carnage and culture

Friday, May 24, 2013

There’s a fly in my soup

By Charles Krauthammer, Published: May 23

http://www.washingtonpost.com

“Horrible customer service.” That’s what the newly fired IRS commissioner averred was the agency’s only sin in singling out conservative political groups for discriminatory treatment.

In such grim proceedings one should be grateful for unintended humor. Horrible customer service is when every patron in a restaurant finds a fly in his soup. But when the maitre d’ screens patrons for their politics and only conservatives find flies paddlewheeling through their consomme, the problem is not poor service. It is harassment and invidious discrimination.

And yet two IRS chiefs (Steven Miller and Douglas Shulman) insisted that the singling-out of groups according to politics was in no way politically motivated. More hilarity. It’s definitional: If you discriminate according to politics, your discrimination is political. It’s a tautology, for God’s sake.

The IRS responds that this classification was for efficiency, to cut down on overwork. Ridiculous. How does demanding answers to endless intrusive and irrelevant questions, creating mountains of unnecessary paperwork for both applicant and IRS, reduce workload?

We are further asked to believe that a cadre of Cincinnati GS-11s is a hotbed of radical-left activism in America. Is anyone stupid enough to believe that?

That’s why the IRS scandal has legs. And because pulling the myriad loose ends of this improbable tale will be the Senate Finance Committee, chaired by Democrat Max Baucus. So much for any reflexive administration charge of a partisan witch hunt.

On Wednesday, however, the issue was in the hands of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. It allowed Lois Lerner, the IRS official who had already apologized for targeting tea party groups, to read an opening statement claiming total innocence: “I have not done anything wrong. I have not broken any laws. I have not violated any IRS rules or regulations, and I have not provided false information to this or any other congressional committee.” She then refused, on grounds of self-incrimination, to answer any questions.

Perhaps not wanting to appear overbearing, Chairman Darrell Issa gave her a pass, pending legal advice on whether she had forfeited her Fifth Amendment shield by making a statement. Then again, Lerner’s performance may not have endeared her to the average viewer. Her arrogance reminded anyone who needed reminding why the IRS is so unloved. Try saying what she said — I deny, I deny, I deny, and I refuse to answer any of your questions — when you’re next called in for an IRS audit.

Does the IRS scandal go all the way up to the top? As of now, doubtful. It’s nearly inconceivable that anyone would be stupid enough to have given such a politically fatal directive from the White House (although admittedly the bar is rapidly falling).

But when some bureaucrat is looking for cues from above, it matters when the president of the United States denounces the Supreme Court decision that allowed the proliferation of 501(c)(4)s and specifically calls the resulting “special interest groups” running ads to help Republicans “not just a threat to Democrats — that’s a threat to our democracy.” It’s especially telling when it comes amid letters from Democratic senators to the IRS urging aggressive scrutiny of 501(c)(4) applications.

A White House can powerfully shape other perceptions as well. For years the administration has conducted a concerted campaign to demonize Fox News (disclosure: for which I am a commentator), delegitimizing it as a news organization, even urging its ostracism. Then (surprise!) its own Justice Department takes the unprecedented step of naming a Fox reporteras a co-conspirator in a leak case — when no reporter has ever been prosecuted for merely soliciting information — in order to invade his and Fox’s private and journalistic communications.

No one goes to jail for creating such a climate of intolerance. Nor is it a crime to incessantly claim that those who offer this president opposition and push-back — Republicans, tea partyers, Fox News, whoever dares resist the sycophantic thrill-up-my-leg media adulation — do so only for “politics,” power and pure partisanship, while the Dear Leader devotes himself exclusively to the nation, the middle class, the good and just.

It’s not unlawful to run an ad hominem presidency. It’s merely shameful. The great rhetorical specialty of this president has been his unrelenting attribution of bad faith to those who disagree with him. He acts on principle; they from the basest of instincts.

Well then, why not harass them? Why not ask the content of their prayers? Why not read their e-mail? Why not give them especially horrible customer service?

Waiter! There’s a fly . . .

Read more from Charles Krauthammer’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.

