Displaying posts published in

July 2016

Fort Myers Nightclub Shooting: 2 Dead, 14 Others Wounded After Teen Event by Erin Dean, Kurt Chirbas and Alexander Smith

At least two people were killed and more than a dozen others injured after a shooting outside a Florida nightclub hosting an event for teens, officials said early Monday.

The gunfire rang out just as family members were picking up their kids from Club Blu in Fort Myers, where the “no ID required” party had just finished.

Some of the victims were aged as young as 12, according to authorities.

Image: Club Blu
Club Blu Google

“We are deeply sorry for all involved,” Club Blu said in a Facebook post. “We tried to give the teens what we thought was a safe place to have a good time.”

The club said there was “armed security” at the event for children between the ages of 12 and 17, adding there “was nothing more we could have done.” Although police did not immediately give information about the identity of the suspects, the club said that “it was not kids at the party that did this despicable act.”

Police said that officers responded to the parking lot of Club Blu at around 12:30 a.m. to find multiple people suffering gunshot wounds ranging from minor to life-threatening

Of the 16 people taken to Lee Memorial Hospital, one died after being admitted and two others were in the intensive-care unit as of early Monday.
One other person was confirmed killed in the incident, according to police.

The victims were aged between 12 and 27, hospital spokeswoman Cheryl Garn said in a statement.

NBC station WBBH reported that both of those killed were male.

Wave of Violence Shakes Germany’s Calm Renewed debate over country’s open door to more than one million migrants in the past 20 monthsBy Ruth Bender and Anton Troianovski

BERLIN—Four acts of violence in seven days have shattered Germany’s calm and revived an emotional debate over the security implications of taking in more than one million migrants and refugees in the past 20 months.

Police identified asylum applicants as suspects in three apparently unconnected high-profile attacks in the past week, from an ax attack on a train last week to a knife killing and a suicide blast late Sunday.

Only the ax rampage, in which a teenager registered as an Afghan refugee wounded five people, has been identified as Islamist terrorism. But all four incidents—including a German-Iranian teenager’s shooting spree in Munich on Friday that killed nine—have put the European Union’s most populous country on edge.

“I thought Germany was safe—no shooting, no terror,” said Faruk Sazil, a 30-year-old of Turkish origin, who owns and runs a Munich kebab stand next to the McDonald’s where the shooting spree began Friday. “Now I don’t know. Who can know?”

Authorities say the Munich shooter had been treated for depression and was obsessed by mass killings.

ISIS? No, Crisis Jed Babbin

It’s official: U.S. now relies on Russia and Iran in Middle East.

The Wall Street Journal report that Russian aircraft had bombed a supposedly secret U.S.-British base on the Syrian border with Jordan last month should raise the hackles of everyone in the presidential race and Middle East policymakers everywhere. It proved, redundantly, the comprehensive failure of Obama’s policies in the Middle East, particularly his more than two-year war against ISIS.

The base was reportedly used by U.S. and British special forces to stop ISIS fighters from coming to Syria from Jordan and for other anti-ISIS missions. A British special forces unit had apparently left the base less than a day before the attack. There were no reports of U.S. or allied casualties, which doesn’t mean there weren’t any.

The attack had the objective of goading us into sharing more intelligence information with the Russians. Sure enough, it worked. Secretary of State John Kerry visited Moscow last week to offer greater sharing of U.S. intelligence with the Russians. (Kerry added a clause to the document he signed stating that if the Russians bombed our bases again we could — might, maybe, perhaps — suspend cooperation.)

Kerry made this agreement despite the rather loud objection by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and the quieter opposition of Defense Secretary Carter.

Several conclusions must be drawn from Kerry’s actions. First, it is clear that Obama and Kerry have long since decided that Russia and Iran — the two nations whose forces have occupied Syria and protect Bashar al-Assad’s regime — will be the nations who should create a new stability in the Middle East. (Obama said, when peddling his Iran nuclear deal, that Iran could be a force for stability in the Middle East.)

Second, that Obama is entirely comfortable with the fact that the “stability” he wants in the Middle East would be accomplished by the force of arms of our enemies, to our strategic disadvantage and that of our ally, Israel. He either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care that a Russian and Iranian-dominated Middle East means war, not peace, and that such wars could engulf the whole region and us as well. When — not if — Iran achieves its nuclear weapons ambitions, that war could be the first in which nations exchange nuclear strikes against each other.

Obama has misplayed all our cards in the Middle East. There are none left for the next president except to gradually undo what Obama has done.

