A would-be mass murderer tried to bomb the SkyTrain in Surrey, which is just a few stops away from Vancouver...
My city.
I take the SkyTrain most days, so I'm not exactly pleased about this news. To be honest, I expected something like this during the Vancouver Olympics. I guess I should be grateful we've been mostly ignored by the world's oversupply of fanatical murderers until now (notwithstanding jihadist Ahmed Ressam's terror mission to blow up LAX after driving down from Vancouver in 1999), but I don't feel grateful. I don't feel scared. I just feel angry.
Police have no idea about the motivation or identity of the would-be bomber and received no notes or demands in connection to the bomb. Investigators will go door to door in the area of the bomb threat, looking for clues and will complete forensic examinations on the three canisters found strapped to the bomb.
Not that I would want to second-guess the police, who will have a difficult job with an investigation that has just begun. That said, I don't think we've got a Basque separatist movement on Canada's west...More >>
Except he wasn't really inspired by Al Qaeda, was he? Not exclusively, anyway. It goes deeper than that.
I mean, we don't say that every single baseball player in the world is inspired by the famous New York Yankees. Baseball players just want to play baseball. By the same token, jihadists want to carry out jihad. When it comes to reporting these stories, is it not worth mentioning the Islamist ideology that has inspired countless jihadists, many of whom were slaughtering people long before anyone ever heard of Al Qaeda? Responsible reporters do make the connection crystal clear sometimes... but not always.
Certainly, Quazi Nafis was motivated to blow up the Federal Reserve building in New York City after reading the Al Qaeda magazine known as Inspire. But it's also reasonable to assume that Nafis was radicalized long before he ever read that particular magazine. As with many Islamists, it could have started in a mosque, or even in the comfort of his own family home. Ultimately, he is acting out what he (and many millions of others) believe to be the commandment of his god and prophet.
Lara Logan's meme-shattering speech in which she skewers the mainstream media and political elite for ignoring the Al Qaeda threat in Afghanistan. We don't have to worry about Al Qaeda rushing back into Afghanistan if the Taliban retakes the country; they're already there.More >>
Whether it's shooting a 14 year old female activist in the head for the crime of secularism, sending out tortured and brainwashed kids as suicide bombers or murdering entire families, the Taliban truly set the standard for savagery.More >>
Particularly if you're Asian. Chinese and Japanese nationalists continue to rattle sabres over a small group of islands in the East China Sea.
Critics may throw up their arms in frustration at these two old challengers getting up in each other's faces over some tiny blips on a map. But at least neither side is threatening to engineer total genocidal destruction of the other nation in order to bring about the return of a magical hidden messiah.More >>
That's weird. I could have sworn this thing ended when Osama bin Laden took two bullets in the face. But here's Walter Russell Mead with Dispatches From The War That Nobody Wants.
If a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged by reality, what would one call this Democratic President who's seen his foreign policy -- nay, his entire outlook on how the Middle East ought to work -- exposed as an utter smoking shambles thanks to the intractable hatred of the Islamic world towards America? It's not so much that the sky is falling as the ideological ground is coming undone beneath their feet.
It's actually not clear at all that the Obama administration recognizes just how much things have changed in barely 10 days. The President's talking heads are still devoting a bizarre amount of time into lambasting a poorly-produced video. The YouTube phenomenon has already been definitively shown to be a fig-leaf cover for Islamist terror attacks and riots sweeping the Arab Middle East, Pakistan, Indonesia and elsewhere. "Moderate" Muslims in France and England are protesting the "blasphemous" video as well; the protesters show their contempt for the birthplaces of Enlightenment values that ultimately saw free speech enshrined as an essential thing impacting all other freedoms. Meanwhile, America spends tax dollars on advertisements in Pakistan condemning "The Innocence of Muslims" -- because nothing shows you are willing to...More >>
