Mark Byron

Burying the Lead... and a British Soldier

Two black Muslim youth hacked a British soldier to death in London; however, this BBC piece avoids that inconvenient truth until deep into the piece. The BBC piece played up the presence of anti-Muslim protestors from the "English Defence League" rather than the jihadi-talking youth who macheted their way to infamy before getting shot by police.

Compare that to this Daily Mail piece that Drudge linked to that strongly covers dissing shout-outs to PM Cameron and a declaration of war on infidel Brits.

‘You people will never be safe,’ he declares in a clear south London accent. ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’

In broad daylight, he and an accomplice had just repeatedly stabbed and tried to behead an off-duty soldier in front of dozens of passers-by.

Unlike the Boston bombing, which were done by Chechen immigrants, this was seemingly done by native-born (or at least native-raised, if the accent is an indication) Londoners.

 

Forthrightly Dealing With the 4th Amendment

The Constitution bans "unreasonable searches and seizures" in the 4th Amendment. It doesn't mandate a warrant for police to check things in an emergency situation; it's vague enough to have the Supreme Court lay down guidelines of what they see as reasonable and when one can skip a warrant. Not all of the legal nicities like Miranda rights and warrants kick in during a quick-reaction spot.

Yeah, Watertown's door-to-door search is a dicey precedent, but the Boston bombing is a once-a-decade case. Doing that to catch a garden-variety drug dealer would be overkill, but I don't see what went down in metro Boston as unreasonable.

I recall one old cop drama (Picket Fences, if memory serves) where a couple of cops have an iffy search move; one of them says "Rehnquist court...I'll take my chances." Rehnquist has past on and we have the Roberts court, but I'd be hard press to see Anthony Kennedy shooting down what happened last Friday and joining a 5-4 center-left coalition shooting it down. 9-0 for the searches wouldn't be surprising.

We Have Met the Enemy, and... Who Are They, Anyway?

We've got a slew of folks wanting to make our Boston bomber an "enemy combatant." Watch it Dzhokar, you're about to be gored by a couple of RINOs.

Who's the enemy in question? Militant Islam, one would assume. Define "militant Islam." Does saying tacky things about rape victims and Harry Potter count? If that's the case, than Todd Akin needs to watch what he says about Hogwarts.

While were in the neighborhood, define "combatant." The late bomber Tamerlan was a boxer; if he took a beef with one of the folks at the gym "out back", has he become an enemy combatant? If what we know about their taste in theology is enough to cast them as the enemy, then what level of violence is enough to declare them a combatant?

Unless we get some clear link with an organized terror group, we're much better off letting the justice system deal with our bomber rather than shepherding him into Gitmo. Otherwise, we're judging their theology to see if it is radical enough to count, and what I've seen so far could almost make me a militant Christian if they applied that standard across the theological board. Guess I have to be careful about what I say about rape victims, lest I get on their radar.

The Counter-Revolution Will be Tweeted

I was thumbing through the TV listings and saw a Good Eats rerun on; Alton was making broth ...in a pressure cooker. Given that was the tool of choice of the Boston bomber, I was surpised that they would run it, but they did, even noting how the thing can explode if you don't regulate the pressure properly. Alton is always big on multitaskers, but that wasn't a use he had in mind.

That was 8-830. Slide to CNN and we have the 19 year old bomber cornered. By 8:45, we get the news that he's in custody; the official confirmation comes via a Boston PD tweet. The revolution may not be televised, but the counter-revolution will be tweeted.

Now it becomes a legal case, with indictements and grand juries, along with an investigation into whether they had help.

The late bomber's name (assuming his folks aren't right in that this all as a frame job) was Tamerlan Tsarnaev. I assume that's a variant on the Central Asia leader Tamerlane, a Muslim hero of the 14th century. It would take a rather warped world-view to view his modern namesake as a hero.

[Update 12:15AM-I'm not sure if hero would be the best world for Tamelane. Badass of the Week is an understatement; try half-millennium. That link isn't quite suitable for work and would be best read as if the Randall the Honey Badger guy is reading it; Tamelane might have been the original Honey Badger, now that I think about it.]

Semi-Homemade Terrorists

Part of the debate over the Boston Massacre 2.0 bombers was whether they were home-grown or whether they were jihadis from elsewhere. The answer would seem to be "yes."

They've ID'ed the bombers as a pair of Chechen immigrants. The older of the two is dead at the hands of local police, while the younger of the two heads up the on-line dictionary definition of "armed and extremely dangerous."

One of the brothers, identified by several sources as Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, studied engineering at Bunker Hill Community College but had taken off a year to train as a boxer, the source said Friday.

...

Several sources identified the other brother, who remained on the lam, as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19.