RUTHIE BLUM: THE SPOILS OF DEFEAT

If there’s one lesson to be learned on the 10th anniversary of the Second Lebanon War, it is that ‎brokered cease-fires and U.N. resolutions are not to be trusted in the Middle East, where the ‎definitions of “victory” and “defeat” are elusive.‎

For 34 days during the summer of 2006, Hezbollah pummeled the Jewish state with rockets, and the ‎Israel Defense Forces conducted airstrikes to destroy the infrastructure and weaponry of the ‎bloodthirsty Shiite organization, which — in typical Arab terrorist fashion — were strategically placed in ‎and around the homes and schools of civilians.‎

When the war was over, both sides declared victory, though then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s ‎announcement sounded feeble to most Israelis. The regular IDF soldiers and reservists who ‎participated in the fighting felt particularly deflated and bitter. When the war was over, their stories of ‎inadequate equipment and lack of training for the missions they were sent to conduct emerged to ‎everyone’s horror and disgust. One friend of mine recounted having to improvise all the time — for ‎example, by using chocolate spread as face camouflage, and operating a tank with which he was ‎completely unfamiliar.‎

The Winograd Commission, set up in the aftermath of the war, delved into these and other mishaps ‎on the leadership and military levels. But the real culprit was a false assessment, reached more than a ‎decade earlier, that the “conventional battlefield” was a thing of the past. According to this ridiculous ‎theory, it would be wasteful to expend energy and resources training for ground incursions, when the ‎era of high-tech sorties from the air was the wave of the future.‎

Still, analysts pointed to the major blow suffered by Hezbollah in the war, pointing to the “restoration ‎of quiet” in the north and the heavy losses incurred by the terrorist group. One such optimist was ‎Iranian-born, London-based Middle East expert Amir Taheri, who visited the Jewish state in May 2007, ‎less than a year after the war was over — on the eve of the release of the Winograd Commission’s ‎interim findings. ‎

Erdogan’s funny definition of democracy : Ruthie Blum

Hamas was one of the many entities rushing to congratulate Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on his successful quashing of the attempted coup against his government last weekend. Like leaders of other countries worldwide, the heads of the terrorist organization ruling the Gaza Strip hailed Erdogan’s success as a “victory for democracy.”

Unlike those who waited for the military takeover to fail before applauding the autocrat in Ankara, Hamas was genuinely relieved. After all, the Islamist Palestinian group has no greater friend than Erdogan.

Thus, Hamas has been able to proceed with its summer activities in a particularly festive manner. Two of these activities are particularly worthy of note.

The first is a special exhibit marking the second anniversary of Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s 2014 incursion into Gaza to destroy the terrorist infrastructure — tunnels and missile-launchers — used by Hamas to kidnap and kill innocent Israelis.

Though Israel managed to decimate much of the infrastructure, leaving swaths of Gaza in ruins, Hamas did not feel defeated; nor should it have. No military match for the mighty Israeli army, it nevertheless succeeded in sending the Israeli populace into bomb shelters several times a day, while retaining political power and several tunnels and subsequently buckets of money and materials with which to keep its terror mill running.

To boost morale and demonstrate that it is doing its job properly, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades — amusingly known as Hamas’ “military wing” — has created a death-and-destruction Disneyland for family fun, free of charge. This consists of a display of various authentic weapons deployed in the slaughter of Israelis, and an extra-special tour of a tunnel bordering the Jewish state.

Man With Knife Kills Woman in German City of Reutlingen Suspect is a 21-year-old asylum seeker from Syria, police say By Christopher Alessi and William Wilkes

REUTLINGEN, Germany—A Syrian man used a long knife to kill a woman here on Sunday in an apparent personal dispute, and injured two other people before being detained, police said.

The suspect is a 21-year-old asylum seeker from Syria, the police said. The man was known to the police and had been charged in the past with assault.

The incident quickly made national news in a country on edge in the wake of a spate of violence across Europe that has fanned fears of a rising terror threat. Another asylum seeker, registered as a 17-year-old Afghan, injured five people in an ax attack last Monday in Würzburg, a two-hour drive from here.

But unlike the Würzburg assault, in which Islamic State claimed responsibility, the Reutlingen incident appeared to be the result of a personal dispute, police said.

“There is no evidence that it was religious or terrorist-motivated,” a police spokesman said.

Germans have been anxious amid a series of high-profile violence in Europe, including the July 14 truck attack in Nice, France; the Würzburg assault; and Friday’s shooting spree in Munich that killed nine.

The police initially described the man’s weapon as a machete but later said it was a long knife, likely a kitchen knife. They said the man and woman had some kind of personal dispute, but said they didn’t yet know the nature of their relationship. Police said they weren’t able to immediately identify the woman and didn’t know her nationality.

