A Michigan professor who corresponds with “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski said the murderer’s cause was a noble one, and that the convicted terrorist may even be “a prophet and potentially a kind of savior of humanity and the planet.”
David Skrbina, a professor at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, has maintained contact with the Unabomber for the past nine years and has published their letters, Kaczynski’s essays and a manifesto about the bombings from the Washington Post in a book called “Technological Slavery,” the Washington Examiner reported.
Skrbina believes Kaczynski didn’t send the bombs because he thought killing people would do any good, but because the act would give him leverage to pursue the publication of his anti-technology manifesto.
Skrbina compared the Unabomber to President Obama. “If I wanted to be sarcastic,” he told his class, “I’d say our president kills people all the time, why should we listen to a murderer called Barack Obama?” he asked. “But we do. OK, it’s a different context and different circumstances, but there’s a kind of parallel there.”
It’s the terrorist guessing game sensation that’s sweeping the nation!
Now, you get only one guess, so you better make it a good one. You might assume from their coloring, for example, that they’re not Muslim—but that would be profiling, you racist [bleep]head. Besides, isn’t that Al Qaeda’s new method, outsourcing?
If you remember the old ads for Levy’s bread, they would show an American Indian like Elizabeth Warren, with the tag-line “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s.” Similarly, you don’t have to be Saudi to hijack jumbo jets and crash them into skyscrapers—but it helps.
Anyway, keep thinking. What’s that? You’re ready? Okay, let’s hear it. For the Grand Prize of a lavish weekend in Bloodthirstan, staying at the ancient and drafty Mordred’s Castle, sampling such indigenous cuisine as Cherokee Crab a la Mayonnaise, what is your answer…?
OHHH! I’m sorry, but “Tea Baggers” is incorrect. While I’m sure you’re right that “those a-holes are due”, this was not that time.
Three men charged with conspiring to commit domestic terrorism during the NATO summit were plotting to attack President Obama’s Chicago campaign headquarters, the Chicago mayor’s home and police stations, authorities said Saturday.
A police investigation that began early this month revealed that the three suspects are “self-proclaimed anarchists” and members of the “Black Bloc” group who traveled together from Florida to Chicago to commit violence as a protest against the NATO summit, authorities said in a statement.
“Black Bloc” was the group blamed for violence that occurred in recent “OCCUPY” protests, such as in Rome last year when anarchists in ski masks torched cars and clashed with police and even other OCCUPY protesters.
The three men were planning to destroy police cars and attack four Chicago police district stations with destructive devices as a way to undermine police response to other planned actions at the NATO summit, according to a statement by Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez and Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy. Downtown Chicago financial institutions were also among the proposed targets, authorities said.
Now, hang on BTL, you protest (peacefully, I hope). Just because these allegedly violent anarchists infiltrated the Occupy Movement doesn’t taint the movement as a whole. It’s like a piece of crab meat that’s gone a bit off doesn’t spoil the salad as a whole.
One of the suspects, identified by police as Jared Chase, 24, is from Keene, N.H., and spent time in Boston, where he participated in the OCCUPY Boston protests last fall.
A Facebook page bearing Chase’s name, picture, and other personal information calls him a DJ and says he is studying 3-D animation and game programming at NHTI, a community college in Concord, N.H.
Chase’s page describes involvement with the OCCUPY movement, first in Boston, then Providence, Washington, Miami, and finally Chicago. The page describes Chase being arrested outside the White House, includes commentary about the merits of antiterrorism legislation, and threats against police.
“Freedom cannot be destroyed by these corrupt pigs with badges,’’ one post reads. Another says, “Miami has the most crooked cops in the country. We should execute them before they do something well regret.’’
The Facebook page expresses support for Anonymous, a loose collective of activist computer hackers that has aligned itself with the OCCUPY movement. Linking to a post about the recent hacking of a Boston Police website, it reads, “[Anonymous] “to the rescue!’’