The source briefed on the investigation added that it should not be assumed that the brothers were radicalized because of their origins in the Russian Caucasus.

That's true, but there are quite a few jihadis flowing out of Chechnya embittered by Russian maltreatment and egged on by al Qaeda types looking for new cannon fodder.Given that Russian maltreatment of Chechnya, the brothers and others like them have a refugee pedigree which drowns out the jihadi stereotype stateside; in Russia, Chechens are blamed for everything but global warming, but our immigration rules tends to give folks the benefit of the doubt short of clear evidence of radicalization.

Without grilling Dzhokhar or his friends, we can't know for sure, but it would seem that it is better than even money that he's been something resembling "radicalized"; pipe bombs on steroids (pressure cookers were the tool of choice, a trick likely borrowed from Taliban bombers) aren't exactly polite civil discourse.

Dzhokhar looks like he got voted off American Idol a few weeks ago rather than being a terrorist, but they don't come with "Hug me, I'm a Jihadi" T-shirts. I recall a Belgian woman who was a dead ringer for Kristy McNichol; she became a suicide bomber in Iraq after marrying a Muslim and going jihadi. You don't need to look like a crazed radical to be one.

There's an interesting story to be told here. Some legit anger at Pooty-poot and his troops might have been morphed into a generic hatrid of infidels; that's merely the leader in the clubhouse of possible rationales.

Thrown Under the Bus...the Hard Way

Ten people are hurt in a Tel Aviv bus bombing that Hamas is praising. No deaths yet, but three folks are supposed to be in serious condition.

Folks in the Peanut Gallery who are critical of Israel (yes...I'm thinking of my Connexions friends) try reaiming some of your animus towards the real villains of the piece. Israel will frequently have some collateral civilian damage when it goes after Hamas targets in Gaza, but Hamas (or their allies, since there are a variety of hard-cases that don't like Israel) does it on purpose.

Do criticize Israeli excesses and pray for peace on both sides, but Hamas seems to start out excessive in the sense they think each and every Israeli is fair game; the same can't be said of the IDF, or else Gaza would already be a parking lot.

Related articles

The Missiles of November

A Bit Too Competent

Last I checked, "incompetent" isn't a synonym for the n-word, unless it is in super-code like where blacks were Canadians. If it is code, I didn't get the memo.

The problem with UN Ambassador Susan Rice might be that she is too competent.We'd like to think that our ambassadors are representing the US, but they're first and foremost representing the President. If the President says X, an ambassador is supposed to toe the party line and say X as well; if you say Y, you're sending mixed messages and you're giving the President and Secreatary of State some major headaches.

Thus, Ms. Rice was staying with the party line on Benghazi, much to the consternation of critics of the administration. They would have liked her to go rogue and say "I'm not sure what the folks in the White House were being told, but it look like an al Qaeda-type operation to me." That would have been the Ms. Smith Goes to Washington thing to do, but she'd be working on her resume in earnest if she did.

Thus, she was being a bit too good of an ambassador, falling on her sword for the boss rather than deliver an inconvienient truth. That's not the first time that's happened in congressional testimony and it won't be the last.

Susan Rice seems a bit like a liberal analogue of her Stanford predicessor and namesake. The president is going to want someone who can reiterate the administration line to folks overseas and on the Hill, and she seems to be doing that rather nicely. Whether she has the gravitas and character to advice the president on foreign policy and talk him out of bad ideas is open to question as things go foward in looking for a replacement for Secretary of State Clinton.

Oh, and questioning it isn't sexist or racist; the administration's critics would give the third degree to anyone up for the post. If anything, they'll go a bit easy on her to avoid looking like a Neanderthal.

It reminds me a bit of a trailer for The Trials of Rosie O'Neill;  Ed Asner was playing a collegue a bit against his arch-liberal real-life persona

"You don't like me because I'm a woman!"

"I'm a card carring member of NOW; I just don't like you."

John McCain might not have his NOW card paid up, but if he doesn't like Susan Rice, it's likely for policy rather than gender or race.

Aleppo, the Jihadi Depot

When countries fall apart, all bets are off. Somalia has at least three independent segments, one of which (Puntland) is a pirate haven. Syria may be heading in that direction, as a Western-friendly opposition government is given the back of the hands of Islamists in the second city of Aleppo-

Islamist rebels are unimpressed with the new grouping.

In a video posted online, an unidentified speaker sits at the head of a long table with at least 20 others, in front of a black Islamist flag. He lists some 13 armed Islamist groups who reject the opposition coalition.

"We are the representatives of the fighting formations in Aleppo and we declare our rejection of the conspiratorial project, the so-called national alliance," he says. "We have unanimously agreed to urgently establish an Islamic state."

