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Showing posts with label Islamic radicalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Islamic radicalism. Show all posts

Saturday, November 14, 2015

#Paris - Initial thoughts on the latest example of #ISIS pathology on display on the streets of Paris, a city that stands in stark contrast to everything repressive Islamic fundamentalism rejects: Liberté, égalité, fraternité; @France24_en

#Paris - Initial thoughts on the latest example of #ISIS pathology on display on the streets of Paris, a city that stands in stark contrast to everything repressive Islamic fundamentalism rejects: Liberté, égalité, fraternité; @France24_en


Tom Burges Watson of France24

Per continuing developments in #Paris, you probably still have it from previous emails of mine but just in case... link for France24's English language channel in Paris, which I previously mentioned back in January during Charlie Hebdo massacres. http://www.france24.com/en/



I also watched both the English and French-language channels during the last French presidential elections, where Hollande defeated Sarkozy. A well-known international media organoization even contacted me about appearing on-air to discuss the election, if you can believe it.
I said no thanks, foolishly.

As it happens, I took French for many years at North Miami Beach High School in late '70's and even received an award for being the 2nd-best non-native speaker of French at the 1979 Dade County Youth Fair Oral competition down at FIU, open to all French high school students in greater Miami.
Of course, I lost to a ringer from Quebec. :-(


In case you forgot what some people in Great Britain were thinking back in January, since we are rarely reminded of it in the U.S.:




The Telegraph
Quarter of British Muslims sympathise with Charlie Hebdo terrorists 
Some 27 per cent of British Muslims sympathise with Paris gunmen, 
while more than one in ten say satirical cartoons "deserve" to be attacked
Am sure we will see similar polls done in U.K. and other European countries within the next few days, with results that both surprise and frustrate.





















Ann Coulter's thought about Donald Trump, on the other hand, seems reflected in both the words, action and human behavior of Americans I see and speak with everyday, not mystical elite salons that believe that their own unpopularity is, itself, a reflection of something positive. She's right, they're wrong. 
















































This blog post is based in part to my not only looking at themany emails I received from friends and contacts in Europe, but also watching and monitoring France24 all morning, including seeing the Interior Minister's speech outlawing public demonstrations until at least next Thursday (?), for fear, clearly, of creating so many new and completely undefensible targets for so-called '"one wolves."
That being a favorite topic of some U.S. TV reporters, even when there isn't as much empirical evidence of them as often suggested in their reports.
But it only takes one, right?
Or, two in Boston.

Also, since it was reported last night per French President Hollandes's speech to the nation, I've learned that there are 61 official "border' entrances and exits in France, which will be more closely monitored than ever before, even while plane flights into France continue.

Press reports I've seen in various places keep hinting at more than passing concern with the 
French-Belgium border for some reason, but yet the media seems reluctant to say just why that would be so compared to France's borders with Spain, Germany or via boat in #Calais, scene of so much craziness and heartbreak because of the surge of immigrants there and theri attempst to get into Great Britain via the Eurotunnel or any other means available to them, a topic which I've written emails about to friends bot not posted about on the blog this summer.

I wonder whether this info I have heard about Belgium is being mentioned specifically because of an errant police leak or it's merely a trial ballon? Sheer supposition? Intuition? 
Hard to say, which also makes it frustrating given how much mis-information has already gotten out and with MUCH more sure to come in the days ahead..

As of 9 am Eastern this morning, two Syrian passports and 1 French passport were found so far on the 7 dead terrorists who killed themselves.
Numbers show that French police did not actually kill any terrorists, leading to a growing if still somewhat under-the-radar for now criticism that French SWAT teams simply waited too long to go in, given history and pathology of hostage takers -i.e. they were selected for the assignment 
precisely because they are prepared (and happy) to kill themselves AFTER killing as many hostages as possible, for a radical ideology where #numbers DO matter.