Gregg Housh, a leading figure in both Anonymous and the OCCUPY Boston protests, said Chase’s involvement in OCCUPY Boston was “an on-and-off thing’’ and that he “wasn’t around much,’’ preferring to move from city to city. Housh said several members of the OCCUPY Boston movement told him that they have not seen or heard from Chase since he left Boston in December last year.
“I can just see the sensationalist headlines: OCCUPY BOSTON GOES TERRORIST!,’’ Housh wrote in an e-mail.
Are we that transparent? I should hope so.
Come on, Tea Baggers, you’re falling behind. The Islamist terrorists are like the New York Yankees, a juggernaut of racist ideology, shattered bodies, and spilled blood; the OCCUPY-ers are beginning to mobilize into the violent anarchist they’ve always dreamed of becoming—and where are you? The late Andrew Breitbart’s bet that no one could provide evidence of a racist bone in your body politic isn’t going to win itself, you know.
How can we play “Islamist, Occupy, or Tea Party” if the Tea Party won’t play?
The trial of admitted Norway mass killer Anders Behring Breivik was disrupted Friday when a brother of one of the 77 people killed in last summer’s massacre threw a shoe at the defendant.
“You killed my brother. Go to hell! Go to hell,” the spectator yelled as he threw the shoe, which missed Breivik but hit one of his defense lawyers, Vibeke Hein Baera, who was sitting closest to the courtroom spectators, according to a report from Views and News from Norway.
“If someone wants to throw something at me, do it at me while I’m entering or leaving, and not at my lawyer,” Breivik said, according to a report from BBC News.
Police escorted the thrower, who was not identified, from the courtroom, but his actions were greeted by applause and shouts of “Bravo!” by others spectators, reports said.
Views and News, citing Norway’s VG Nett, reported that the shoe thrower lives outside of Norway and had flown into Oslo on Wednesday so he could be at the trial when his brother’s autopsy was presented.
Some reports said the shoe thrower was from Iraq, a country where the action is seen as a grave insult because the bottom of shoes are unclean.
That’s okay in Iraq—you guys sure showed George Bush!—but a single airborne shoe hardly matches the horror of Breivik’s crimes. A few herring might be more culturally appropriate, or a few blows from an old-fashioned baseball bat with a few rusty nails driven through it.
But a single Cole-Haan penny loafer, size 10 1/2 E? Come on…
I don’t pretend to understand Parliamentary systems, and let’s face it, no one can truly understand Israel , but this is an interesting explanation.
First, a quick reminder of the 6 Day War.
n May 1967, in brazen violation of previous truce agreements, Egypt ordered U.N. peacekeepers out of the Sinai, marched 120,000 troops to the Israeli border, blockaded Eilat (Israel’s southern outlet to the world’s oceans), abruptly signed a military pact with Jordan and, together with Syria, pledged war for the final destruction of Israel.
May ’67 was Israel’s most fearful, desperate month. The country was surrounded and alone. Previous great-power guarantees proved worthless. A plan to test the blockade with a Western flotilla failed for lack of participants. Time was running out. Forced to protect against invasion by mass mobilization — and with a military consisting overwhelmingly of civilian reservists — life ground to a halt. The country was dying.
On June 5, Israel launched a pre-emptive strike on the Egyptian air force, then proceeded to lightning victories on three fronts. The Six-Day War is legend, but less remembered is that on June 1, the nationalist opposition (Menachem Begin’s Likud precursor) was for the first time ever brought into the government, creating an emergency national-unity coalition.
Everyone understood why. You do not undertake a supremely risky pre-emptive war without the full participation of a broad coalition representing a national consensus.
And today:
Forty-five years later, in the middle of the night of May 7-8, 2012, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shocked his country by bringing the main opposition party, Kadima, into a national unity government. Shocking because just hours earlier, the Knesset was expediting a bill to call early elections in September.