Aleppo isn't far from the Turkish border, nor is it too far from the Mediterranean. The former could make it a thorn to Turkey, or allow Turkey to make it a thorn to an unfreindly Syrian government. There is no grand rule requiring Syria to stay unified once the Assad team is shown the door, and an Islamist-run Aleppo might not be easily ousted without outside help, especially if one of their neighbors is interested in keeping them in power.

If that Aleppo faction can swing west and set up shop on the Med, it could wind up acting a bit like Puntland and make the western Med a no-go zone like the entrance to the Red Sea and the route to the Suez Canal was terrorized by Somali pirates. That's a bit of a long-shot, but the prospects of an Islamic Jack Sparrow doing Pirates of the Mediterranean isn't that big of a stretch if Somalia is any lession.

The Missiles of November

Could we be looking at the first major war involving Israel in four decades? Egypt's new Muslim Brotherhood-led government is backing their Hamas brethren, even sending their PM over to Gaza to give moral support while Hamas exchanges rocket-powered pleasantries with Israel.

Egypt and Israel have come to blows four times, most recently in 1973. After that, a rapprochement created an uneasy peace that saw Israel give the Sinai back to Egypt after grabbing it in 1967 as a buffer. Expect Jimmy Carter, who brokered the Camp David accords that codified that rapprochement, to be back in the news, likely bashing the Likudniks for breaching the spirit of Camp David.

I'm not sure if the Egypian government, having just gotten into power and still working to keep the Mubarak leftovers in check, is up to picking a fight with Israel. Camp David is part of the legacy of the Sadat-Mubarak team, but one that helped Egypt become allied with the US and a bit more prosperous than it otherwise would have been. Officers might well be inclined to drag their feet and not want to go back to the four-wars-in-a-quarter-century that crippled the Egyptian military.

____________

It's Friday morning; where are the Islamic rabble going to be roused today? Somehow, I expect something American to be trashed over the current unpleasentness in Gaza, since their isn't anything Israeli to be trashed in most Arab countries other than a Israeli flag to be burned in effigy. Friday is always a prime day for that, since it's go-to-mosque day and a good Jew-bashing sermon will get the rabble roused.

Old-Time Religion, Salafi Style

Reading up on the various strains of Islam finds some interesting parallels with Christian movements. The hard-conservative Salafis are a case in point.

On one level, the Salafis remind me of Restorationists (Campbellites) looking to reestablish the early church without two millennia of stray tradition and added doctrine, getting back to the New Testament basics; the Salafis are looking to the 7th century as their benchmark when Islam was new and close to the original. On that level, we might have fellow comrades on some issues of the day if it is simple Ten Commandments-level morality.

However, one key difference between a Christian going back to basics is that we don't have a tradition of Christian government; from a worldly perspective, Jesus never ran anything but His mouth. We don't have hands-on experience on how Jesus would have run a government, or even how Paul or Peter would have served as a prime minister or President. Thus, Christian back-to-basic are more theological in nature and have little political economy in the mix.

Conversely, Mohammad did run a good hunk of Arabia before he died. Muslims have more of a track-record of Mohammad and his early successors as political leaders as well as mosque leaders. Couple that with a lack of church-state separation in Muslim thought makes their theology political and their politics theological.

That makes modern Salafis problematic in the public square, since democracy wasn't in the mix in early Muslim history that they look to as normative; that's new stuff that is best avoided as impure to them.

Note that only a minority of Salafis are violent, but they are the ones that get the press, like the guy who wants to trash the Pyramids. Interestingly, you have folks appealing to the Salafi love of early Islamic history to save the condos made of stone-

But in retaliation to Gohary’s remarks, the vice president of Tunisia’s Ennahda party, Sheikh Abdel Fattah Moro, called the live program and told Gohary that famous historic military commander Amr ibn al-Aas did not destroy statues when he conquered Egypt.

“So who are you to do it?” he wondered. “The Prophet destroyed the idols because people worshiped them, but the Sphinx and the Pyramids are not worshiped.”

Hopefully, they'll learn to adapt to a democratic system that may be flavored by the Koran, but not as strict as they'd like; that is going to be a touch-and-go proposition. Before we cast too many stones, recall that we had the Alien and Sedition Acts a decade into our Constitution era; the Egyptians and other Arab democracies might have to fumble towards their own version of a viable political culture.

The Future's So Dark, We Need the High-Beams

Mali doesn't get a lot of news coverage in normal times. The old shaggy-dog pun that comes to mind was the stainless-steel basin sold there, the unbrownable Mali sink.

Mali's northern parts, including the historic city of Timbuktu, has been taken over by jihadis who trash anything that they don't like; since they're just south of Libya, they might well have had a hand in the Benghazi embassy attack.

