Posts Tagged → terror
The day after 9/11: First impressions are the most accurate
I remember the moment of 9/11, because I was giving testimony to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives Environmental Resources Committee about the importance of conserving land for future generations of people that morning.
I had just gotten started, the committee chairman made some quip about the length of my presentation being measured by the inches thickness of my prepared notes, and then the room was cleared because of potential threats to public buildings. My mile-long testimony was entered into the record and I didn’t even have to say more than a few jokes and introduce myself (Also in the record, I used an old Jim Seif ice breaker that goes like this: “My name is Josh First, and it is tough to follow so many august and impressive speakers today. I feel a little bit like Zsa Zsa Gabor’s seventh husband. I know what to do, I just don’t know if I can make it exciting.”)
What I remember most about 9/11 is the day after the terror attack on the twin towers. Within 24 hours, a great deal of information about the attacks, the attackers, and the losses had been gathered. And yes, I am aware that some people believe 9/11 was an inside job committed by the CIA or some group of American security agencies. And I remain unpersuaded of that allegation.
Within 24 hours, literally the day after, the world discovered the cost of open American borders and of tolerating people who hate us living amongst us. Our first impressions were the most accurate understanding of the situation, the cause and the effect of the terror attack. Open borders and providing a safe home to people who want to murder us carries a very high cost. Only a nation that believes either it is bullet and bomb proof, and too big to fail, or that is asleep at the wheel, will permit these conditions to persist.
No nation is too big to fail. No nation is bomb proof. And any nation that is asleep at the wheel by allowing failed policies to persist is going to crash and burn and fail disastrously. And so we never learned the harsh lessons of 9/11, and we ignored our accurate first impressions to make way for ridiculous multiculturalism nonsense that continues to shape our national policies even now.
So today it is the day after 9/11, and a lot of Americans will understand when I ask: Have we Americans learned anything since the day after 9/11? Given that right now we have a wide-open southern border and millions of unknown people pouring over it, including lots of Middle Eastern terrorists, we all can say No. No, we have not learned that lesson we were so painfully taught on 9/11.
Because our biggest enemies are again living under our roof, it is just a matter of time before America experiences another 9/11-type attack. Only this time, the mass destruction mass -casualty attack will most certainly be a direct result of federal government bureaucrats and elected “leaders.” Of that purposeful culpability, there will be zero denial. They know exactly what they are doing.
Which makes us ask another question on this impression we get: Who are these American “leaders” and federal bureaucrats actually working for, if not us American citizens? They clearly don’t have our interests at heart, and they punish us when we try to put America and Americans first.
Operation Valkrie in reverse: Biden’s mis-use of FBI to destroy American democracy
In July of 1944, a small group of high ranking German military officers tried to assassinate Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, and thereby set into motion a series of events that they hoped would cascade into a much larger set of sudden policy realities that the German government – minus its lunatic fuhrer – would have to address realistically. The hero conspirators hoped that by assassinating Hitler and calling out a small and relatively unused military branch to get control of the government would result in a fairly slow but eventually complete takeover of the then-leaderless government by anti-Nazi people, who could then work out a quick end to World War II with the Allies. Before Germany was utterly destroyed.
The German officers called their plan “Operation Valkrie.”
What strikes me about Joe Biden’s reliance on the DOJ and the FBI to do a tremendous amount of really dirty and heavy political lifting is how it is nearly a perfect mirror image of Operation Valkrie 78 years ago. It fascinates me how people can learn from history, and then apply those lessons to work toward some political goal. It is a shame some of these people are so evil!
One could easily say that Joe Biden and his NKVD Beria, AG Merrick Garland, are just following the tracks laid down by the communists after WWII in Eastern Europe (I wrote about this in 2018). But that was a much longer process than Biden’s current shock and awe assault on America’s legal and cultural fabric. No, what we have going on today is a tail-wag-the-dog Operation Valkrie in reverse, where two relatively small agencies, DOJ and FBI, are over-leveraging their formerly high standing with the American people to achieve political outcomes way beyond what their agencies could normally do.
Biden’s attempt to assassinate America in cold blood is playing out in front of us. His unfair mis-use of government employees to attack his political opponent is a lawlessness most Americans can’t really grasp. And if Americans did grasp just how small the actual numbers of DOJ and FBI agents are, they would probably feel a lot more comfortable about their future. And this is why Biden is hoping to sign into law any day now the hiring of an additional 83,000 heavily armed IRS agents, whose online job description until late yesterday included “Must be willing and able to use deadly force.”