It also wasn’t clear when the man came to Germany. More than 300,000 Syrians have applied for asylum in Germany since January 2015, according to government figures. Reutlingen, a city of 110,000, is in the southwest German state of Baden-Württemberg.

DISPATCHES FROM TOM GROSS

CONTENTS
1. Germany’s first suicide bomb
2. Western Europe’s (still relatively small-scale) Islamist insurgency
3. BBC omits Muslim first name of attacker
4. CNN – if the same attacks happen against Israelis, it is not terror
5. AFP: no terror in Israel
6. In Paris too
7. Ex-Democrat congresswoman: Israel behind European terror attacks
8. Israel a “major cause of Isis” says British Lib-Dem politician
9. A no-fly zone
10. Turkey: Erdogan publishes photo of new government

It’s Not My Party Donald Trump has completed the gutting of a principled Republican party that began in the Bush years. By Andrew C. McCarthy

“It is a comfort that Trump will have some solid people around him, but the truth remains that he is uninformed on many topics, ill-informed on others, untrustworthy, and pathologically vindictive. I will never be able to say I want him to win — only that I’m certain I want Hillary Clinton to lose.”

You reap what you sow. For a generation since Ronald Reagan left Washington — that would be the Ronald Reagan who knew that “I’m from the government and I’m here to help” was a punch line — the “conservative” Republican party has sown an incoherent statism that has trouble telling the good guys from the bad guys. On Thursday night came the harvest: The party was formally taken over by an incoherent statist whose “conservatism” is not done justice by scare quotes. Oh . . . and he has trouble telling the good guys from the bad guys.

Of course, you wouldn’t get that from his acceptance speech. Donald Trump doesn’t know much, but he has a genius for self-promotion and marketing. The conservative intellectuals and Washington political class so dismissive of his bravura 72-minute performance for its high-decibel staccato and occasional rambling repetitiveness are missing the point, as they have throughout Trump’s ascent.

From 30,000 feet, which is as close as most Americans get to government policy in all its intricacies, Trump gave a great speech. If you knew nothing of Trump, if your only impression was the Donald bestriding the Manichaean world he portrayed Thursday night, you wanted to be with him.

He’s with the cops against the thugs who shoot them down. He’s with peace-loving Americans (and don’t forget the “Q” after “LGBT”) against the barbaric Islamic terrorists who besiege them. He’s with wall-deprived communities preyed upon by illegal aliens. He’s now with the upright American middle class screwed over by the cabal of Beltway insiders and crony capitalists (of which he was, until moments ago, a member in good standing). He is the embodiment of law and order, pitted against Hillary Clinton, a recidivist felon in the court of public opinion — one the throng in Cleveland wants “locked up,” pronto.

You can see why it would drive an informed person nuts. But a note to all eggheads: Save your dissertation on why free trade does not actually undermine the dignity of work. Forget the stubborn facts that manufacturing is thriving in America, that a trade war with China is a moronic idea, and that Trump has forsworn any action on the entitlement spending that drives the ruinous $19 trillion national debt he decries. And don’t dare mention the bombshell Trump conveniently omitted in his stemwinder: his commitment to give legal status (pssst– that means amnesty) to millions of the illegal aliens he risibly promises to deport.

Munich 1972 and 2016 The long history of German incompetence in the face of Islamist terrorism. Howard Rotberg

We all know about Germany under Angela Merkel deciding to admit about a million immigrants from lands where jihadism, Sharia law, terrorism and hatred of women, Jews and gays are endemic.

Most of know that on New Years’ Eve last, some 1000 of the recent immigrants, predominantly young males from a culture of rape, began sexually assaulting hundreds of German young women in Cologne.

Fewer know that German police took days to acknowledge the extent of the mass rapes and sexual attacks and in this they and the German media have been following the lead of Sweden whose police and media, according to a recent article in Britain’s The Spectator, have been actively covering up the facts on the nature and extent of Muslim sexual attacks on their women.

German police declared within one day that the German-Iranian shooter who killed 9, including children, in the Munich mall attack this week acted alone, and inferred that this was mental illness not terrorism.

This happened during a period where police and security services were on “high alert” due to information about a possible terrorist attack. Unlike most shooters who are killed on site as they continue to shoot, this shooter was found a kilometer away from the mall, and police quickly said that not only did he act alone but that it was suicide. He had been walking around with a Glock 17 semi-automatic handgun and 300 rounds of ammunition in his rucksack. I ask whether it is reasonable to accept such a fast conclusion from police that it was suicide and not terrorism.