The president, whoever he might be come January, will have this one on his plate; the local African countries can provide some troops and diplomatic cover, but a Western responce seems to be needed, as Mr. Totten points out in his piece. If Yemen has become the drone capital of the world with their lawless wastes, Mali will be getting there in short order.

P.S.- here's your Timbuk3 earwig from the title.

Uncle Tom's Mosque-Part V-Northern Exposure

It's Friday, so something regarding a mosque is sure to be in play; today, it's a bombing of a mosque in northern Afghanistan-

A suicide bomber targeted worshippers who had gathered at a mosque in north Afghanistan for prayers to mark Eid al-Adha, killing at least 41 people.

More than 50 people were wounded in the attack, which happened as people were leaving the Eid Gah mosque in Maymana, capital of Faryab province.

Note that this is in the north, where the Taliban have less of a following. During the post-Soviet civil war, the northern part of the country stayed independent of the Taliban government; the US used a combination of air power, special forces and Northern Alliance fighters to roll back the Taliban a decade ago.

The tragic part is that it came on one of Islam's big holidays; Eid al-Adha celebrate's Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son, although the Koran twists the Genesis story to have Ishmael as the would-be sacrifice rather than Isaac. It's a bigger party than the end of Ramadan.

"We had just finished Eid al-Adha prayers and we were congratulating and hugging each other," deputy provincial governor Abdul Satar Barez told the AFP news agency.

"Suddenly a big explosion took place and the area was full of dust and smoke and body parts of police and civilians were all over the place. It was a very powerful explosion."

Since a lot of officials and police were at the mosque, it was a target for the Taliban as a way of getting at the powers-that-be. That's the underlying theme of a lot of Muslim-on-Muslim violence as of late (note the part V), where the jihadis go after the establishment Muslims.

 

Optimal Prime

I'm not sure how much legs this will have, but this stint on The Daily Show won't help the president much-

President Obama, during the taping of The Daily Show, discussed the Benghazi terrorist attack that claimed the lives of the U.S. Ambassador to Libya and three other Americans.

“Here’s what I’ll say. When four Americans get killed, it’s not optimal. We’re going to fix it,” Obama said per pool. “The government is a big operation and [at] any given time something screws up,” he also said, saying that he believes “you find out what’s broken and you fix it.”

Having an ambassidor dying at the hands of jihadists is sub-optimal? That sounds like discussion from a MBA quant-methods class of a solution that can be improved upon with some linear programming, not an assessment of a murderous attack on our consulate in Libya.

Too cool for school. And he's supposed to be the guy in touch with the little guy?

Taliban Vrs. Talib

A 14 year-old girl who wants to be a doctor when she grows up and goes to bat for education with her blog would be a prize in most places, but in Pakistan's Sharia Belt, she gets a hit put on her;

Malala Yousufzai, 14, remains in critical condition a day after surgeons removed a bullet lodged in her neck. Taliban militants shot Malala and two other girls Tuesday as the girls headed home from school in Pakistan's conservative Swat Valley. The two other girls were not seriously injured.

The Taliban have claimed responsibility for targeting Malala, who enraged the militant group by writing about her daily battle with the extremists who used fear and intimidation to force girls to stay at home instead of going to school. Malala's online writing earned her Pakistan's first National Peace Prize in November.

An irony here is that Taliban means students in Arabic; students of the Koran by implication, but they are gunning down a coed talib (that's the singular form) for wanting to be educated.

Educated in something other than 24/7 Koran. That might be the craw-sticker. Over in Nigeria, the jihadist group Boko Haram declares western-style education to be non-halal and harasses Christians and folks who don't oppose a secular approach to things. There might be a bit of that here.

However, since the Taliban come from the barefoot and pregnant school of culture (not so much religion; you'd be hard pressed to quote Muhammad sura and verse to back illiterate girls), a teenaged girl treating herself as their peer, if not their superior, is double-trouble.

It's one thing to send a prank 911 call to send a SWAT team to an offending blogger's house, it's another to send a Swat Valley team of hit men to kill a juice-boxer blogger. It shows something of the desperation of the Taliban to terrorize Pakistani culture to a point where the only thing you can do is survive and have your nose in a Koran when you're not doing the minimum to survive.

Uncle Tom's Mosque-Part IV-To the Right of the Salafis

Another Sunday bombing in Nigeria, but this time, it's of a Muslim school; the Sunday School bombing of the week happened in Kenya.

Gunmen detonated a bomb Sunday near an Islamic boarding school in northern Nigeria and later exchanged gunfire with security forces, causing unknown casualties in the region's latest round of violence, officials said.

...

Boko Haram has attacked mosques and killed Muslims in the past. The Zaria boarding school near Sunday's bombing is run by Awwal Adam Albani, who is a critic of Boko Haram and a follower of the ultraconservative sect of Islam known as Salafi.