I think we all know where Krauthammer is going with this analysis. I toss in the obvious. Israel cannot trust the United States, or anyone else, to help her deal with Iran. She is led by grown-ups who get this. And so she’s taken steps to make whatever decision is made with as much cohesiveness as possible. Or, to put it another way:
Such a fateful decision demands a national consensus. By creating the largest coalition in nearly three decades, Netanyahu is establishing the political premise for a pre-emptive strike, should it come to that. The new government commands an astonishing 94 Knesset seats out of 120, described by one Israeli columnist as a “hundred tons of solid concrete.”
…
Those counseling Israeli submission, resignation or just endless patience can no longer dismiss Israel’s tough stance as the work of irredeemable right-wingers. Not with a government now representing 78% of the country.
Netanyahu forfeited September elections that would have given him four more years in power. He chose instead to form a national coalition that guarantees 18 months of stability — 18 months during which, if the world does not act to stop Iran, Israel will.
And it will not be the work of one man, one party or one ideological faction. As in 1967, it will be the work of a nation.
I thought about writing a post about the guy who got convicted of trying to blow up subway cars in NYC. Or about how Desmond Tutu, the creep, is encouraging Methodists to divest from Israel. (PS if that happens, should I try to figure out which local businesses are owned by Methodists, or employ Methodists, and avoid?) Lots of people have commented on the classless way Obama has handled the anniversary of bin Laden’s death.
Twelve-year-old Noa Weinzweig decided to use her bat mitzvah earnings to buy a 3-day holiday for survivors.
“You have done something exemplary,” President Shimon Peres told 12-year-old Noa Weinzweig of Herzliya as she sat opposite him in the reception hall at the President’s official residence in Jerusalem.
Tall, poised, polite and exuding a sense of maturity well beyond her years, Noa was engulfed in appreciation and admiration. Of the sixty or so other people in the room fifty were Holocaust survivors who belong to the Amha Club in Netanya and were the beneficiaries of Noa’s caring heart.
In her family of five siblings, it’s customary to give away one’s bar or bat mitzvah money – and that’s exactly what she did. When she celebrated her bat mitzvah, Noa who is the middle child, decided to forego the excitement of unwrapping gift parcels and asked everyone to give a donation. She ended up with NIS50,000. Her mother Nirit Gilboa who was born on Kibbutz Kfar Menachem, gave her a list of worthy causes from which to choose. But the truth was that Noa, a student at the American School in Even Yehuda, had already made up her mind that she wanted to do something for Holocaust survivors. As a little girl in Canada, she had learned something of the Holocaust, had read up as she could and asked her older relatives to tell her more.
“They’ve been through a lot,” she told Peres. “I though they deserve to be happy and peaceful and to have a good life.” NIS50,000 doesn’t go very far in providing a good life, but it can provide a good time – and that’s exactly what happened. Noa’s grandmother Rikki Gilboa who was born on Kibbutz Deganya Aleph belongs to the Herzliya Women’s Circle which adopted Amchja in Netanya. So when Noa, with three generations of kibbutz values of shared burdens in her genes decided that she wanted to help Holocaust survivors, finding them was no problem. She decided to finance a three day vacation for them in Jerusalem.
The CNN article dances around it, but these guys were at “protests” last year… And they’re anarchists. And angry with corporations…
I suppose it could just be member of the Young Democrats or something, but I’m putting money on The Occupy Movement.
Five men have been arrested on suspicion of trying to use what they thought were explosives to destroy a bridge near Cleveland, Ohio, the FBI said Tuesday morning.
The group on Monday planted what they thought were two remotely activated C-4-based explosive devices – which they allegedly bought from undercover FBI employees – at the base of a Route 82 bridge that crosses from Brecksville to Sagamore Hills over the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, the FBI said in a news conference Tuesday.
…
The FBI learned of the plots through a confidential source who met Wright at a Cleveland-area protest event in November, according to a criminal complaint filed in U.S. district court. Wright told the source that Wright and a group of anarchists “had been discussing plans involving violence and destruction to physical property … to send a message to corporations and the United States government,” the complaint reads.