Read more on this topic: Dana Milbank: The IRS passes the buck Greg Sargent: The IRS’s Lois Lerner has to go Jennifer Rubin: Time to come clean, Mr. President Ed Rogers: A special prosecutor in the IRS mess is inevitable

The London Terror Attack Was More Than 'Unforgivable'

Britain has been in denial about the Islamist threat. Time to face it down

By DOUGLAS MURRAY

The Wall Street Journal

http://online.wsj.com

May 23, 2013

London

Soldiers pass by flowers left at a makeshift memorial outside an army barracks near the scene of a killing in Woolwich, southeast London, Thursday. British authorities believe that two men accused of the gruesome murder of a soldier yesterday on a London street was revenge for wars in Muslim countries.

Luke MacGregor/Reuters

How many ignored warnings does it take? That is one question that should hang over Britain after the horror of the daytime murder of a British soldier on the streets of south London. On Wednesday afternoon, Drummer Lee Rigby was killed in Woolwich by two men wielding large knives and shouting "Allahu akbar"—God is great.

Islamists have been saying for years they would do this. They have planned to do it. And now they have done it.

The attack itself is not surprising. What is surprising is that British society remains so utterly unwilling not just to deal with this threat, but even to admit its existence. Politicians have called the Woolwich killing "unforgivable" and "barbarous." But expressions of anger should not really be enough.

Attempts to attack military targets in Britain go back to before the millennium and even before, it is important to note, the war on terror. In 1998 Amer Mirza, a member of the now-banned extremist group al Muhajiroun, attempted to petrol-bomb British army barracks. In 2007, a cell of Muslim men was found guilty of plotting to kidnap and behead a British soldier in Birmingham. The plan had been to take the soldier to a lock-up garage and cut off his head "like a pig." They wanted to film this act on camera and send it around the world to cause maximum terror.

In 2009, al Muhajiroun protested at a homecoming parade in Luton for British troops returning from Afghanistan. Carrying banners saying "go to hell," "butchers" and "terrorists," the group was protected by British police officers from an increasingly irate crowd of locals. The resulting outrage toward the police gave rise to the deeply troubling English Defence League, a street protest movement that often turns violent.

Now comes the attack in Woolwich, which the perpetrators—as with the earlier cell—wished to be observed and even filmed. Reports suggest that they invited people to capture their actions on video. The perpetrators gave interviews, machetes in hand, to bystanders with cameras. This horrific scene is something that will stick in the memory.

But it should also have been foreseen. Instead we entered the stage of denial. For there is already, in the reaction to events, more than a hint of what I have previously termed "Toulouse syndrome." The term is named after the attacks last year carried out by a jihadist called Mohammed Merah, who killed three French soldiers in a rampage that concluded with the murders of four French Jews at a school in Toulouse.

In the early stages of the attacks, when little was known, there was significant speculation that the culprit was a far-right extremist. At that stage everybody knew what they were going to say. But once the culprit turned out to be an Islamist, the gaze nearly fell away completely. "Nothing to see here, please move on" was the order of the day.

"Toulouse syndrome" also touched Boston last month. After the bombing at the marathon, media and politicians waited, hoping—some even said as much—that the attackers would be tea-party types. Then everybody would know what to say. But when it turned out to be Islamists?

So it is with the Woolwich killing, which British officials have lined up to denounce. Yes it is sickening. Of course it is barbaric. But what of it? Even all these years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2011, our societies remain unfit for purpose in facing up to—and facing down—Islamic extremism.

Too many still seek refuge in ignorance and denial that was so memorably displayed by U.S. officials after the Fort Hood shooting in 2009. A man who was a member of the American armed forces, Maj. Nidal Hasan, gunned down his colleagues while shouting "Allahu akbar." On that occasion the American government, like the French government before it and the British government this week, decided to focus on everything about the attack other than what really mattered: the motive. Fort Hood was put down to a case of workplace violence.

There will be many angles to the events in London that must be addressed in the coming days, and we can hope many will receive the appropriate level of public attention. Among them will be one particularly unpleasant irony.

Most of the extremists who have repeatedly expressed their hatred of British soldiers are themselves supported by the British state. A prominent hate-preacher—Anjem Choudary, a leader of the disbanded al Muhajiroun—was even caught on video earlier this year extolling Britain's "jihad-seekers' allowance." As he explained to his followers, "The normal situation, really, is to take money from the kafir"—a slur for non-Muslims. "Allahu akbar. We take the money."

After the video showed up online, a BBC reporter asked Mr. Choudary to clarify how much he's taking—the press has long reported a sum of £25,000 ($37,770) per year. "It's irrelevant," Mr. Choudary replied.