The Salafi are a back-to-basics bunch within Islam; while they have a few jihadist in their midst (the Blind Sheik from the first World Trade Center bombing is one), terrorism isn't their strong suit and many of them have preached against such terrorism. When the Salafi aren't radical enough for you... things are getting out there. If the Salafis are Islam's answer to the King James only Baptists, then Boko Haram is more like Fred Phelps gone violent.

Taking Back the Arab Street

Interesting news out of Benghazi, where the US embassy had been torched last week. A mob of more-moderate citizens overran a militant group's headquarters. A step in the right direction and not something you'd expect on a Friday during crazy season in Muslim territory, with French cartoons adding to the outrage mix; the natives are more outraged at their own radicals than the next poor excuse for free speech.

Uncle Tom's Mosque-Part III-Wake Up, Little Sufi

It's not been a easy time to be a moderate Muslim, especially one who's either accommodating to local secular rulers or who's not part of the normal Sunni-Shia paradigm. Sufis have taken it in the neck twice recently. The most recent one happened in southern Russia, in the Dagestan area near the Caspian Sea. There, a female autoboomer took out a Sufi leader, Sheikh Said Afandi.

The other one happened in Libya,

On Friday, a Sufi mosque and adjoining library were vandalized in Zliten. The mosque's dome collapsed and hundreds of books were destroyed.

And, on Saturday, in broad daylight, Salafist activists brought in a bulldozer to flatten the Sidi Al-Sha'ab shrine, which was centuries old and contained 50 graves considered sacred by Sufi Muslims.

The Sufis are among the more mystic-oriented of Islam's flavors, making the attractive to spiritual seekers from the West, something of a halfway house between Catholic monasticism and Eastern meditative thought; theistic but without the Christian doctrine that intellectuals often run from.

The shrine bulldozed was in the capital, Tripoli. The nearest Christian analogy I could think of would be militant Baptists storming downtown Houston and demolishing Joel Osteen's stadium-church for preaching a false gospel. Sufi=Pentecostal isn't a great fit here, especially when the Sufis go back a millennium and the Pentecostals are just getting a second century going in their modern form, but they both lean towards the experiential and are often seen as theological outliers by the more textual-oriented folks in their faith.

The fact that a fledgling Libyan government had to essentially stand back and let the mob have its way is not a good sign for other new democracies in the area, especially Egypt and their good-sized Coptic community.

The bombing in Dagestan is a part of a ongoing string of attacks on traditional religious leaders in the ethnically-Muslim areas of southern Russia; Tartarstan was the previous site of anti-establishment violence in the far domestic (since they call their old USSR neighbors "the near abroad", that would fit those minority sections of Russia). That's been a problem since the USSR broke up, and won't be stopping anytime soon; this might be one main reason why the Russians veto stuff on Syria; they don't want any of these scuffles becoming UN material in the future.

The Sound of One Crucifixion Report Clapping

Drudge has had a link to a World Net Daily piece claiming the mobs of Muslim Brotherhood backers have been crucifying foes, including one in front of the presidential palace; this seemed to be the core piece backing up the claims. It was supposed to have been aired on Sky News, but the article on the piece has been wiped off the site according to the article.

There's one problem with the piece; no one outside of a circle of anti-Islamist or conservative web sites seems to be running the story. For a story of that magnitude to be a non-starter elsewhere is a bit odd. Glenn Beck's Blaze site has the story, but I'm not seeing any serious confirmation other than a lot of people regurgitating a single report in English.

If a political lynching happened in front of the White House, one would assume that it would be bigger news than just one piece floating around conservative web sites. Egypt might not have the most vibrant and free press on the planet, but one would expect that someone other than Drudge and WND would have picked this one up. Fox News, the Washington Times, someone with some gravitas beyond Drudge (who has gravitas, but has his share of false alarms).

It smells like the story might be not what it seems to be. Some form of English-language confirmation beyond what has showed up in "Islamophobic" circles (I don't like that term as a conversation-slamming analogue to homophobic, but I don't know of a good term to describe the folks who are overly nervous about things Islamic) would be helpful.

{Update 9/7-The National Post's Johnathan Kay takes up the story three days after I wrote this and chalks it up to an urban legend. That's a conservative-leaning paper (Canada's Washington Times without the Moonie connection) and one that would be one of the first places a conservative-leaning story would get traction in the traditional media.]

Israel, the Insult Dog

An old joke that has made the rounds asks what the first car in the Bible was. The classic but wrong answer is a Honda, since the disciples were all in one Accord. Other folks think it was a Dodge-"I will tread them in mine anger, and trample them in my Fury."

Then there was David with an after-market muffler; his Triumph was heard throughout the land.