Biden is creating a heavily armed, hyper aggressive domestic army of politically partisan bureaucrats to really seriously attack his political opponents, under the guise of “collecting taxes” and “obeying the law.”
As things stand right now, it would not be too difficult to stop the IRS expansion, just a couple US senators voting No, and it would not be unreasonable to expect growing political pressure to slow down Merrick Beria Garland. After all, it just takes a little luck over here and over there to make these coups fail and for the great nation to survive.
It’s a damned shame that it looks instead like Biden’s version of Operation Valkrie is about to succeed in ending America as it has been known for 249 years, with widespread terror, oppression, and official violence against freedom loving political dissidents about to become a daily reality here. Almost like Adolf Hitler rose from his grave and suddenly reanimated as Joe Biden….it is exactly the kind of “official” government behavior Hitler liked.
2020’s Jacobins vs. 9/11
Today is 9/11, the 19th anniversary of a devastating Islamic terrorism attack against America via jet airliners crashing into major targets. Over 3,000 Americans were murdered on September 11, 2001, almost all of them incinerated as the different planes were deliberately crashed and burned in an effort to damage America’s economy and create widespread fear.
The 9/11 attack was a huge blow to America. Not just our economy was hurt, and not just our national pride, but also our culture and self-identity. A great deal of uncertainty resulted, too. A lot of questions were asked about America’s place in the world, our role in world politics, and how we should interract with other nations. Questions are good, and to me and many others, those questions were clearly answered: America is the world’s sole superpower, we stand for all that is good and just, and we want to keep it this way.
You would think that nineteen years later virtually all Americans would be strongly unified behind a strong pro-America identity and protective policy array meant to shield us from another similar attack or series of attacks. Strong pro-America policies make sense when we all can see just how vulnerable our open society is to all kinds of attacks and exploitations, especially from within.
But two potentially fatal misconceptions have accelerated since 9/11. First, what appears to be a majority of Americans still incorrectly believe that America is too big, too rich, too successful to fail. They believe that no matter how devastating or sustained an attack is, America can withstand it.
Second, far too many Americans believe that sedition and treason against America are legitimate forms of communication and “protest.” Even though sedition and treason are the gravest crimes punishable by immediate execution.
Both of these misconceptions have led a surprisingly high number of Americans to passively stand back and allow American universities and other institutions to lead the way in overt efforts to overturn America’s form of government and economy. Even violently. To the point where the modern day equivalent of 1790s Jacobins are running the streets across major cities. Some critics have compared the wild, angry, violent people burning down our cities to the NAZI Brown Shirts, the NSDAP (Nazi socialists) street militia who helped Adolf Hitler gain control of Germany in the 1930s.
But there is a better argument to be made comparing today’s Democrat Militia “mostly peaceful” arsonists and looters to the Jacobins of 1790s France. The Jacobins started out as a freedom movement resulting from the 1789 French Revolution against the monarchy. However, in just a year or two, the Jacobins coupled their promises of perfect freedom, liberty, and equality for all to the extremely violent Reign of Terror. The Reign of Terror was the mass jailing and summary execution of anyone deemed a possible threat to Robespierre and his power-hungry angels.
Every day for almost two solid years, Robespierre would read a list of names in the French congress, and hundreds of innocent people would be dragged off to the guillotine. Their cases had already been determined by a small committee that heard no witnesses, considered no evidence, gave no due process. Someone simply had to be named and that was it – off with his or her head. It was ‘freedom-through-death’.
The thing about the Jacobins that separates them from the Nazi Brown Shirts is that the Jacobins had such beautiful intentions. Really, quite perfect and well-meaning. Right? After all, what is so wrong with absolute anarchic freedom for everyone? They were going to achieve justice for all when the very last ‘bad guy’ had his head chopped off.
It brings to mind a classic 1960s quote, often attributed to Eric Hoffer: “Both the left and the right want you to obey, but the left wants you to love them.” Because the Left has such beautiful intentions, anything they do is excused, no matter how violent or wrong. It is simply that beautiful intention that exonerates the Left’s great evil and cruelty. Their ends justify their means.