This would not be the first time a country has paid both sides in a conflict. But if the reported figure is anywhere near accurate, it would surely be the first time in human history that a society has paid its opponents better than it pays its own. A British soldier can expect to start in the army on a salary of around £16,000 ($24,172).

The events in south London must cause a re-evaluation by British society of the insanity we have been permitting. The question is not how sad we feel. The only question should be what we do about it.

Mr. Murray is associate director of the Henry Jackson Society, a London-based think tank.

A version of this article appeared May 24, 2013, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The London Terror Attack Was More Than 'Unforgivable'.

Thursday, May 23, 2013

WHEN DID WE VOTE TO BECOME MEXICO?

By Ann Coulter

http://www.anncoulter.com/

May 22, 2013

April 18, 2013: Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., flanked by Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., left, and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., right, speaks about immigration legislation. (AP)

At first I thought the IRS scandal was leaked to distract from the Benghazi scandal. But that didn't make sense because the IRS scandal is a more obvious abuse of power than the White House lying about the murder of four Americans in Libya.

Before I had resolved which scandal was distracting from which, we found out the Department of Justice was spying on The Associated Press -- not to protect national security, but to prevent the AP from scooping the White House. Then, this week, it broke that the Department of Justice was also spying on Fox News for reasons that remain unexplained.

Meanwhile, Sens. Marco Rubio, Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham and John McCain are working feverishly to turn the country into Mexico.

So now I think all the scandals are intended to distract from Rubio's amnesty bill.

For decades, Mexicans have been about 30 percent of all legal immigrants to the United States, while only a smidgen more than 1 percent come from Great Britain. Is that fair? Granted, their food is better, but why is it the norm is to have nearly 30 times as many Mexican as British immigrants?

We have been taking in more immigrants from Guatemala, the Dominican Republic and Colombia, individually, than from England, our mother country. There are nearly twice as many immigrants from El Salvador as from Canada, and 10 times as many as from Australia.

Why can't the country be more or less the ethnic composition that it always was? The 50-1 Latin American-to-European ratio isn't a natural phenomenon that might result from, say, Europeans losing interest in coming here and poor Latin Americans providing some unique skill desperately needed in our modern, technology-based economy.

To the contrary, it's result of an insane government policy. Teddy Kennedy's 1965 Immigration Act was designed to artificially inflate the number of immigrants from the Third World, while making it virtually impossible for anyone from the nations that historically provided our immigrants to come here.

Pre-1965 immigrants were what made this country what it was for a reason: They were the pre-welfare state immigrants. From around 1630 to 1966, immigrants sank or swam. About a third of them couldn't make it in America and went home -- and those are the ones who weren't rejected right off the boat for being sick, crippled or idiots.

That's why corny stories of someone's ancestors coming here a half-century ago are completely irrelevant. If their ancestors hadn't succeeded, their great-grandchildren wouldn't be here to tell the story because no one was given food stamps, free medical care and housing to stay. (And vote Democrat.)

Now we're scraping the bottom of the barrel by holding ourselves out as the welfare ward of the world and specifically rejecting skilled immigrants.

As Milton Friedman said, you cannot have open borders and a welfare state. The reason a country's average immigrant matters is that the losers never go home -- they go on welfare. (Maybe if they had to work, immigrants wouldn't have as much time to build bombs.) Airy statements about wanting to end welfare aren't going to change that implacable fact.

It should not come as a surprise that a majority of recent immigrants are following a path that's the exact opposite of earlier immigrants. The immigrant story of lore is that the first generation is poor but works hard, then the second, third and fourth generations soar up the socioeconomic ladder.

But innumerable studies have shown that Mexican first-generation immigrants work like maniacs -- and then the second, third and fourth generations plunge headlong into the underclass.

By now, Mexicans are the largest immigrant group in America, with about 50 million Hispanics living here legally.

Marco Rubio's amnesty bill will soon make it 80 million. First, there are at least 11 million illegal immigrants, a majority from Mexico, who will be instantly legalized. Then we'll get their entire extended families under our chain migration system.

I wouldn't want that many Japanese! I wouldn't want that many Dutch (not that there are that many Dutch)! Why do we have to become a different country? Was there a vote when the country decided to turn itself into Mexico? No other country has ever just decided to turn itself into another country like this.

The nation's plutocrats are lined up with the Democratic Party in a short-term bid to get themselves cheap labor (subsidized by the rest of us), which will give the Democratic Party a permanent majority. If Rubio's amnesty goes through, the Republican Party is finished. It will be the "Nancy Pelosi Democratic Party" versus the "Chuck Schumer Republican Party."