The most notable Triumph of modern days is Triumph the Insult Dog, who just went on a surprise Middle East tour and gotten a certain Twelver hot and bothered.

Israel's existence is an "insult to all humanity," Iran's president said Friday in one of his sharpest attacks yet against the Jewish state, as Israel openly debates whether to attack Iran over its nuclear program.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said confronting Israel is an effort to "protect the dignity of all human beings."

News flash, Mahmoud-ring. I read the end of the book, and our insult dog wins.

Run-DMZ

After the Camp David accords, the Sinai has been largely a demilitarized zone, since Israel has been fearful of having too many Egyptian troops close to its border; UN troops kept the sides apart for decades. However, that has left a vacuum where Gaza gun runners and local goons can operate without fearing a major armed backlash from the authorities, especially after the Arab Spring ditched Mubarak last year.

That has changed; with Israel's blessing, the Egyptian army is moving back in.

Hundreds of troops in armored cars drove out of the town to hunt Islamist militants blamed for killing 16 Egyptian border guards on Sunday, the biggest spike in violence which has been growing steadily since last year's overthrow of Hosni Mubarak.

The gunfire in al-Arish, the nerve centre of the government's otherwise shaky control of the North Sinai region, showed how difficult it will be for Egypt to impose order. It followed attacks on checkpoints in the town on Wednesday.

Israel has welcomed Egypt's offensive while continuing to express worries about the deteriorating situation in Sinai, home to anti-Israel militants, Bedouin tribes angered by neglect by Cairo, gun-runners, drug smugglers and al Qaeda sympathizers.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Egypt was acting "to an extent and with a determination that I cannot previously recall".

It also puts new President Mursi in an awkward spot; Hamas is a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot, so he'd be going against some spiritual allies in cracking down on the smuggling of military goodies into Gaza. However, if Mursi is going to have any credibility with the west as an Islamic democrat, keeping Hamas at a distance and Israel as a peaceful neighbor would require such a crack-down.

That bode watching, for if Mursi can pull that off, there might be hopes for some form of housebroken Islamic democracy; the "Christian Democrats" of Europe come to mind as a bloc that is religious but not authoritarian. It would be a bit of a feat to see an Islamic Democrat when Islamic doctrine leans toward a church-state fusion.

Uncle Tom's Mosque-Part II-Steak Tartar

Autoboomers have been busiy around the globe, having taken out a bus of Israeli tourists in Bulgaria and an anti-terror Muslim leader in the Russian subpart of Tartarstan. The second bombing has echoes of Boko Haram's offing of a traditional Muslim leader in Nigeria, as both represent an establishment form of Islam that is at odds with the desire to create a reactionary theocracy.

The first bombing on the list reminds us of the spot that Israel plays on the haram-list of Muslim radicals; there isn't any strategic benefit to killing off a bunch of Israelis heading to a beach resort. You can see the logic of taking out leaders as a way of showing the cost of being against their version of sharia, but the Bulgarian bombing is just designed to give vengeance to past grievances against Jews and Israel.

Civil war amongst Muslims on one hand in at least two countries outside the Middle East and a possible Hezbollah operation on the other; at least Israel is pointing fingers at them and their Iranian friends. That could be a precursor for what we might see if Israel does pull the trigger on an anti-nuke strike on Iran.

Uncle Tom's Mosque

This was not good news out of northeastern Nigeria; the jihadist group Boko Haram has been bombing churches in the Muslim part of the country on an alarmingly regular basis, but they have now added a new spin to their attacks-

A suicide bomber has killed five people at a mosque in the north-eastern Nigerian city of Maiduguri, security officials say. The attack, reportedly by a teenage boy, narrowly missed one of Nigeria's most revered Muslim traditional leaders, the Shehu of Borno.

The blast happened at a mosque near his palace in the centre of the city as Friday prayers finished.

The operative word here is traditional. These leaders were put into power by the British when they ran Nigeria; they have no legal authority these days, but are respected by folks in the region. For a group who's name translates to "Western learning isn't kosher" (haram is unclean/forbidden, the inverse of halal in Arabic), the traditional rulers would be likely seen as collaborators with Western rule and Western culture, even if they were otherwise devout Muslims.

When you add Friday's autoboomer to this NPR story from Thursday about Boko Haram hooking up with Yemen's branch of al Qaeda and a north-African al Qaeda branch, you have a recipe for a civil war level of trouble in Nigeria as well as seeing Nigeria exporting jihadists as well as Internet banking scam spam.

Coup of Grace?

The Egyptian analogue to the Supreme Court just declared the Muslim Brotherhood-led parliament unconstitutional and disbanded it, giving power back to the military interim government. That's bad news for democracy, but might be good geopolitics for the US and Christians in the region.

