Terrorism
December 6, 2021 — Scott Johnson
You may have read about the six Palestinian charities Israel has designated as terrorist fronts, to more or less universal opprobrium. The Washington Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo and Matthew Foldi have now obtained what appears to be the Shin Bet dossier, as they call it — I would suggest another term! — on the “charities.” Kredo and Foldi remark on the dossier: The 74-page dossier, obtained and reviewed by the
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December 1, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Leftists like Kamala Harris want us to believe that white supremacism is a major threat to America. What about black supremacism? To Harris and the left, it’s a myth, and worrying about it is racist. Daniel Greenfield at FrontPage has the details on Harris’ quest to render black supremacism a non-concept and to bar the Department of Justice from preventing terrorism by black supremacists: Two years ago, Senator Kamala Harris,
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October 14, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard argument in the case of Dzhokar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber. A jury sentenced Tsarnaev to death, but the liberal First Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that sentence. The Washington Post’s report is here. Bill Otis discusses the oral argument here. The Post infers from the Justices’ questions that the Court will overturn the First Circuit’s decision, thereby reinstating the death penalty. CNN sees it
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September 15, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Scott has provided video of the exchanges between Sec. Antony Blinken and several Republican Senators yesterday during a hearing on the Afghanistan fiasco. He has done a great service to those of us unwilling to watch Blinken in full. All of the clips Scott presented are worth watching. In this post, I want to focus on Sen. Rob Portman’s comments (the video is below). Portman presented the best data made
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September 12, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
David Von Drehle writes that most of the time the war on terror “has felt like war only to the few, the deployed: the special operators, the contractors, the diplomats, the spies, the data analysts. . .the drone pilots. “For the rest,” he complains, “it has felt like mom’s birthday, finals week, the playoffs, just another April.” But when the enemy’s short-term goal is to terrorize populations and its long-tern
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September 11, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Based on what I’ve read and seen, the prevailing narrative on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 is that the war on terror went pear-shaped. 9/11 presented a test, and we failed it. On September 12, 2001, America was unified as it hadn’t been for decades. Our allies were fully behind us. But we blew it, or rather the Bush administration did by plunging us into war in Iraq. So I
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September 11, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Last night the White House released President Biden’s recorded statement on the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. This was to be the day that Biden celebrated our departure from Afghanistan. As our departure turned into the epic humiliation of the United States at the hands of forces that were instrumental to the 9/11 attack itself, he had a change of plan. While the 9/11 attack was still underway, Rick Rescorla understood
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September 11, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Following 9/11 the New York Times ran Portraits of Grief profiling many of those lost in the 9/11 attacks. The Times attributes authorship of these artful profiles collectively to Kirk Johnson, N.R. Kleinfeld, David Barstow, Barbara Stewart, Jane Gross, Neela Banerjee, Constance L. Hays, Lynette Holloway, Janny Scott and Somini Sengupta. We can’t capture the magnitude of the loss, or the meaning of who and what we lost, but the
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September 8, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
As we approach the 20th anniversary of 9/11, we’re seeing assessments of the 20 year war on terror. We’ll see many more in the next few days. The ones in the mainstream media will probably be along the lines of a piece in the Washington Post by the paper’s book review editor, a leftist of course. He argued that 9/11 put America to the test and America failed. I think
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September 7, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
In an earlier post, I discussed how top jobs in the new Taliban government will be held by leaders with close ties to al Qaeda. But there’s more to this story. You can find a list of the Taliban cabinet members here. It includes four terrorists who were released by the U.S. in exchange for Bowe Bergdahl. The four are: Mullah Norullah Nori (Acting Minister of Borders and Tribal Affairs)
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September 7, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
The Taliban has announced the formation of the government that will rule Afghanistan. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Taliban gave no positions of power to other political forces, religious minorities, or women. And it pledged to implement strict Islamic rule. Of course it did. That’s what the Taliban is all about. Did the Taliban at least exclude al Qaeda-linked elements from its government? No, it did not. The
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August 27, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
U.S. forces carried out a drone strike on an ISIS-K target in eastern Afghanistan today. ISIS-K is the group that claimed responsibility for the bombing that killed more than 170 people, including 13 U.S. service members, at the Kabul airport. A U.S. military spokesman said: U.S. military forces conducted an over-the-horizon counterterrorism operation today against an ISIS-K planner. The unmanned airstrike occurred in the Nangahar Province of Afghanistan. Initial indications
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August 24, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
John Bolton calls attention to one aspect of Joe Biden’s decision to choose defeat in Afghanistan — the implications for Pakistan. Bolton argues that “the Taliban’s takeover next door immediately poses the sharply higher risk that Pakistani extremists will increase their already sizable influence in Islamabad, threatening at some point to seize full control.” By the way, Pakistan has nuclear weapons. According to Bolton, the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, is
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August 17, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
I hear some conservatives saying that we should have gone into Afghanistan, defeated the forces that attacked us on 9/11, and then left. The obvious problem with this view is that as soon as we left, the forces that attacked us or collaborated in the attack would have returned to power. Sure, we would have killed and captured some bad guys, but basically we would have been back where we
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August 13, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
In July, when Joe Biden announced that he would be pulling the U.S. completely out of Afghanistan, he said: “The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.” Biden isn’t bright. He never has been. But is he stupid enough to have believed it unlikely that the Taliban would, in short order, overrun Afghanistan and seize control of the whole country?
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July 9, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Joe Biden is pulling the U.S. out of Afghanistan and the country is spiraling toward civil war (maybe) and a takeover by the Taliban (almost certainly). Biden is no stranger to catastrophic pullouts. As vice president, he was behind our withdrawal from Iraq which led to the rise of ISIS and the creation of its caliphate. We had to return. Biden tried to defend the current pullout yesterday. He said
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June 27, 2021 — John Hinderaker
A Somali immigrant murdered three women and wounded six more in Wurzburg, Germany on Friday. Initial news accounts expressed puzzlement over the murderer’s motivation, but most now acknowledge that “Allahu Akbar” provides a clue. This is from the Telegraph: A Somali immigrant accused of killing three women during a knife attack in Bavaria told police that he was carrying out a “personal jihad”. Abdirahman J, 24, who has a history
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