Today, on the anniversary of 9/11, America is facing its own Jacobins. In the name of justice for some criminals, they demand that America be utterly destroyed from the ground up, and re-created into some sort of Reign of Terror utopia, where some new Robespierre types will sit above us and declare us to live or to die.
If you care about America and your own happiness, your bank account, your safe streets, you are encouraged to remember 9/11 and stand up for America, its constitution, its traditions and laws, all of which are under attack.
Vote for Donald Trump, and not for the Jacobins.
9/11’s meaning then and now
Today is the 18th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, known as “9/11”.
From October 2001 to October 2003, I worked closely with the National Park Service and with the families of the Flight 93 victims on protecting the crash site, two solid hard-working years, so that it could eventually become a national memorial without worries of losing the physical sense of what the surrounding ground looked like the moment the plane flipped upside down and did a nose-dive into Tim Lambert’s spruce grove.
And for those two years no one ever blamed the victims of 9/11. Nor did anyone try to scapegoat anyone else for 9/11. Solemnly we focused hard on protecting the landscape so that future generations would know and remember not only what happened, but why and by whom. Like a battlefield, which most Americans properly see it as.
However, for a lot of Americans today, the ‘why’ and and ‘whom’ parts of 9/11 are now strangely flipped around.
In a recent conference about 9/11, panelists blamed guns, the NRA, whites, Christians, and a lack of open borders for 9/11. No, I am not making this up. Blaming the American victims of 9/11 is the actual state of mind among many liberal leaders today. At the conference, they refused to mention Islam, Muslim terrorists, or hijacked planes. Instead, they used the event to call attention to their favorite failed policy goals, not to heal the wounded nation or to discuss lessons learned about how to avoid a repeat of 9/11.
And let’s be honest: Open borders will lead to not just one more 9/11, but many more acts of mass terror against Americans. You could fairly argue that the coast-to-coast illegal alien crime wave already is a form of terrorism, or that the liberal policy assault on law enforcement and the resulting mass shootings is a form of terrorism. But what is meant here, and what is the worst, are carefully planned and targeted acts of mass murder. Like what happened on 9/11.
Eighteen years ago 9/11 heightened our awareness. It made Americans feel vulnerable. It taught us that our best intentions and most open-minded policies are seen by most people outside of America as signs of weakness, of decadence, of a lack of willpower to survive, and they were then exploited to our disadvantage. Our federal government at the time properly took revenge on the Taliban and al-Qaeda, mostly hiding in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. But then that same government mistakenly tried to implement a repeat of the World War II Marshall Plan, where America re-built the nations we had invaded and occupied. The post-9/11 attempted rebuilding of Iraq and Afghanistan was overly optimistic, because these Muslim countries are not European. They share none of the values or culture of WWII Europe, and they are immune to our culture and values.
And so now, instead of learning lessons from 9/11 and using them to protect America, we have an entire American political party that has inverted 9/11 and turned it into another forum and stage for promoting policies that have zero to do with 9/11 or preventing something similar from happening again.
Today in America, to one political party, the military veterans who fought to protect America by taking the fight to Iraq and Afghanistan are now the threat to America, not orthodox Muslims following the Koran to the letter of the law. And the patriotic friends of those veterans are the threat to America; the religious Christian friends and family of those veterans are the threat to America; and the hunters and target shooting friends of those veterans are also the threat to America.
Everyone but the actual perpetrators of 9/11, and their supporters like US Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, are that political party’s scapegoats for 9/11.
For radical Muslim Ilhan Omar, on 9/11 “Somebody did something.” That’s it, that is her whole take on 9/11, and her political party agrees with her.
And now her political party is coming hard after you and me.
Looks like a whole lot of people missed the lessons-learned part of 9/11. Probably because they don’t care about them. And that right there is the real lesson learned for the rest of us: 9/11 only means something to people who actually care about America staying America.
Trump and that French Fire Water
President Trump tweets his immediate concern for extinguishing the blazing Notre Dame cathedral in France yesterday, and the next thing ya know, half of France is supposedly upset with him. And just to prove that there really is a little Wizard of Oz man behind that fake news curtain directing fake anger at Trump, both official and semi-official French outlets vented their displeasure and mockery of his comment.
All these French critics proved is that President Trump cares more for the Notre Dame cathedral, and for France as a free Western nation, than do the French themselves.