I do not understand why the country that makes Mercedes cars that can drive themselves cannot, during a period of high alert, protect public gatherings, or find a shooter in a dense urban environment and must rely on the killer committing suicide a kilometer away – unless of course your ideology says all Muslims are culturally equal to all Western Europeans and that it is appropriate to accept a million mostly unvetted, mostly Muslim, migrants during wartime (radical Islam has declared war, and Hollande accepts this but not Obama and it would seem that Merkel does not accept it either). The ideology of tolerance (which I term “tolerism” in my book of that title) says that tolerance and compassion and empathy, and yes, “submission” to a million demographic soldiers of the Islamic retaking of Europe, will somehow ease the problem.

The perpetrator shouted, “Allahu Akbar” — the terrorist battle-cry. Munich police chief Hubertus Andrae, however, told a news conference there were no indications the gunman had links with ISIS, identifying the attack as a “classic shooting rampage” and not terrorism. Why do we insist that we are only worried about links to ISIS and not links to cultural jihadism and conquest?

Police were quick to emphasize that the shooter also shouted that he was a “German”, all but ignoring that he, or perhaps his parents, was, or were, from Iran, the major terrorist exporting nation in the world. Even if he was not directed by Iranian terrorists, one cannot say that he was not inspired by the constant anti-western propaganda and warlike statements coming out of Iran. One would think that Germany, in light of its crimes during the Nazi era but also due to its role in selling chemicals to Iraq and Syria for its chemical weapons program, and, as disclosed in a report by the World Nuclear Organization, providing 24% of the parts for the Iranian Busheir 1 nuclear plant, be more diligent in pursuing world peace by stopping its tolerance for Islamic warmongers.

Kaine: The Face of the Democrats’ Dangerous Foreign Policy Priorities A telling pick for the Clinton VP post.Joseph Klein

Hillary Clinton settled on Virginia Senator Tim Kaine to be her running mate. Senator Kaine’s self-effacing description of himself is “boring,” a trait that Hillary appears to relish. “I love that about him,” she told CBS News. Hillary also was looking for someone with knowledge of national security issues. Senator Kaine serves on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Arms Services Committee. What she really found in Senator Kaine is a running mate who epitomizes the Democratic Party’s increased willingness to turn on our close ally Israel and give the benefit of the doubt to Iran and the Islamists.

“Boring” is not the first trait that comes to mind when describing Senator Kaine. His moral cowardice and faulty judgment were on full display as he supported the disastrous nuclear deal with Iran. Kaine obsequiously followed the direction of President Obama and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid in supporting a filibuster to block the Senate majority opposed to the deal from conducting an up-or-down vote on Obama’s appeasement pact. Bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress opposed the deal. Senator Kaine himself admitted to having reservations in light of Iran’s past record of cheating and state sponsorship of terrorism. Yet he gave the thuggish Iranian regime the benefit of the doubt.

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had previously accepted an invitation to address a joint session of Congress regarding his concerns about the path the negotiations leading to the final deal was taking, Senator Kaine joined seven other Senate Democrats in boycotting Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech.

During an interview with the Forward in March 2015, Kaine claimed that “I’m a strongly pro-Israel Democrat.” If Kaine were such a “strongly pro-Israel Democrat,” he would not have been one of only 12 senators whom, as the New York Sun recounted, “refused to sign a letter to President Obama warning of legislated legal constraints on funding the Palestinian Arab authority after it struck its alliance with Hamas.”

By elevating Senator Kaine as her choice for vice president, Hillary Clinton demonstrated how the Democratic Party she aspires to lead is moving towards breaking the decades-long bipartisan support for the Jewish State of Israel. However, it gets even worse than that. Hillary’s running mate exemplifies the Democratic Party’s willingness to risk the security of the American people by opening the door to admit large numbers of Islamist “refugees” from Syria. Hillary Clinton herself has called for a 500 percent increase of admissions over Obama’s irresponsible target of 10,000 Syrians to be admitted by the end of this fiscal year. Kaine appears to agree with those who do not think that the Obama administration has been processing the applications for asylum fast enough. And he opposed a bill passed by the House of Representatives that would have required more careful vetting of Syrians and Iraqis before they can be admitted to the United States as “refugees.”

“These refugees are people who are terrorized, not terrorists,” Kaine said in an interview conducted by Vox Media following the ISIS attack in Paris last November. Kaine made this statement even though he has no way of knowing whom the “refugees” from jihadi terrorist-plagued parts of the Middle East seeking to enter our country really are. Top U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials have acknowledged that they have no real way of determining whether jihadist groups are infiltrating their fighters into the flow of refugees, as ISIS indicated it had every intention of doing. In particular, there is no reliable database to use in vetting Syrian refugees. Yet Kaine thinks he knows better, just like the top of his ticket thinks she does. He claimed that “the refugee vetting process is one of the safest areas that we have.” And he is willing to put American lives at risk to test his unfounded assumption.