When that happens, the cover-up of murder in Benghazi, a little IRS abuse or governmental spying on journalists will be a good day for civil liberties.

A majority of Americans still do love this country -- including, one hopes, legal immigrants who thought they were leaving Mexico. But a policy that will change America forever is about to slip through under the cloak of endless scandals from the corrupt Obama administration.

Afghanistan Comes to London

Posted By Daniel Greenfield On May 23, 2013 @ 12:58 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 9 Comments

http://frontpagemag.com/

After telling the story of Mohammed’s boast that he would make the mountain come to him, only to be forced to go to it, Francis Bacon observed, “If the mountains will not come to Mohammed, Mohammed will go to the mountain.”

Americans, Englishmen, Frenchmen and countless others went to the Muslim world hoping to turn it into another Boston, another London and another Paris. Instead, Boston, London and Paris are turning into another Kabul, another Islamabad and another Mogadishu. Mohammed has come to the mountain.

Five years ago, the sight of Muslim terrorists beheading British soldiers was a horror that could happen in Afghanistan or Iraq. Now it has happened in broad daylight in the capital of the United Kingdom.

In a decade, 600,000 white Londoners have fled the city. Those are the sorts of numbers you would expect from the Syrian civil war. Their place has been taken by the million Muslims occupying the city.

Woolwich Common, adjacent to the area where the attack took place, is described as an “inner-city multicultural neighborhood” which is to say that it is more ethnically diverse than the London average; it has more violent crimes than average and is among the 5% of poorest neighborhoods. Only 58% of its population was born in England and a quarter of its residents immigrated in that same dreadful decade.

Multiculturalism has enriched the area with the Woolwich Manz, a Somali Muslim gang whose antics have led residents to fear walking the streets at night. The Royal Borough of Greenwich’s Social Inclusion and Justice Division informs us that there are thousands of Somalis in the borough, most of whom live in Woolwich Common and Woolwich Riverside.

Gang wars over the lucrative drug business have broken out between the Woolwich Manz and other African gangs. Already in 2007, the London Evening Standard said that area residents were describing the Woolwich Common Estate as a “war zone” with stabbings and shootings and a new generation of child soldiers being recruited into the war. It was a little piece of Somalia in the United Kingdom.

The two men who butchered a British soldier are believed to be Somalis. Last year it was reported that dozens of Muslims in the UK were being trained to fight for Al Qaeda in Somalia. There were concerns over what those men would do once they returned to the United Kingdom.

Al-Shabaab, the local Al Qaeda franchise, subsists on tens of thousands of pounds from the hundreds of thousands of Somali settlers living in the United Kingdom. In 2012, Al-Shabaab terrorists had threatened a terrorist attack against the UK, saying, “The nightmare that surreptitiously looms on British shores is bound to eclipse the horrors of 7/7 and 21/7 combined.”

That nightmare still looms. It is the nightmare of the savage wars of the Muslim world being exported to the United Kingdom.

Last year, Shabaaz Hussain was sentenced to five years in jail in Woolwich Crown Court for his fundraising activities on behalf of Al-Shabaab. Five years earlier, Osama bin London and his followers had been sentenced at that same court for the 21/7 plot which attempted to set off bombs in a number of London Underground stations. The majority of Bin London’s followers were African immigrants.

Ramzi Mohammed, a Somali, turned to face a young mother with a baby in her stroller before trying to detonate his bomb.

Muslim fighters have torn Somalia apart. And importing 200,000 of them into the United Kingdom is beginning to have the same effect. There are an estimated 70,000 Somalis in Greater London. That makes London the 12^th largest city in Somalia. Nearly 2 percent of Somalia now lives in the UK.

80 percent of Somalis in the UK live in public housing. They have the lowest employment rate of every immigrant group in the country. And within four years, they had managed to rack up over ten thousand arrests. Every effort to integrate them has failed. Rather than the Somalis becoming British, shards of Britain have become little Mogadishus.

The Somalis are not alone in this regard. Muslim immigration to the UK has brought the norms of Somalia, Afghanistan and Egypt to the streets of London. Individual acts of violence can be overlooked. But there is nothing individual about all these cases. This is a culture of violence.