France has actually been on fire for years, and instead of extinguishing their own self-arson, they have poured gasoline on the flames through deliberate official action and inaction. By importing millions of openly hostile, imperialistic, non-conforming, non-integrating foreigners, France has injected a death serum into its own veins. We know this injection feels like France’s veins are on fire because of all the street level battles that have followed.
Islamic terror is real, and Islamic culture war against France and Catholic churches is real, but it is the least of France’s problems. Rather, it is the culture war against traditional French identity and values facilitated by the watered-down French Vichy intelligentsia itself (Trump’s loudest critics yesterday) that is the greatest threat to France.
Think of the official response to the 2015 Bataclan massacre in Paris by Muslim terrorists, who after the initial gunfire then walked among and picked through the dead and dying to find survivors they could further maim and sadistically torture: “Any person who thinks this event (and all the others like it) is about Islam vs. France is a bad person. No, the actual terrorists are not to blame; we French are all to blame.” It is complete nonsense, and it allowed France’s famous openness and freedom to be further stifled by an official clamp-down on pro-Western, pro-France activists.
Here in America, yesterday I listened to fake news talking weasel head Shep Smith of Fox News also shamefully carry water for the terrorists and arsonists.
If President Trump could walk on the water he recommended for the Notre Dame fire, his critics would complain that he can’t swim, and if he called for help while drowning in it, they would arrest him for disturbing the peace. Trump and his fellow pro-West leaders can do nothing correct in the eyes of his opponents. While the Bataclan dead bodies served up a big warning sign, it is difficult to create a better image of France’s nose-dive toward self destruction than the burning Notre Dame cathedral, and the French anti-France response afterwards.
Dear France, do you want to survive? If yes, then take all your fancy vino and pour it into a giant moat around your southern borders to keep the invaders out, or save it up for putting out the inevitable fires that are coming to your cities and towns.
France, the Notre Dame Cathedral, and the cross, all on fire
Bataclan massacre in Paris by religious Muslim terrorists. These bloody bodies were swept under the rug by French officials and their establishment media allies
About that New Zealand mosque massacre…
Once again, liberal ideas have resulted in terrible results, and yet, the people who promote those ideas blame everyone else for their failures. Now it is a mass shooting in a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand.
The massacre did not happen in a vacuum.
New Zealand has the same kind of stupid, ineffective “gun control” that anti-firearm activists have demanded for everyone everywhere: No handguns, mass registration with the goal of eventual mass confiscation for a gun-free society (except for the police and security services controlled by the liberals). Had the members of that mosque had access to handguns, like our concealed carry laws permit here in America, then they could have defended themselves against the lone attacker. But nope, anti-gun activists require these bodies and blood in the street in order to make the emotional case for yet more anti-freedom, anti-safety gun elimination.
Sorry, mosque members. I am sorry that you were martyred by the same leftists who have brought so much destruction to everyone else across the planet.
And then, so many questions come to mind, like:
Did that mosque serve as a launching point for public or private anti-Christian, anti-Jew hatred and bigotry, as so many other mosques do around the world?
Did that mosque have members who were actively engaged in denigrating and materially undermining Christianity and Western countries from within, as so many mosques do? Did they take advantage of New Zealand’s freedom and democracy to achieve non-democratic results?
Was that mosque a security risk for New Zealand? Does it harbor violent terrorists or proponents of Islamic terrorism?
Was the mosque officially silent about the non-stop bloodbath perpetrated by Islamic jihadists against innocent people around the world, notably Christians living peacefully in Paris and London and Antwerp?
Was the mosque officially silent about the obvious danger that Islamic jihad represents to the entire world?
Did that mosque serve as a center for spreading Islamic terrorism, as so many other mosques do around the world?
These questions and many similar ones must be asked, because if any of them are affirmative, then the massacre could be construed or even understood as an act of self-defense by the perpetrator, acting on behalf of his vulnerable countrymen who are paralyzed by leftist political correctness and an inactive government run by people willing to sacrifice the entire nation on the altar of “understanding” a fascist, totalitarian ideology that is mutually exclusive with the openness and tolerance New Zealand and every other Western nation stands for.
Here in America, Muslima Terrorista Suprema Linda Sarsour used the massacre to publicly explain exactly what is at the heart of this civilizational conflict. She explicitly blamed “white Christians” as the source of all evil on Earth and of being the biggest threat to all civilizations. In other words, when some mosque somewhere gets a taste of its own medicine, suddenly jihad against Christians and whites is openly justified. As if jihad against Christians and Christianity has not been ongoing for 1,300 years! No wonder Westerners are phobic of Islam; they are afraid for very good reasons.
