The Garland Terrorist Attack - Jihadis Caught in a Trap?

I'm somewhat ambivalent about the folk that  hosted the Mohammed cartoon even in Garland that drew an ISIS-inspired terror attack to the North Texas town. The organizers have the right, of course, to do any sort of event they like so long as they are peaceful about it and people have the right to say whatever they want about it so long as they too are peaceful.  But the people who organized this had to know they were painting a target on themselves by deliberately offending the Muslim community in this fashion. Were they putting lives at risk, had the terrorist attack against the even spilled over into the nearby community or gotten officers killed or injured? It's a difficult question that every community will have to answer for themselves.

That said, setting these sorts of entrapment events to draw out jihadis isn't necessarily such a bad idea if our only concern were eliminating jihadis. Even ISIS was thrilled to claim credit for the attack, which gives you an idea how hard up for headlines they are, given the anti-climactic results.

• Jihadi jumps out of car, draws his weapon and shouts, "Allahu............Ack!" and drops to the ground.
• Second jihadi jumps out of the car and reaches for his weapon................"Ack!" and drops to the ground.
• A hail of bullets strike the fallen jihadis from all sides.  
• "Terrorism" managed!

There is something to say for throwing the occasional provacative anti-ISIL or anti-Al-Quaeda event. It would after all, give bored jihadis something to do with all that pent-up anger they're carrying around. I am suggested that such such an outrageously provacative thing as this kind of event might have a purpose, because I have this fear is that unless we throw up these kinds of incendiary and flagrantly obvious targets, the ISIS-inspired jihadis, who are already in the States, are going to eventually become bored and restless. If that happens, they will, as they've done elsewhere in the world, finally resort to conducting random terrorist attacks in less conspicuous places that are offensive to radical Islamists like gay pride parades, Florida Spring Break wet t-shirt contests, Femininst rallies, synagogues, Bhuddist temples, flea markets, buses and Christian church services.

Perhaps such honey traps might serve to draw the inevitable jihadi attacks away from peaceful folk and put jihadis where we can see them clearly.  We might at the very least reduce the number of breathing jihadis in America. You'd think these two ego-maniacs would have twigged to the idea that someone might be waiting for them in Garland, but noooooooo.
And no, I won't call them by their names. I believe their names should be deliberately forgotten. I can think of other more colorful things to call them. Let's not immortalize their names and make martyrs out of two guys who were almost cartoon characters themselves. Ironic, given they were attacking a cartoon convention.

I don't think front-line terrorists are being chosen for their vast brain-power these days. I don't really think it's going to sink in to these guys that they are being lured to their doom every time a bunch of heavily armed rednecks do something deliberately offensive to Islam. Since 9/11, the U.S. has picked off most of the terrorist leaders with any brains anyway, although our current president seems intent on letting them back out on the street lately.  Whatever happens, the question is a difficult one to answer. Big game hunters used to stake out a goat in the jungle to lure in the tigers. Not very sporting, but an effective way to get yourself a nice tiger skin rug.

Whether we want to encourage a repeat of the Garland incident by hosting more blatantly anti-Islamist events like the Mohammed cartoon event or not is part of a larger moral debate that frankly, we each must conduct within ourselves. We really have no say-so as to whether such events should be held or whether someone ought to go jihadi because of them. Alls we can do is choose not to participate in something designed to offend others if we decide it's wrong to do so. It is not our business to make them stop.

In the meantime, what about the Garland beat cop who put a stop to the attack in short order?

You know, once in a while you see a news story about the part if the country where you grew up and you think, YES! I'M FROM THERE! THOSE ARE MY PEOPLE! The guy who single-handledly put "PAID" to these two accounts is 60 years old (my age). He's been on the force for 38 years and practices so often at the gun range and is such an outstanding marksman that he was able to take down not one, but two heavily armed terrorists in body armor before either could get 20 feet from their car. I mean that's how we deal with terrorists in TEXAS!

We Texans have a message for ISIS:

Don't mess with Texas, you terrorists, but if you insist, we'll be happy to send you on to where you can find out for yourself that there ain't no virgins waitin' for you. They ought to allow that Garland officer to paint a couple of ISIS symbols on the door of his squad car. He's just 3 short of being an ace now. 