Islam sanctifies that culture of violence. It takes tribal killings and endows them with the status of a religious duty. Jihad is simply gang warfare, no different than the kind practiced by the Woolwich Manz, given theological meaning. Men have been butchering other men with machetes throughout Africa. But when a Muslim mutilates a British soldier with a machete, then he is engaging in a religious ritual.

This is no clash of civilizations because there is hardly anything resembling civilization on the other side. Islam began with a gang raiding caravans. It now persists in gangs raiding across Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Europe.

What happened near Woolwich Commons would not have been considered extraordinary in Afghanistan, Somalia or Syria. It is only extraordinary because it has been a long time since rampaging Vikings were disemboweling the locals. It is only extraordinary because the nation is hobbled by the assumptions of civilization. And one of those basic assumptions is that murderers with red hands will not carry out beheadings in your streets.

The United Kingdom has become a civilized place. Unfortunately its practice of importing savages makes that civilization of climbing roses and social progress unsustainable. If you import millions of people who follow a religion that sanctifies tribal violence, then you must expect tribal violence to tear apart what you have built. And if you do not wish that to happen, then you must close the gates on the barbarians.

There is no need to go fight the Taliban in Afghanistan. Not when they are already living in London in public housing and screeching diatribes about the coming conquest while treating themselves to all the luxuries of the welfare state. And as their numbers grow, ignoring them will become impossible.

The butchers who perpetrated this latest atrocity wanted to be seen. They wanted to break through the media boycott to tell the peoples of the United Kingdom that they were being murdered in the name of Islam. The story is already being met with the usual cognitive dissonance and being swept under the rug, but that just means that the next bunch will try even harder to convey the message that the war is here.

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Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/afghanistan-comes-to-london/

The Real Voter Suppression of 2012

Voter ID didn’t reduce turnout, but the IRS may have.

By John Fund

http://www.nationalreview.com/

May 23, 2013

Lois Lerner of the IRS. Photograph: J Scott Applewhite/AP

The 2012 election season was filled with angry cries of “voter suppression,” almost all of them regarding attempts by states to require voter ID and otherwise improve ballot integrity. Bill Clinton warned that “there has never been — in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the other Jim Crow burdens on voting — the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today.” Democratic-party chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said “photo-ID laws, we think, are very similar to a poll tax.”

All of this proved to be twaddle. An August 2012 Washington Post poll showed nearly two-thirds of African-Americans and Hispanics backing photo ID. The Census Bureau has found that the rate of voter turnout for blacks exceeded that of whites for the first time in the 2012 election.

But it now turns out there may have suppression of the vote after all. “It looks like a lot of tea-party groups were less active or never got off the ground because of the IRS actions,” Wisconsin governor Scott Walker told me. “Sure seems like people were discouraged by it.”

Indeed, several conservative groups I talked with said they were directly impacted by having their non-profit status delayed by either IRS inaction or burdensome and intrusive questioning. At least two donors told me they didn’t contribute to True the Vote, a group formed to combat voter fraud, because after three years of waiting the group still didn’t have its status granted at the time of the 2012 election. (While many of the targeted tea-party groups were seeking to become 501(c)(4)s, donations to which are not tax-deductible, True the Vote sought to become a 501(c)(3).) This week, True the Vote sued the IRS in federal court, asking a judge to enjoin the agency from targeting anyone in the future.

Cleta Mitchell, True the Vote’s lawyer, says we’ll never know just how much political activity was curtailed by the IRS targeting. She has one client who wanted to promote reading of the Constitution, but who didn’t even hear back from the IRS for three years – until last Monday, when the IRS informed this client that some questions would be sent.

“I was about to file with the IRS when other tea-party groups started to get harassed,” Pennsylvania activist Jennifer Stefano told Time magazine. “I remember checking with the IRS to see if they wanted the group [Facebook] page or my personal page, and they said ‘All of it.’”

The IRS claims that all of the delays and information demands were rooted in mere mismanagement and misjudgment, a stance that began to look even shakier yesterday when Lois Lerner, the director of the IRS’s exempt-organization division, took the Fifth Amendment before a House committee.

Conservatives have long tangled with Lerner, who was director of enforcement at the Federal Election Commission from 1986 until 2001, when she moved to the IRS.

“Everything we have seen at the IRS was reeled out first at the FEC,” says Jim Bopp, a noted election-law attorney who represented the Christian Coalition in its successful fight to quash the FEC’s attempt to impose a $5 million fine on the group for political activities. The FEC lost the case on summary judgment in a 1999 opinion written by a Jimmy Carter–appointed judge.