Caroline Glick articles are intricate and difficult to summarize, but I’ll try. She begins by comparing the most popular musical events of two Independence Days: 1998 and 2012.
As he is today, in 1998 Binyamin Netanyahu was prime minister, and then as now there were prominent voices seeking to blame him for the absence of peace and every other terrible blight on the planet.
In 1998, the government invested a fortune in marking Israel’s 50th Independence Day.
The main official celebration was a massive affair called Jubilee Bells that took place at Teddy Stadium in Jerusalem. More than 2,000 performers participated. But rather than serve as an event that unified Israeli society in celebration of 50 years of sovereign freedom, the event exposed just how far Israel’s political and cultural elite were willing to go in attacking basic societal values.
The Bat Sheva Dance Troupe was scheduled to participate in the program and present a dance set to the traditional Passover song “Ehad mi yodea,” (Who knows one). The song contains 13 stanzas that praise God, praise Jewish law, and outline the Jewish life cycle. In the number Bat Sheva was scheduled to perform, the dancers come on stage dressed as ultra-Orthodox Jewish men and by the end of the song, all they are wearing is underwear.
The choreography enraged members of Netanyahu’s cabinet including education minister Yitzhak Levy. They insisted that the program shouldn’t contain material that insulted sectors of Israeli society. The organizers tried to forge a compromise. But the dancers chose to boycott the festival.
Israel’s cultural and media establishment expressed shock and horror at what they viewed as the government’s attempt to infringe on artistic freedom. The Association of Israeli Artists demanded that a public commission be formed to ensure that the government would be unable to interfere in artistic freedom in the future. Major cultural icons declared cultural war against religious Jews.
The question of whether the dance was appropriate for an official, state- financed celebration of Independence Day was never asked. So, too, no one asked whether a dance portraying ultra-Orthodox Jews moving sensuously to a traditional Jewish song while taking off their clothes reflected the values of society.
To understand the distance Israel has traveled since then, consider Tuesday night’s Memorial Day ceremony at Rabin Square in Tel Aviv. None of the performers attacked their fellow Israelis. And the best-received artist and song was Mosh Ben-Ari and his rendition of Psalm 121 – A Song of Ascent.
The psalm, which praises God as the eternal guardian of Israel, became the unofficial anthem of Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in 2008-2009. And Ben-Ari’s rendition of the song propelled the dreadlock bedecked, hoop earring wearing world music artist into super-stardom in Israel.
IT WAS impossible to imagine Pslam 121 or any other traditional Jewish poem or prayer being performed as anything other than an object of scorn in 1998. Back then, it would have been impossible to contemplate a crowd of tens of thousands of non-religious Israelis reverently singing along as Ben-Ari crooned, “My help is from God/ Maker of Heaven and Earth/ He will not allow your foot to falter/ Your Guardian will not slumber/ Behold he neither slumbers nor sleeps – the Guardian of Israel.”
It’s not that the crowd would have necessarily booed him off the stage. He simply never would have been allowed on the stage to begin with. The 1990s was the decade that launched Aviv Gefen, the most prominent secular draft-evader, to stardom.
In other words, Israel grew up. As for the Western world, Europe, the US, etc., not so much. We would still prefer the religious people dancing in their underwear, or maybe naked. We are still angry and unserious because we have never been tested. That’s me talking, not Ms. Glick. She goes on to explain why Israel took a different path from Obama worship, from the metrosexual (again, my word, my thought) male elite.
Israel is no longer in the throes of an adolescent rebellion. It has regained its senses.
True, its celebrities look like Ben-Ari and not like Naomi Shemer [the woman who wrote Jerusalem of Gold - Aggie]. But the message is the same. Israel is a great country and a great nation. Zionism is in. Judaism is in. Post- Zionism is out. Post-Judaism is out.