I'm sorry for being a little sanguine here and I apologize to my friends who are Muslim, but these guys were very bad men as even members of several Islamic groups and everyone but their mothers have admitted. And this doesn't ONLY apply to Islamist jihadis. I don't like any brand of terrorist. I'd have advocated painting a white pointy hood on the car if he'd taken down a KKK terrorist burning churches back in the 60s or a Symbionese Liberation Army bank robber in the 70s. A terrorist is a terrorist.  Some people are just evil and that's that. They self-identify as evil. They murder and terrorize innocent people. It's time we call evil by its name. You can have evil opinions all day long, but as soon as you strap on body armor and pick up an AK-47 or wire up a bomb, then it's time for right thinking men to step in and protect the innocent. If two nations just want to slug it out over oil or real estate or power, then count me out. I'm a pacifist. But start murdering the innocent and I don't believe I can stand by any longer with my hands in my pockets. 

To the Texas cop who took care of business, I say, "Good for you sir! God bless you for saving lives."

Just my opinion,

Tom King © 2015

Al-Quaeda on the Run in a "More Peaceful World"

Let's revisit the words of the smartest president who ever lived and his equally brilliant VP  over the past 4 years and cast them against the reality of today's event. Surely we will see that all is well in the world and going according to plan.~

•  "[It] could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You're going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You're going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government."  - Joe Biden (Larry King Live - 2010)

• “We focused on the terrorists and Al-Qaeda is on the run.” Barak Obama (2012)

• "The world is less violent than it has ever been. It is healthier than it has ever been. It is more tolerant than it has ever been. It is better fed then it’s ever been. It is more educated than it’s ever been." - Barak Obama (2014)

The Iraqi government is stable in the sense that it is losing ground and crumbling at a nice steady rate.

The president actually could say that the world is a more peaceful place, if by that you mean that as the bad guys are winning they are slaughtering more and more of their "enemies". There is nothing quite so peaceful as piles of dead people. Large numbers of those dead people were poor and ignorant so percentage wise that would mean more of us are now well-fed and better educated. Also, tens of thousands of the dead were Christians, so, by definition, we are now a more tolerant world because everybody knows how intolerant Christians are.~

And he does have a point about Al Quaeda. They are indeed on the run - with an Army straight toward Baghdad. Reminds me of an old Russian saying that was popular during the Communist era famines. "If you want milk, take your pail to the radio." In totalitarian nations, the news reports always paint a rosier picture than what is reality.

We could update that Russian observation for today's America this way.

• "If you want peace, take your palm branches to MSNBC."

"And that's all I've got to say about that."  - Forrest Gump (1994)

© 2014 by Tom King

* I use a new punctuation mark you may have noticed:  .~
 It's called a "snark mark" and is used to indicate sarcasm. I use it to help some of my more critical readers to recognize that I'm not being serious when I say things like "Everybody knows how intolerant Christians are.~"

Supporting the Real Conspiracy

How Conspiracy Theorists Have Made Themselves Tools of the Progressive Statists
by Tom King (c) 2013

Once again, give it up with the conspiracy theories, people!  Yes, I do believe people conspire like Al-Quaeda and Timothy McVeigh and other terrorists.  I also realize Japan conducted a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor and that could be considered a conspiracy.  So conspiracies do exist.  That has nothing to do with truther, birther and Illuminati believer conspiracies.  There are just two kinds of conspiracies - at least two kinds that actually work.

1.  The first kind is the small group conspiracy working against a perceived common enemy such as Al Quaeda does regularly and very small group conspiracies such as the Oklahoma City Bombing.

2.  The second kind is the national conspiracy conducted against a neighboring country. These are never quite so secretive as one would have you believe. Thousands of people in Japan knew about Pearl Harbor, but they had a common interest in keeping it a secret. They were soldiers and had very publicly been convinced that America was evil (rather like the Al Quaeda terrorists only on a much larger scale. Hitler's depradations was hardly a conspiracy. WWII was a "surprise" only because people deluded themselves into believing that the Axis nations really were peace-loving like we were - an artifact of using tit for tat or mirroring diplomatic methods. They ignored obvious signs for years because the signs didn't fit their diplomatic model. Japan's attack wasn't all that big a surprise. FDR had already started rebuilding the military years before Pearl Harbor.

