Turkish Muslim “Hispanic”

You have to go to a British paper at this point to get the nationality and religion of the Cascade mall shooter.

And, of course, the motive is “unclear” and terrorism is not suspected.

Motive is likely important here: if this bastard was just going to the mall to shoot a girl who wouldn’t date him and a few random strangers, it will all be ok and nothing to do with Islam or immigration. If, on the other hand, it turns out that the creep was doing it for ISIS or was self-radicallized, the gently, gently media will go with the mentally deranged, lone wolf, narrative.

Anything to avoid asking if Arcan Cetin was a worthwhile person to have allowed into the US. Because: racist, Islamophobic and very bad indeed. Besides, his Twitter and Facebook accounts suggest he’s a Hilly support so no point in looking too closely.

But, and it is a big but, it also works as a boy meets girl, gets bounced by girl and goes in and kills her story. I am not sure that is much consolation.

Update: You can see this guy’s FaceBook timeline here https://www.facebook.com/Arcancetin

Apparently in high school ROTC. No sign at all of Islam or radicalization as far as I can see.

Update #2: Ooopsie…now his Facebook page is closed:

 

 

Long views

A long break from writing my blog but not from thinking about the questions which drive it.  In the interim we have seen the rise of IS, the economic laming of Europe, the collapse of high oil prices and the end of the Democratic Congress.

Oh and I nearly forgot, the end of alarmist climate change as anything but a fringe issue… When you are reduced to the Pope and Prince Charles you know that the shark jump has occurred.

At end I have been reading history and Gore Vidal’s essays and Proust. To really get a handle on IS you need a sense of the murderous history of the Near and Middle East. To capture the spirit of massacre which permeates the politics of the Levant you need to recognize that it stretches all the way back to the Early Byzantine. If you want to understand the nastiness of elements of Sicilian and Spanish cultural attitudes towards women you have to see how far into Europe Islam advanced. Similarly it is useful to know that before the Islamic invasion much of the Middle East was Christian, pagan or Jewish. The Crusaders, in their brutish way were protecting Christian holy places from invaders. (Not that the Crusaders were adverse to killing the Jews as well as Muslims in wholesale numbers. Not to mention attacking Byzantine, populated by fellow Christians.)

When you get a bit of a historical feel for the place a lot of the vexed questions of whose land is it vanish – it is contested land open to whomever can hold it. So then the question become who would we like to hold it. And that question can be answered in a number of defensible ways.

So, back to blogging. It is an emptier world than when I tapered off. But it will be interesting to see who is new.

The Madness of Islam

With all of the usual qualifications as to not all Muslims….Are these people nuts?

The answer – from the killing fields of Iraq and Syria to the rocketeers in Gaza – is pretty clearly, “Yup. Whacked, ready for the cotton box, gaga.”

For the moment the Islamists, and pace the Big Zero this has everything to do with Islam, are lucky in the sense that the American President is both feckless and addicted to golf and the Israelis seem to still believe that world opinion matters.

The Israelis are the near problem. They have just targeted and killed, perhaps with Egyptian intelligence, three serious Hamas military leaders. They may have got the overall military commander of Hamas and, sadly, they certainly got his wife and kids.

The Israelis will, eventually say “Enough with the rockets” and roll over Gaza and let the leftie luvies and the crazed Islamic Hamas supporters in the West wet their pants. Israel has better and more interesting friends in Saudi, Egypt and Jordan not to mention India and China.

Whether or not the Big Zero has the stones to kill the rabid dog of IS is a different question. Frankly, given the size of the Saudi and Jordanian air forces and the Egyptian army (easily dispatched for mercenary duty) there is no reason why they cannot take a big bite out of the rabid dog of Islam.

And they may have to. Because, with the exception of relatively limited air strikes, the Big Zero seems incapable of actually using the American’s overwhelming air capacity much less put boots on the ground.

I am hoping I am wrong. I am hoping that once Obama finally breaks 80 he’ll wander back to Washington, re-introduce himself to the Joint Chiefs and say, “Roll’em up boys.” But I am not holding my breath. That would take courage rather than a low handicap.

But the madness of Islam lies in relying upon the weakness of the West and of Israel. What the dimwits in Hamas and IS see as weakness is largely ill-considered forbearance. A few more beheadings, a lucky rocket beating Iron Dome and hitting a family or a school and first the Israelis and then the Americans will move closer to going Roman.

Late.

(It will be interesting to see if Israel decides to send a drone or a wet team to Qatar. There is a chap there who certainly would do with some killing.)

Go Kurds, GO!

http://time.com/2898883/iraq-turkey-kurd-isis/

If there is any glimmer of light in the Iraq debacle it is that the Kurt are well on their way to sovereignty. The crazed Arabs and equally insane Persians will fight it all out. The Kurt will hold their borders, straighten their lines, and be recognised as a state. One which will prosper and ignore the idiotic of the sale fists and the Khomanists.

Good Guys

News of an impending chem weapons “deal” in Syria is a reminder of how surreal Middle Eastern politics can be. There is next to no chance the terms of the deal will have any reality but that does not seem to matter much.