(That "strain" of Islam that to the regret of this country, President Obama refuses to say aloud for fear of causing offense - Islamic fundamentalism.)

Which means that in these types of situations, law enforcement simply has no time to pretend they are military units with overwhelming numbers and have the freedom to mass, coordinate with everyone and then enter and attack on THEIR own timetable.
New reality is that in this type of terror hostage situation, the clock is ticking... and a real bomb WILL definitely go off.

Similar public criticism of Littleton police by parents during and after the Columbine High 
School massacre proved to be more than justified, as there's still extant video of assembled, frantic parents and public near school asking why police were waiting SO LONG back then,
given that the Littleton area SWAT teams were armored, armed and trained.

Los Angeles Times
Police Under Fire in Quest to Study Columbine
Emergencies: Public lacks understanding, officials say. They defend actions of Littleton officers.
April 27, 1999
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and MATT LAIT | TIMES STAFF WRITERS

(N.B.: Eric Lichtblau is now at NY Times and an excellent reporter.)

Too much police concern for SWAT team members and not enough for kid hostages?
Which is precisely what I was thinking even as I watched the LIVE coverage of that on CNN 
back in 1999, when I was still living/working in Washington DC and that day, doing some consulting work for a well-known U.S.law firm... until the news hit and everyone raced into the giant conference room to watch the TV and see what was happening.
And not quite believing the 'rescue operation' seemed to be going in slow-motion... 

I had a similar sinking feeling and thought last night, and I suspect that many of  you did as well 
-the Police are simply waiting TOO LONG... 

:-( Anguish and exasperation in equal measure.


The Tweet below from this morning is my clear reference to George Stephanopoulos' frequent
absence from his own Sunday morning public affairs show, This Week, NOT the amount of time per show he's actually visible on it, which may be the impression I mistakenly conveyed when I did it.
This fact is self-evident, esp. to someone like me who's tracked it all year, since I believe that as of July, he was barely on 55% of 2015's This Week shows.

I've mentioned to many of you in person and probably even tweeted it a few times, and mentioned in emails, that as far as I'm concerned, ABC News should have never allowed Jake Tapper to get away to CNN, however it happened.
He was the best host for that show since its creator and first host, David Brinkley.  







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Sunday, September 22, 2013

'They think they are terrorists' -Gripping CCTV mobile phone video captures harrowing initial moments of stunned store customers as screams and gunshots ring out at Westgate Mall as team of al-Shabaab terrorists methodically take over Nairobi shopping mall, killing 68, injuring 175 and taking 30 hostage; #Kenya, #Westgate


CCTV Africa mobile phone video shows the initial confusion and shock as shoppers at Nairobi's Westgate Mall tried to decide what to do as they heard more and more gunshots that only got louder and closer to them. http://youtu.be/Zi7Kkot67oA
See this video and analysis of video at Sky News website:
http://news.sky.com/story/1145131/kenya-dramatic-video-shows-moment-of-attack

Related article: 
The Daily Mail
Shouts, screams... and then a sprint for their lives: Raw video footage shows full terror of moment Muslim terrorists struck at Nairobi mall
CCTV Africa reporter filmed clip at Westgate shopping centre in Nairobi
Video shows people running or cowering behind shelves and boxes
Man heard saying on his mobile phone: 'They think they are terrorists'
By MARK DUELL
PUBLISHED: 14:31 EST, 22 September 2013 
UPDATED: 14:39 EST, 22 September 2013
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2429431/Kenya-mall-attack-Gunshots-shouts-screams-heard-terrifying-video-filmed-inside-Nairobi-shopping-centre.html





























In my opinion, this video was the definitive TV news segment on what happened Saturday morning.















As of 6:30 tonight EDT Sunday, the Kenya Red Cross has is still reporting that 58 people were killed and 175 have been injured, confirming reports early this morning from Reuters. As of this afternoon, the second floor of the five-storey Westgate Mall was thought to be the only floor that has not been secured by Kenyan Army Special Forces or Kenyan Police, who are now both above and below the 15 terrorists and what officials believe are approximately 30 hostages. Electricity to the ground floor has been cut-off but there are still fears that more terrorists are holed-up in the large Nakumatt supermarket. 