The court is made up of Mubarak appointees, so they have something of a vested interest into the pre-2011 status quo. What we're seeing is something akin to Turkey, where the military there has stepped in to toss governments that look too un-secular, although the current government seems to have escaped that fate as it tries to give Muslims more room to maneuver in the public square.

That sounds good from a freedom-of-religion standpoint, but it has also resulted in a less-pro-western government in Turkey, as they have ditched previously friendly relations with Israel. A MB government in Egypt will be more anti-Israel and more pro-Hamas than the current one, which leaves small-d democrats rooting for the MB and conservative foreign-policy types rooting for the Mubarak holdovers.

Adding to the mix is the Coptic Christians in Egypt who weren't exactly best buddies with Mubarak but were treated with some deference; the more radical Muslims in the new parliament might be inclined to put severe restrictions on the Copts if not forcing them underground. A similar dynamic is going down in Syria, where the Assads, religious minorities themselves as a Muslim analogue to Mormons (if I can take some poetic license; the Alwaitis are looked at as apostate by Shia and Sunni alike), treat their Christians much better than the opposition would; part of Russia's backing of Assad could well flow from an honorable looking after fellow Orthodox churchmen in Syria.

Thus, conservatives would have some things to be happy about if the military stays in power in Egypt, except that the neocon vision of spreading democracy around the world takes it in the chops. One could see the Pat Buchanans in the realm cheering but the Weekly Standard crowd being of mixed thoughts.

It might well be worth letting one of these popularly-elected Islamist government actually be allowed to govern and see if they can coexist with the rest of the world. If they can coexist, that will take a lot of the steam out of al Qaeda and their ilk if we can give would-be jihadis a political outlet to change corrupt systems rather than forcing them to arms to get their way. If the powers that be keep pulling the plug when they win, they'll stop being part of the political process and take up arms or bombs.

There is an election coming up for president, pitting a MB guy versus a Mubarak leftover; the winner would be in position to move things in their direction, although a MB president going up against the military might result in a civil war far bloodier than we saw last year.

I'd Whack a Male for a Camel

The Somali branch of al Qaeda has a unique bounty on the POTUS-10 camels. 20 chickens is the tab for Hillary. That would get most folks to move 10 miles, if you'd walk a mile for a camel. "How far would you go for 20 chickens?" was the question from my mother-in-law; at least across the road.

Get Yer Yahya's Out... of the Way

The Drone Ranger rides again, dispatching al Qaeda second-in-command and Internet front-man Abu Yahya al-Libi. Pakistan's wild, wild Northwest was where our buddy was located.

The Monday strike was the third such deadly attack in as many days and the 21st suspected U.S. drone strike in Pakistan this year. At least six missiles were fired at a militant compound near the town of Mir Ali in the North Waziristan region near the Afghanistan border.

This guy beat me to the title pun; and christened the mechanical merchants of death the Rolling Drones.

Seriously, we're essentially looking at Pakistan as enemy territory, at least the NW part of the country which is all but run by the Taliban.

Moroccan Mole

A Belgian of Moroccan descent shot up a marketplace in the Wallonian capital of Liege, killing at least three, with a fourth body found at the shooter's home. That puts things on the French-speaking side of Belgium. Since France has a colonial tie to Morocco (think of the French cop from Casablanca being shocked, shocked at the gambling), having alleged shooter Nordine Amrani in a French-speaking area makes some sense.

What is interesting in the BBC profile of Amrani (misspelling that into Armani might be fashionable), there seems to be no play on whether Islamic thought came into play at all. Amrani liked guns and pot and had a long rap sheet, but we don't know if he was just a European gun nut who happened to be Moroccan or whether he went jihadi on the town square. That might be a ghost worthy of a Get Religion piece.

Egypt's National Brotherhood Week

Excuse the Tom Lehrer earwig, but seeing coverage of the Muslim Brotherhood brought back memories of National Brotherhood Week. The MB is slated to be at least the plurality winner in the parliamentary elections, with polls pointing to a majority between the somewhat more moderate MB and the more hard-core Salafist faction.

How that plays out post-election is a good question. Hamas is an offshoot of that movement, so that is not very encouraging for Egypt-Israel relations.The MB has a track-record of delivering social services like Hamas; however, Hamas combines a Salvation Army-style ministry to the poor with a jihadi-army to fight Israelis.

The hope is that their Egyptian brothers will be a bit more moderate, especially when the rest of the world has more at stake. Having a relative backwater area like Gaza being under bad management creates less of a problem than when the Brotherhood has control of the Pyramids and the Suez Canal. The former brings western tourists to mull over the false deities of that era; neither the visiting infidels nor the infidel theology of cat and sun gods will sit well with MB.