Assorted rebel factions are shooting at each other while Assad, not quite believing his luck, keeps up the pressure. It’s a mess.

The only bright spot I can see is the quiet emergence of a Kurdish enclave in Syria just across the largely imaginary border from the semi autonomus Kurdish region of Iraq.

There are very few good reasons to support any of the facrions in Syria, Iraq, Iran or Turkey. In most cases the choice is between the bad and the awful. However, the Kurds – though Muslim – seem to avoid the fanaticism which infects so much od the Middle East. They would like their own country carved out of various other countries – and they have pursued low level wars to attain that; but they are more slaughtered than slaughtering.

From the West’s perspective, supporting Kurdish independence would weaken any number of bad actors in the ME and might establish a second, pro-Western nation in the region. At the moment the West, and paticularily the US, is playing a directionless, losing game. Changing that game by supporting Kurdish nationalist ambitions might establish a course toward a more stable Middle East.

Crunch

The crunch and clangs you are hearing is the sound of the car wreck which passes for American foreign policy at the moment.

Russia is not keen at this stage for a binding U.N. Security Council resolution that would provide a framework to control Syria’s chemical weapons’ stocks, France’s foreign minister said after talks with his Russian counterpart on Tuesday. reuters

There was never much chance that Syria and Russia would actually act to sequester the chemical weapons. In the middle of a civil war it is not all that terrifically easy to deal with the logistics leave aside the politics.

However, faced with certain defeat in the House and a good chance of defeat in the Senate and the American people 3 or 4 to 1 against the idy, biddy, no really, really small, attack on Syria, Obama needed a way out. Putin threw a lead life buoy and the very dim Obama and the even dumber Kerry grabbed it. (The laughter echoing through the halls of the Kremlin can be heard in Damascus.)

Hitting Syria, or, more accurately blowing a raspberry in its general direction, was not the credibility piece here. Everyone knows that the US has awesome raspberry blowing capacity. The credibility was all about the President’s ability to deal with a complicated international situation. While the Court Press will hail the Russian “deal” as proof Obama can wield the power of his office for a peaceful outcome, anyone paying attention will know just how badly he and his team have done.

The audience here is not the Washington tounge bathing media nor, in fact, the American people: rather it is the Iranian, North Korean, Syrian, Russian, Israeli, Egyptian and world strategic elite. People whose job it is to assess the resolve of the American President.

I rather suspect that, no matter what the Big Zero and his spinners say tonight, the universal verdict will be:

Pwned

The Deadly Crescent

David Goodman writes about Syria:

If we had a Syrian elite dedicated to modernization, free markets, and opportunity, we could have an economic recovery in Syria. But the country is locked into suppurating backwardness precisely because the dominant culture holds back individual initiative and enterprise. The longstanding hatreds among Sunnis and Shi’ites, and Kurds and Druze and Arabs, turn into a fight to the death as the ground shrinks beneath them. The pre-modern culture demands proofs of group loyalty in the form of atrocities which bind the combatants to an all-or-nothing outcome. The Sunni rebels appear quite as enthusiastic in their perpetration of atrocities as does the disgusting Assad government.david goodman

Which, I suspect, gets Syria about right.

Patrick Buchanan wrote up a bit of history in discussing Sykes-Picot which was the WWI treaty which carved up Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and such like.

I’ve just finished reading Philip Mansel’s brilliant history of the region, Levant, which gets the sweep of the history of the area very right indeed. The critical thing in Mansal’s book is the “black tide” of Islam sweeping up from the Gulf and destroying the cosmopolitan accommodation of Levantine culture. In Smyrna, Alexandria and Beruit the imposition of Islam has destroyed the mercantile, liberal cultures of the Mediterranean. It is a book of massacres, ethnic cleansing and a description of the corrosive effects of Islam.

There is a very good argument that we are looking at the first phase of a Thirty Year war in Islam. And those wars have never been anything but pure atrocity in the name of God.

For the West the best policy is, I think, to stay the Hell out and make sure that any of our “citizens” who participate are denied reentry to the West.

We might also, usefully, ensure that other than the Christians who are displaced, we prohibit immigration from any of the nations involved. Frankly, we have not the slightest idea which of them have blood on their hands. And, as we don’t, there is no reason at all to let mass murderers or their enablers into Canada.

Syria issues travel warning for Turkey

Ace.

Springtime in Turkey?

Not Happy with Islamists

The general collapse of the old order in the Levant continues.

My bet is that these largely secular protestors will go the same way as the anti-regime protestors in Iran. They will be ignored by the great and the good in the West for fear of destabilization. Which is a shame but about what can be expected from the pussies who purport to be our political class.

Syria is in a full scale civil war with the traditional sectarian massacres – I am reading Mansel’s wonderful history of the Levant: Splendor and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean – and if history is any guide we are at the very beginning of a Rwandan level slaughter of the innocents.

The Turkish protests are a first shot. Syria started in much the same way.

The Levant is filled with fanatics, often under a thin veneer of a Westernized culture, who have a long history of rampage and amok. It is very sad but, I fear, it is a convulsion which needs to burn itself out.