British, American and Israeli according to reports. Three Britons already known dead, many feared held hostage.

Reminder: Nairobi is 7 hours ahead of Miami and Eastern Daylight Time in the U.S. & Canada. 

 Watch Sky News LIVE thru the day for regular updates on the harrowing situation in Nairobi at 
http://news.sky.com/templates/watch-live

 BBC is streaming reports with lots of details on the standoff here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-24193284
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Saturday, September 21, 2013

Even The Drudge Report is now sleeping on weekends! Today's deadly al-Shabab terrorist attack at #WestgateMall in Nairobi is more proof, as if needed, that on Saturdays, in the year 2013, just like the past 15, the U.S. News Media has left the building and only the JV team is manning HQ -and that includes Fox News, which should've been airing Sky News' coverage but didn't. Heaven forbid something bad or important actually happens on a Saturday and we need to know the actual details


Channel Four News video: Kenya attack: Al Shabaab claims responsibility
Story at: http://www.channel4.com/news/kenya-nairobi-mall-shooting-gunmen-killed-shopping

 Latest harrowing ITV video at: http://www.itv.com/news/story/2013-09-21/gunmen-open-fire-in-kenya-mall-nairobi/

 http://www.itv.com/news/




Sky News hasn't updated this tweet in over seven hours even as more and more people have died in the terrorist attack. 
NOT impressive.
https://twitter.com/SkyNews




Keep up with tweets at: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23WestgateMall&src=hash&f=realtime


Toll has gone from 20 dead to 25 to 30 within a few hours.
Sky News is still sticking with 22 dead.

Witnesses say people were executed on scene.
Terrorists yelled out beforehand, "Muslims get out, we are here to rescue you."

Similarities to Mumbai attack already being made.

I've been watching and listening to SkyNews LIVE for hours at:
So should you.

 Disappointingly, but in keeping what I and many other have seen and commented on privately, even The Drudge Report has had nothing about this incident many, many hours after-the-fact.

 That only adds fuel to the, first, speculation, and now, common belief, among myself and people I know throughout the country in the media that despite the record numbers of readers going to that website, the people who are actually physically manning the Drudge Report on weekends, whoever they are, are NOT doing as good a job as readers were used to, and came to expect on weekends years ago.
Boring stories stay up far too long -sometimes 3-4 days- and stories that ought to be up stay unposted after even lamestream media has them.
What the hell is going on? 

As I've detailed here on the blog more than a few times before, contemporaneously, largely as a result of MSNBC and CNN continually sleeping on the job while breaking news was happening around the world overnight -while I was awake and listening to the BBC or Sveriges Radio or watching the morning TV shows on SVT and TV4 in Sweden- Fox News Channel is what I usually turn to first when some Breaking News happens, but today they are TOTALLY f-ing missing the boat.

 Watching them today is painful, like watching portfolio videotapes of some once-cute girl doing Community College TV newscasts in Oklahoma, circa 1987.
Why, why, why???

 You have a family relationship with Sky News -you are the younger, dumber and more shallow brother in case you forgot- and yet Fox News is refusing to use any of those amazing resources, including video of the situation and reporters in the area.
Why?
What are you waiting for, an invitation?

 We have a huge country where real news is happening all the time and yet Fox News is doing another story with three guests about funding Obamacare? Really???
Can you you please stop kicking Obama and contemplating your navel and your ass for just a couple of hours?
It's embarrassing for me as a regular Fox News viewer to see this disregard for viewers intelligence and be served up this swill.