When last year a group of performers announced they would boycott the Ariel Center for Performing Arts, the public reacted with anger and disgust, not understanding.
Fearing a loss of state funding, their theater bosses quickly sought to distance themselves from the performers.
Israel’s return to its Zionist roots is the greatest cultural event of the past decade. It is also an event that occurred under the radar screen of the rest of the world. No one outside the country seems to have noticed at all.
The outside world’s failure to take note of Israel’s cultural shift owes to its failure to recognize the significance of the failure of the peace process with the Palestinians on the one hand and the failure of Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza on the other hand. The demise of the peace process at Camp David in July 2000 and the terror war that followed launched the Israeli public on its path away from its radical post-Zionist rebellion and back to its Zionist roots. The failure of the withdrawal from Gaza, and the international community’s response to Operation Cast Lead, marked the conclusion of the journey.
The Oslo peace process was based on the radical belief that it is possible to make peace by empowering terrorists and giving them land, political legitimacy, money and guns. To embrace this nonsense, the public had to be willing to tolerate the notion that there was something unjust about the Zionist revolution. Because if Zionism and the cause of Jewish national liberation are just, then it is impossible to justify empowering the PLO, a terrorist movement dedicated to the destruction of Israel and the delegitimization of Zionism.
Most Israelis never adopted the post-Zionist narrative. But they did accept the doctrine of appeasement. And they shared the belief that if appeasement failed, the world would rally to Israel’s side.
Consequently, the beginning of society’s awakening to the lie of post-Zionism at the heart of the peace process was a function not only of the massive Palestinian terror onslaught that began after Yasser Arafat rejected peace and statehood at Camp David. It was also a function of the August 2000 UN Durban Conference and its aftermath in which the international community rallied to the Palestinians’ side. The latter demonstrated that just as Israel’s transfer of land and guns to the PLO had endangered the lives of its citizens, Israel’s conferral of political legitimacy on the PLO endangered the international standing of the country.
The lesson that Israelis took from the failure of the peace process was that Israel has no Palestinian partner for peace.
And until the Palestinians change, Israel has no one to talk to. While a slight majority of Israelis still support partitioning the land between Israel and a Palestinian state, the overwhelming majority of Israelis believe that Israel has no one to make peace with and therefore no possibility of successfully partitioning the land.
This is not the lesson that foreigners learned. From Bill Clinton to George W. Bush to Tony Blair to Barack Obama to Nicolas Sarkozy, foreign leaders have insisted that the Oslo process had nearly succeeded and that its failure was a fluke.
…
THEN THERE is the aftermath of the withdrawal from Gaza.
Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza was a traumatic national event. The forced expulsion of thousands of Israelis from their homes led Israeli society to the brink of disintegration.
The move represented the last hope of the peace movement.
If the Palestinians won’t sit down with Israel, so the thinking went, Israel can still appease them by simply giving them what they want without an agreement.
But not only did the withdrawal bring no peace. It brought Hamas to power. It brought tens of thousands of projectiles down on southern Israel. Israelis expected the world to recognize the significance of this string of events.
But that didn’t happen.
Instead of seeing the lengths Israel had gone to appease the Palestinians and side with it when its appeasement failed again, the international community refused to even acknowledge that Israel had withdrawn from Gaza. Condoleezza Rice forced Israel to continue supplying electricity and water to Gaza and providing medical care for Gazans in Israeli hospitals as if nothing had happened. No one accepted that Israel was no longer in charge.
As far as most Israelis were concerned, the final end of our vacation from reality came with the publication of the Goldstone Report in the aftermath of Cast Lead. Here was Israel, forced to defend itself from Hamas-ruled Gaza that was waging an illegal missile war against Israeli civilians.
Rather than stand by Israel that had done everything for peace, the UN’s commission accused Israel of committing war crimes.