The Suez Canal will be a different kind of issue. A militant Egyptian government could throw a monkey wrench into the Asian and European economies by making cargo ships go the long way around the Cape of Good Hope. This would be less of an issue for the US, who has more of a straight shot to both of those markets; the disruption would make US goods more competitive, but the overall negative effect of a Suez closure would be bad for the developed-world economy.

However, those fears will be factored into the actions of the MB. If they want to stay in power, they have to deliver the goods. Civilized relations with the western world will keep tolls from the canal coming and possible investment dollars for people wanting to be a part of liberalizing the Arab world. Whether the Arab world wants to be liberalized is a good question.

The best-case scenario is for the MB to be akin to the Islamic-leaning government in Turkey; the downside there is the Turks are becoming more anti-Western in the recent past, so Turkey might not be a great role model. How the Copts would fare in that setting is a good question, since the small Orthodox remnant in Turkey is ill-treated.

The worse-case scenario is that the MB will act more like Hamas and isolate the country from all but Muslims and useful dhimmis from overseas. One future path would have the MB move to a Iranian-style moderated democracy, where secular and non-Muslin thought is proscribed and only MB-authorized candidates can run. That could easily happen.

What could be more dangerous in the long haul is if the MB were to keep winning elections fair and square and yet be toxic to the kind of human rights we're used to in the US; laying the dhimmi status hard on the Copts is a real prospect, which would lead to a refugee crisis with the Copts heading to the US and other countries willing to help.

Obama's Greatest Hit

Interesting news out of Yemen, where an US-born al Qaeda teleterrorist, Anwar al-Awlaki, was killed by US forces, likely a Predator drone aircraft. al-Awlaki was able to use his native English to spread his cause over the Web and inspired more than one American jihadi, including the Fort Hood shooter.

I don't have a problem with unmanned drone aircraft doing the shooting; it does make things a bit antiseptic for our side and a bit less gallant, but if the pilot can be doing the job from an office complex in Nevada, more power to 'em.

What is novel is that we've essentially put out a extrajudicial hit on Anwar al-Awlaki. There doesn't seem to be much doubt that he'd be up for either life in prison or a trip to Jack the Dripper had he been hauled to justice. It's not something that is good for a country that thrives on the rule of law to be shelving such principles on a global battlefield.

However, it is a battlefield, albeit an unconventional one. A missile strike delivered some rough justice without putting US or Yemeni troops at harm's way; if you're more of a pacifist or more of a legal purist, that is too rough, but a constitutional law prof turned president signed off on the policy.

It will be interesting to see if this gets anyone into the Democratic nomination race.

The Ten-Year War

As I mentioned in the last post, over 2 million people die in the US each year. Something on the order of 23 million have perished in various ways in the last decade.

However, it is the 3000 or so that perished ten years ago today that get the press. One one hand, it seems a bit... obsessive... to focus on this quartet of terror attacks.

That being said, those were preventable deaths without good reason, and the underlying cause of those attacks aren't quite dead yet. EJ Dionne would like to leave 9/11 behind, but there is still a block of Islamic militants who want to have their theo-ideological view imposed on the world, by force if needed. That grouping has been crippled somewhat in the last decade, but it is far from dead.

The "war on terror" is unwinnable, since you can't kill off a concept, but one can work on making militant Islam unattractive and work on keeping violence from happening in its name. The "Arab Spring" that is quickly shifting though into fall shows some promise for giving alternatives to radicalism, but also gives the scary prospect of a militant Islamic party from grabbing hold in one of the newly-freed companies.

However, just because it is on its heels doesn't mean that the effort stops. We've had a "war on poverty" for the better part of a half-century and poverty is still with us, albeit in less toxic forms than in the past. Even in poor-unfriendly places like Texas, a safety net is still in place to look after the needy, far better than before another guy from Texas took a whack at helping the least of these in the mid-60s.

We'll need to keep up discouraging radical versions of Islam (or any other religion, including a few millita groups with Christian trappings) for the long haul, just as we need to keep looking after the needy. Neither will fully go away, but we need to keep whacking at it.

 

What Have You Done for Him Lately

It's interesting that the shooter in Frankfurt yesterday was a guy from Kosovo. One would think that he would have a soft spot for the US Air Force for their ousting of the Serbs from his country over a decade ago.

However, that is sooooo 90s, and we're in the 10s. Also, infidels are still infidels, even if they are former allies. Osama was happy to take US help in ousting the Russians from Afghanistan, then turned around and aimed at the less-egregious infidels.

Be thankful that modern Christian history is short on jihad-style thought; otherwise, we'd have the Westboro folks shooting at mourners rather than damning them loudly. Unfortunately, they're allowed to do that thanks to the First Amendment. They're allowed to question one's eternal destination as long as they don't try to expedite one's trip to eternity.