideology, respond with full A-10 Warthog armament (metaphorically, of course) !
Jan Aage Jeppesen says
How serious a threat is Islamism and Jihad actually to the Western Civilization?
That question is very difficult to answer. We hear about Islamic terror all the time and thanks to Robert Spencer and Jihad Watch all of them are recorded and commented. All the two thousand attacks a year. But that fact is, that almost all Islamist terror attacks are directed against other Muslims and very few against Western countries and populations. The vast majority of Muslims do not engage in violent acts on behalf of their Muslim faith; on the other hand they seldom speak out loudly against Jihadist terror. Or they blame the West, or India or poverty and a number of other reasons, thereby legitimizing terror as a mean to reach a goal.
I see two possible outcomes for the surge in fundamental belief, violence and Jihadist terror growing year by year since the abolition of the last Islamic caliphate in 1924.
First. What we experience is the last desperate death rattle of a once great and powerful Civilization about to becoming extinct because it was unable to adapt to the ethic’s, tolerance and openness of the modern world. Islamism understood as Islam transformed to a totalitarian political revolutionary ideology, as we in the West understand those concepts, is Islams last attempt to survive. In my opinion Islamism will not succeed. Actually it will bring about the total collapse of Islamic Civilization much sooner.
Second. Islam, or rather Muslims in their heads, is already under transformation and adapting to the values and norms of the Western World in a much larger scale than expected. Nothing is changed on the theological or ideological level, as Robert Spencer constantly remind us, but Muslims are losing faith in much larger numbers than I expected. Especially among Muslims having lived in the West for a couple of generations. I will not deny that integrating Muslims is a very difficult task, but it is not an impossible one.
The second scenario is supported in a new book by Simon Cottee “The Apostates: When Muslims Leave Islam”.
Let me quote the first two chapters from a review essay of the book In Foreign Affairs:
“Losing Their Religion
When Muslim Immigrants Leave Islam
By Darren E. Sherkat
A tide of immigrants from the Islamic world is altering Europe’s landscape. The continent’s demographic profile is changing thanks to relatively open immigration policies and much higher fertility rates among immigrant communities. And the continent’s religious profile could change as well; with old-stock Europeans becoming increasingly secular, some scholars posit that Islam could become one of the region’s most visible and practiced religious tradition in the coming decades. Projections by Eric Kaufman of the University of London predict that the Muslim population will comprise up to 15 percent of Western Europeans by 2050. Given that 25 percent of Europe is expected to be atheist or agnostic by 2050, this will give Islam 20 percent of the religious market, and that proportion would be much higher if market exit included people who may not be atheists or agnostics but reject religious identification.
But that is only half the story.
Scholars have generally assumed that Muslims seeking a better life in the West want Islam to remain a central part of their culture. They blame Europe and North America’s failure to build real multicultural societies for pushing new arrivals toward radical Islamist groups such as al Qaeda and Islamic State (also called ISIS). It is true that marginalization pushes some young Muslims to the brink of extremist fundamentalism. But radicals are few and far between, and there has been little scholarship on the average religious behavior of younger immigrants and second-generation immigrants raised as Muslims.
In truth, the West’s embrace of secular multiculturalism has created a groundswell of increasingly non-religious Muslims, though quantitative research is lacking documenting this trend. Simon Cottee’s The Apostates: When Muslims Leave Islam provides readers with a powerful depiction of this group. Cottee examines how Western secularism challenges Islamic thought in ways that lead some to abandon their faith—an outcome that is much more common than resorting to fundamentalism. Data from the General Social Survey in the United States show that 32 percent of those raised Muslim no longer embrace Islam in adulthood, and 18 percent hold no religious identification. Rates of defection could well be higher in Europe and Canada. The odds that a Muslim in the United States will embrace radical fundamentalism are almost certainly much lower, although we do not have good measures tapping Islamic fundamentalism in quantitative studies. …”
jihad3tracker says
It takes only one successful attack breaching a crucial location or infrastructure necessity in America to cause immense and possibly irreparable harm.