And at 2 pm, as I just flipped the TV back to Fox from a college football game, they give us a tan John Boehner, the soon to be ex-Speaker of the House because of what a horrendous job he's been doing the past two years.
(It's a reflection of how much everyone within the House GOP either hates or dislikes Eric Cantor that he can't push over a push-over like Boehner that is barely coherent at times.)
Is everyone in New York today inside a TV studio sleeping?

Also, I've wanted to say this for quite a few days and since i haven't seen anyone else say it anywhere -that I've seen- let me be clear.
IF hundreds of people were missing from New York City's Upper West Side after a flood there, you better believe the national news coverage would've been a lot more intense, professional and lengthy than what we saw in Colorado this past week, which many NY and DC-based news organizations treated like another bus in India or Bangladesh that went off the side of a mountain and killed all aboard.
Colorado, they still consider you "flyover country," even if they come visit you to go skiing.

 Oh well, hurricane season isn't over yet here in South Florida! 
And we all know how the people in New York at the TV networks root for us to get hit hard by one so they can fly in and do stories where they can 'act' like brave journalists facing the elements!
Just saying...
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Saturday, June 29, 2013

Claire Berlinski is our prescient eyes-and-ears in Istanbul, front-and-center on the battle between the past and the future -and what comes next- in a very important place: Turkey. With a smart and knowing Twitter feed that's exploding -and golden for journalists- she's now wrapped up the past few months in one great piece in The Tower magazine: "The Gezi Diaries: Can We Still Call Turkey Civilized?"; @ClaireBerlinski


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For months I've been closely following American writer Claire Berlinski's incisive writing from Istanbul, via her various online pieces and her very intensive and very popular Twitter feed, @ClaireBerlinski

 Berlinki's like a one-woman wire service the way the timely and useful information just flows in and out of her feed every few seconds for what often seems like hours at a time.
It's quite impressive in its scope in ways that Florida media websites and Twitter feeds aren't and never have been, but ought to be, given their greater resources.
Yet she's the one who pulls it off.

 Berlinski reminds us again thru her hard work and diligence that the wonders of technology are useless unless the people using it are both savvy and energetic, not one-note town criers.

That Berlinski lives four blocks from Taksim Square and knows the ins-and-outs of everything, plus speaks the language and is NOT one of the many foreign correspondents there who are forever having to get everything second-hand even while they're eyewitnesses, gives her the effect of knowing things before they happen.
In my opinion, she's lapping the field, which is why I've sent multiple emails out over the past two months with links to particular tweets of hers that were prophetic and spot-on.

Now that she's been front-and-center for months on what's really going down in Taksim Square, and with Prime Minister Erdogan's imperious march to the past, just as Turkey finally has the well-educated and dynamic population it's long needed to take its full place on the stage, the West's fear of Turkey finally going a bridge-too-far -and a subsequent brain drain- is more than just an idle threat as she tells below in a great essay that captures what's really animating the push against Erdogan.

 Here's a taste:
According to legend, when the great historian Robert Conquest was asked if he wanted to rename the updated edition of The Great Terror, his history of the Stalinist purges, he replied, “How about, I Told You So, You F***ing Fools.”
And that’s what I’m saying now to every single lazy journalist and policy wonk, professional sycophant, diplomat and idiot pundit who’s never so much as visited this place, the duly-funded social scientists and craven Western politicians and everyone else who for years swallowed Erdoğan’s nonsense and helped to manufacture the fantasy that Turkey was getting more and more democratic by the day.

That's what I'm talking about!