Undoubtedly one of the reasons so few outsiders have drawn the same lessons as the Israeli public from the failure of the peace process and the Gaza withdrawal is because the only Israelis they listen to are the few remaining holdouts from the 1990s. People like former Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) director Ami Ayalon can expect to have every withdrawal-from-territory and destroy-the-settlements op-ed they write published in The New York Times, whereas Richard Goldstone wasn’t even able to get the Times to publish his admission that his eponymous commission’s conclusions were false.
This open door policy for Israeli radicals was defensible in the 1990s when a significant portion of the Israeli public supported them. Now it constitutes nothing more than an anti-Israel propaganda campaign.
From Obama to J Street to the EU, international actors interested in forcing Israel to make more concessions to the Palestinians cannot understand why their attempts continue to fail. How is it possible that despite their best efforts, Netanyahu remains in power and the Left can’t get any traction with the public? For the answer, they need to look no farther than Mosh Ben-Ari, his dreadlocks, and his rendition of Psalm 121. Israel’s adolescent rebellion is over.
Impossible to improve on what Ms. Glick is saying. I thank her for saying it in English so that interested Americans can read it and understand it. That is a limited number of people, for sure. But we can take heart in the fact that Israel is doing just fine. Her economy is strong and her population is not at each other’s throats. That is a by-product of dealing with reality.
Oh, and for all the idiots that believe that Israel is a white, colonialist country, this is for you. This is the performer mentioned above, the guy that did the musical rendition of the Psalm. Notice, morons, that he has dark skin. This is because his parents fled persecution in Yemen and Iraq.
A suicide bombing outside a church in the northern Nigerian town of Kaduna killed several people on Easter Sunday. Last week, authorities had ramped up security and said they uncovered various plots to disrupt festivities. No one has claimed responsibility for Sunday’s bombing, though many suspect militant Islamist sect, Boko Haram, which is known to target Christians around holidays.
The Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) announced Monday that it uncovered and arrested a terrorist cell that was behind a series of shootings in the Ramallah area.
The shootings, including one on January 20 near the West Bank town of Amari, caused damage to vehicles but no injuries.
Among those arrested for being part of the cell were employees of the Palestinian Red Crescent in Ramallah. The men included Hamas affiliates, Red Crescent workers and even a member of the Palestinian Olympic soccer team.
The government will be able to monitor the calls, emails, texts and website visits of everyone in the UK under new legislation set to be announced soon.
Internet firms will be required to give intelligence agency GCHQ access to communications on demand, in real time.
The Home Office says the move is key to tackling crime and terrorism, but civil liberties groups have criticised it.
Tory MP David Davis called it “an unnecessary extension of the ability of the state to snoop on ordinary people”.
Attempts by the last Labour government to take similar steps failed after huge opposition, including from the Tories.
‘Unprecedented step’
A new law – which may be announced in the forthcoming Queen’s Speech in May – would not allow GCHQ to access the content of emails, calls or messages without a warrant.
But it would enable intelligence officers to identify who an individual or group is in contact with, how often and for how long. They would also be able to see which websites someone had visited.
In a statement, the Home Office said action was needed to “maintain the continued availability of communications data as technology changes”.
Etc. It is liberal fascism, but Europe does have a self-inflicted terrorism problem.
Iran had planned to bomb an Israeli ship while it crossed the Suez Canal, the prosecution in Egypt’s state security court said, the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram reported on Saturday.
According to the report, two Egyptians were recently arrested and investigated for allegedly planning an attack on an Israeli ship in the Suez Canal.
The investigation of the two found that they had received their instructions from Iranian agents, and that the two asked a third person, by the name of Mohamed Zakri, to carry out the act in exchange for 50 million Egyptian pounds.
The two denied the accusations against them.
In the past, Hezbollah terror cells that planned terror attacks, including in the Suez Canal, were found in Egypt. Moreover, Israeli officials have recently warned that Iran is setting up terror infrastructure on Egyptian soil to ready the ground for an operation.
So Iran is trying to provoke a war between Egypt and Israel? Is that what this means?
, but