The NSA / CIA / FBI — which constantly monitor Muslim traffic in every type of communications — probably have a more severe opinion of Islam’s danger to the United States than you.
jihad3tracker says
. . . . And, the last time I checked, our country was a rather important slice of “the Western Civilization”. Ask government C.E.O.s in other democratic countries if they agree . . .I will predict a “Yes”.
Westman says
Jan, I like your reasoned approach. The openness of the West does relieve the compliance pressure that exists in Muslim countries, letting those who can become lapsed or Agnostic and the rest restrained by relationships or by strict adherence due to personal faith.
However when immigrant Muslims create their own exclusive neighborhoods, some with Sharia Law Courts, those options to leave or lapse become limited. Those neighborhoods will generate terrorists.
Holy Prophet APF says
… bomber had detonated his explosives after shouting “Allahu Akbar,” the Arabic phrase meaning “God is Great.”
Allah Akbar = God is great
Allahu Akbar = God is greatest
The second is an idiom best understood by axeing the question: if your God is greatest, then greater than who?
We are in deep trouble when Moslems start blowing up fellow Moslems cuz one version of Allah is greater than the other, when the Shia god is greater than the Sunni god.
Think about it: if Moslems can’t get along with one another, the possibility exists that one day they could start blowing up, stabbing and shooting us Infidels. So I propose that the U.S. taxpayers fund a rolling series of Sunni-Shia interfaith outreach negotiation seminars. To give these important meetings a great sense of urgency and meaning, I also propose that the outreach seminars always be held the day before the latest round of Mideast talks.
This is the solution to the world’s problems. Less the Communist Chinese and Vladimir, of course.
abad says
I have a much better idea.
Let the all school/faction members of Islam kill off each other.
Problem solved.
particolor says
If that is THEIR god, God Help us if the Wretched Beast ever comes Back ! 🙁 🙁
fido says
I, frankly, care very little when shia islamo-satanists are killing sunni islamo-satanists, or vice versa…it merely serves to reaffirm my belief in just how evil both sides of this satanic ideology really are. I must admit that I have found myself dreaming of a world where shia and sunni manage to pick off each other until that blessed day would come when the last damned shia and the last damned sunni manage to trip their boom boom waist belts at exactly the same moment rendering the whole islamo-satanist lineage terminated. But then I awake from my pleasant daydream and realize with the Camerons in the world that is not likely to be the outcome anytime soon. It is horrible when children are hurt or killed…but it doesn’t seem to bother the satanists in the least.
mortimer says
UK Muslims QUIETLY CONDONE jihad, but PM David Cameron is WHITEWASHING ISLAM.
Islam is a violent Death Cult. No ‘opinion’ by a politician can change that.
“Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those [who say this] are WITLESS. Islam says: KILL ALL THE UNBELIEVERS just as they would kill you all! Does this mean that Muslims should sit back until they are devoured by [the unbelievers]? Islam says: Kill them, put them to the sword and scatter [their armies]….Islam says: Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to Paradise, which can be opened only for the Holy Warriors! There are hundreds of other ayahs and hadiths urging Muslims to value war and to fight. Does all this mean that Islam is a religion that prevents men from waging war? I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim.”
-Ayatollah Khomeini
………………………………….
A man asked the prophet: “…And what is Jihad?” He replied: “You fight against the disbelievers when you meet them.” He asked again: “What kind of Jihad is the highest?” He replied: “The person who is killed whilst spilling the last of his blood.” – [Narrated by Ahmad in his Musnad 4/114 – Hadith Sahih. Al Haithami states: “Narrators upheld it.” Majmauz Zawaid 1/59].
particolor says
“The Religion of Serenity !”
wildjew says
Slightly OT? Or is it?
1) Supreme Court rules gay couples nationwide have a right to marry
2) Killed for ‘being gay’: ISIS savages blindfolded man and threw him off tower block – then stoned him to death when he SURVIVED the fall
Man blindfolded and thrown off tower block by ISIS militants for ‘being gay’
Horrific pictures show man being hurled from building in Tal Abyad, Syria
Man supposedly survived fall but was stoned to death by crowd at bottom
Comes less than month after ISIS extremists threw two ‘gay’ men off block