The Tower magazine
The Gezi Diaries: Can We Still Call Turkey Civilized?
By Claire Berlinski
Some see it as a modern democracy with an Islamic tint, an improving, reforming country. But if you were in Istanbul during the last month and a half, you’d have seen something completely different: a violent, authoritarian, increasingly suppressive and brutal regime. Tales from the Dark Side, Turkish style.
I’ve always been a critic of armchair reporting. But when your armchair is four blocks away from Taksim Square, it has one of the best views of the uproar in Istanbul any diligent reporter could ask for. I’m now able to calculate with great precision the time between the beginning of the screaming, the sound of the shot, and the entry of the gas through my window. It’s two and twelve seconds respectively.
Read the rest of her great essay at 
http://www.thetower.org/article/the-gezi-diaries-erdogans-turkey-goes-medieval/
------

 The Tower, http://www.thetower.org/ You can see the whole Middle East from here

 Claire Berlinski, @ClaireBerlinski, https://twitter.com/ClaireBerlinski

 http://www.berlinski.com/
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Saturday, June 1, 2013

Turkish House of Cards finally coming apart? Istanbul - Come for the peaceful protests, but stay for the tear gas and the water cannons! Turkey continues to screw-up over-and-over, play the 'heavy,' and cause reasonable Western observers to shake their heads and wonder whether it can now be trusted in the future; blogger Dani Karlsson is right in the middle of the action!


bakshow1 YouTube Channel video: Overview of Gezi Park protests in Istanbul and government's clumsy and heavy-handed response, as seen via Al Jazeera News' English-language service. Uploaded May 31, 2013. http://youtu.be/-MZpzPeeKOk
Taksim Istanbul
by Its me, your Dani June 1st, 2013 15:57

Well, as so often seems to be the case, Swedish model and blogger Dani Karlsson, of "It's me, your Danni" fame, recently in Miami, has found herself in the middle of everything yet again.
I mean really in the right place at the right time.

 This week, in the middle of the mass protests by Turkish citizens, chiefly in Istanbul, who don't want the government to chop down some much-needed shade trees and level parts of Gezi Park,  a spot of green amongst acres and acres of concrete, merely to indulge their edifice complex instincts and do some redevelopment in a place where it's both inappropriate and unpopular, though there's no accounting for taste among visiting tourists.

 Tens of thousands of regular citizens participated there and eslewhere in Turkey.
And in the case of the former, received complimentary tear gas and water cannons for their troubles.

 Dani, who appears on the popular Metromode blogging platform, has lots of photos of her
protest experience at http://dani.metromode.se/2013/06/01/occupy-taksim/

 The BBC's take on the government's heavy-handed reaction and the police over-reaction, is interesting:
Correspondents say that what was initially a local issue has spiralled into widespread anti-government unrest and anger over the perceived "Islamisation" of Turkey.
One woman told Agence France-Presse: "They want to turn this country into an Islamist state, they want to impose their vision all the while pretending to respect democracy."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-22741644

 Meanwhile, Channel 4 News has their own take here.

Channel 4 News video: Turkey protests: police fire tear gas on demonstrators
Turkish police fire tear gas and pressurised water at demonstrators on a second day of anti-government action, which was sparked by a protest to protect a park from redevelopment. 
SATURDAY 01 JUNE 2013
http://www.channel4.com/news/turkey-protest-police-tear-gas-taksim-square-istanbul-ankara  They're chanting, among other things, "shoulder to shoulder against fascism"

 In their dispatch from there today, Reuters deals a lot more with the increasingly-seen authoritarian side of the current Turkish Prime Minister and the grave concerns among secular Turks that he is increasingly willing-accomplice in undoing what modern Turkey had become -a small-case democracy with a majority Muslim population within NATO.

 If Erdogan keeps it up, he will be initiating the brain drain that's long been feared.
Once that happens, that country will quickly lose its dynamism and become the land of misfits as companies bolt. leaving the dummies behind.

Reuters
Turkish PM Erdogan calls for end to protests as clashes flare
By Nick Tattersall and Humeyra Pamuk
ISTANBUL/ANKARA | Sat Jun 1, 2013 4:23pm EDT
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/01/us-turkey-protests-idUSBRE94U0J920130601

 American Thinker
Are the Turkish people finally waking up to 'creeping Islamization'?
By Rick Moran
June 1, 2013
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/06/are_the_turkish_people_finally_waking_up_to_creeping_islamization.html

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