Here in Harrisburg, the local JCC issued a Marxist screed about the shooting, decrying, among other ridiculous things, “Islamophobia” and “bigotry” (no, not the explicit anti-Christian, anti-Jewish, anti-Hindu bigotry of the Koran). One wonders if the regular, normal, hard working members of the many various JCCs and Jewish Federations around America will ever tire of underwriting the Marxist march of their institutional professionals, who seem to specialize in delivering sappy Yiddish entertainment to elderly people and Marxist-everything-else for everyone else. In the past it was Margie Adelmann, now it is Jen Ross, the “professional Jews” who represent the very worst of secularism and controlling, destructive leftism. Neither of them was or is responsive to JCC members who want them to stop politicizing everything in the name of Marxism and political correctness.
They, too, are on a jihad, parallel with Linda Sarsour, the rest of us be damned.
Remembering 9/11
It is tough to square up the religiously-inspired terror attack on America 17 years ago with our national policies since then.
America went through a ridiculous bout of Political Correctness, instead of rational, logical approaches to minimize the risk of something similar to 9/11 happening again. The PC policies placed American at even greater risk. Our porous borders are a symbol that we are still asleep.
Today, political commentator Jamie Glazov was tossed from Twitter, on 9/11, for posting simple ideas about how to protect America.
FakeBook deleted people’s accounts for simply mentioning 9/11.
PC is alive and well and it will only invite more terror attacks like 9/11 on America if we do not adopt a survival attitude.
God bless America and the brave Americans who put up such a fierce fight on Flight 93, and who showed us all how to deal with this scourge.
Are the British a Free People?
A free people does not live in fear.
Either their government, which is created to serve them, eliminates the fear, or the people themselves eliminate it.
What has happened in England is that the government no longer represents the British People. Instead, an array of amorphous, feel-good, politically correct goals are substituted. These are “global” interests that reportedly supersede the interests of the people living within Britain itself.
When the British government fails to care for its own people, and the people begin to complain, then the government creates limits on what the People may say. Under threat of severe punishment!
The British speech codes are only slightly worse than what we see on American campuses today. If you step out of line and utter something “unacceptable,” or “offensive,” whatever that means, then your individual rights are stripped from you in an instant. No due process, no overarching Constitutional rights, just immediate and sudden delivery of scary coercive government force.
And when Muslim terrorists run amok in Britain’s streets, stabbing people, no one is allowed to carry a gun to defend themselves. Instead, heroic bar bouncers are limited to throwing chairs and beer bottles at the terrorists.
Can you imagine if people being terrorized had concealed carry? The terrorists would not have made more than a few seconds of headway, and then they would have justifiably died.
Sad to say, the British People do not appear to be free any longer. Their government cannot protect them, and the government will not allow them to protect themselves, either. In fact, it tells the People that they should expect to be terrorized as a matter of cultural reality going forward. That is, the People must live in fear. Contrary to the basic living standards of a free people.
With human history as our guide, we know that at some point something gives way. Either the People are fully controlled and enslaved by their government, or the People revolt and create a new government that actually represents their interests.
Abbas smiles in group photo mourning French dead
World leaders gathered in Paris to publicly condemn typical Islamic behavior that resulted in a whole bunch of French citizens dying the other day, murdered by good young Muslim men, and in the group photo Abu Abbas is smiling ear to ear while everyone else looks grim or serious.
Why is Abbas smiling? Because he is a Muslim supremacist, he is anti-Western civilization, he is against free speech, and he is happy that a bunch of innocent Christians and Jews were executed by young Muslims who have heeded Abbas’ many calls for jihad.
A Jewish grocery store was also targeted in the terror act, and four shoppers there were executed by one of the devout Muslim terrorists. This brought cheers and dancing in the streets all over the Middle East.
Why pretend that Abbas really wants peace? Why pretend that Islam is the “religion of peace”?
And why Abbas was even there in polite company, among actual leaders, is another indication that Europeans have not yet come to terms with their growing problem. They are still embracing silly slogans and empty gestures while innocent people are gunned down in front of them. Having Abbas present was a slap in the face to the victims.