What the whole Illuminati type conspiracy asks us to believe is that pretty much everything is manipulated by an evil cabal of evil industrialists, Jews, priests, progressive socialists, communists (whatever the flavor of the month happens to be). Do people conspire to cover up things?  Sure. But it only succeeds if the knowledge of the coverup is limited to a very small group who share the same interests. Nixon couldn't pull it off and down he came.

My criticism of the conspiracy theories is that they suppose the existence of vast numbers of evil minions who refuse to talk.  A successful conspiracy like the supposed 9/11 plot by George Bush and that a media, notorious for jumping on scandals even when the subject is someone they like a lot, will remain silent about the conspiracy. Obama is going to find out soon what happens to your media "puppets" when there's real blood in the water. They'll shred him to ribbons for ratings.

The 9/11 conspiracy was a conspiracy funded by a wealthy Saudi involving a relatively small group of terrorists, most of whom would become martyrs. Those sorts of evil minions are in relatively limited supply or else we'd have seen a lot more of these kinds of attacks.

Conspiracy theorists jump on every single event and start nosing around for supposed anomalies that prove (whoop there it is) that there is a conspiracy going on, usually involving their favorite bunch - the Illuminati. They swallow whole hog made up nonsense like the "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" that Hitler used to justify the Jewish genocide, the Zinoviev Letter that brought down the British Labor government and the forged Donation of Constantine used in the 18th century by the Roman Catholic Church to justify it's assumption of rule over the Western Roman Empire.  The Internet is rife with screeds and rants against imaginary bugbears by uncritical researchers who sound like Sgt. Schulz going ,"Hmmmmmm. Verrry interesting."

There are lots of attempts to manipulate things and conspiracies do happen.  Even those conspiracies with relatively few conspirators tend to be found out eventually. Nixon's attempts to cover up his campaign committee's shenanigans cost him his presidency in short order.   Vast conspiracies, on the other hand, never last long. Right now tens of thousands of Americans are working toward a common goal - the change of the American government from a limited power, free market capitalist republic to a huge, powerful behemoth of a socialist state. This is not so much a conspiracy as it is a confluence of like interests. These kinds of movements operate rather like war in their mechanisms, with committed true believer attackers slugging it out wherever opportunity presents itself with committed defenders of the current system.

Fortunately, this type of "conspiracy" is not well organized, difficult to control and everybody knows about it. A high level of plot and secrecy is not possible until the plotters have unlimited power and even then the "plot" is always generally known. Every Russian in the Soviet Union knew they were being lied to by their government. They knew people were disappearing into the gulags for pointing that out.  

Viktor Belenko, a MIG 25 pilot who defected to the US with his plane during the 1970s was blown away the first time he went to an American grocery store. He thought for a time he was being shown a staged setup to convince him American stores were really so full of food. He told this great story about his own experience with the great communist experiment in collectivism.

"Growing up in the Soviet Union," Belenko related," There was no milk to be found anywhere. The official radio station, though, was constantly bragging that milk production was up from last year. So when people heard this they started saying sarcastically, 'If you want milk, take your pail to the radio.'"  No matter how powerful the Soviet Government became, it could not prevent it's vast conspiracy to lie to the Russian people from becoming a public joke.

The US government is so far, not nearly powerful enough to convince thousands of evil minions to set up 3000 of their innocent fellow Americans to be killed and not talk about it.  Not one single person who supposedly set the "demolition charges" in the twin towers come forward and admit it and there would have had to have been hundreds to have pulled it off.

These kinds of wild-haired conspiracy theories are being used by the progressive left to discredit conservative constitutionalists that stand in the way of their idea of how things ought to be. Are there elitists who are trying to bring this about? You bet. They've been working on re-establishing the old idea of a more or less permanent American nobility - a special ruling class that has a "right" to rule because of their superior genetics.

My objections to the uncareful consumption of conspiracy theory material is that most of this stuff is based on heresay and guesswork, disseminated by too many people with obvious mental disorders.  It accomplishes little more than to get us all looking in the wrong direction while the real "plot" happens right in front of our eyes.

An example is the "Veterans for Ron Paul" organizer Adam Kokesh who's trying to organize pro-second amendment supporters into an armed march on Washington on the 4th of July. The guy advertises himself as a "Tea Partier" (sic), but has a long history of working with Marxist groups like Code Pink. That's a conspiracy all right, but like most real conspiracies that involve large groups, it's easy to document from legitimate sources like I did in this blog.

Be wise, Grasshopper.

(c) 2013 by Tom King