“In a dozen out of the 81 depositions in the case, the FEC wanted to know about people’s religious beliefs or the content of their prayers,” Bopp told me. “Lerner took the speech-chilling culture she developed at the FEC right over to the IRS.”

The timing of the greatly increased scrutiny of tea-party groups by Lerner’s IRS office was curious. Glenn Kessler, the fact-checker at the Washington Post who awarded “a bushel of Pinocchios” to Lerner this week, noted that “the targeting of groups began in early 2010, after the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC was announced on January 21.” Claims that the decision deregulating political speech led to an enormous surge in applications for tax-exempt status are bogus. As Kessler showed, the increase between 2009 and 2010 was only about 7 percent.

Ralph Reed ran the Christian Coalition until 1997 and now directs a similar effort called the Faith and Freedom Coalition. He told me that misbehavior against nonprofits by the IRS didn’t begin with Barack Obama’s presidency. “The corruption and abuse of enforcement power, the harassment of Christian and pro-life organizations began with the IRS regulations trying to block the tax-exempt status of Christian schools in the 1970s,” he says. “The only difference is that this time it was more blatant, and hopefully there’s a better paper trail to see exactly what happened.”

Jim Bopp, the election-law attorney, hopes some good will come out of the IRS scandal. “What’s clear is that bureaucrats and regulators can abuse the system when there aren’t bright lines. This should teach us we have to nail down exactly what the permissible level of political activity for a non-profit is. That will make it harder for arbitrary and capricious bureaucrats who might want to misuse their power.”

It won’t be easy to discover whether the “voter suppression” engaged in by the IRS was malicious and political. But we have to make every effort to find out before the American people start losing confidence in the integrity of our elections.

— John Fund is national-affairs columnist for NRO

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Woolwich killing: the random attack has always been MI5's greatest fear

The Woolwich attack has all the hallmarks of the very nightmare MI5 has feared – low key fanatics arming themselves with basic weapons and targeting a soldier or other victim at random.

By Tom Whitehead, Security Editor
http://www.telegraph.co.uk
22 May 2013

The police and security services have had repeated success since the 7/7 outrage in 2005, which left 52 innocent people dead, but they have been under constant threat of the lone wolf terrorist.

Dubbed the “Nike terrorists” after the sports giant’s slogan “Just Do It”, Britain has faced a new generation of Islamic extremists that are virtually impossible to detect.

They are self-starting fanatics who have radicalised themselves over the internet and while many may be inspired by al-Qaeda they do not need any command or control from the terror group.

MI5 was last night urgently investigating the alleged assailants in the Woolwich attack and trawling their systems to see if they were known to them or had ever crossed their radar.

But the nature of the new threat is often such attacks can come out of nowhere, with no network or obvious plot for MI5 or the police to pick up on in advance.

In 2010, Roshonara Choudhry was convicted of attempting to murder the MP Stephen Timms with a knife at his constituency office having radicalised herself.

Earlier this year a group of Birmingham terrorists only narrowly missed attacking a rally by the English Defence League through their own incompetence.

The security services only picked up on the group after they had turned up late for their target and were stopped by a traffic officer driving home in a car without insurance.

The group had knives, guns and viable homemade bombs the last of which they had built from terror material on the internet.

Senior Whitehall sources have regularly expressed relief that random, basic but deadly attacks have not been more common place in the UK.

The threat of self starters increased dramatically with the emergence of the Yemen-based al-Qaeda preacher Anwar al – Awlaki.

He gave sermons in English over the internet and encouraged followers anywhere to launch whatever attack they could, spawning the "Just Do It" motto.

Awlaki was killed in 2010 but his influence has long resonated and almost every fanatic convicted of terror plots in the UK in recent years have been inspired by him.

Last year, the then Director General of MI5, Jonathan Evans warned that one of the biggest threats to the UK was from “lone actors”.

John O’Connor, a former Flying Squad commander at Scotland Yard, said: “This has all the hallmarks of a very low key terrorist incident which raises a number of problems for the authorities.

“This type of attack is very difficult to protect against because it is not as though you are talking about a network of people following their plans.

“This raises the whole ball game.

"The bottom line of it is that this could spring up anywhere and that's the concern. It's very difficult to keep a tab on where this is going and where the threat level is."

He added: “It seems to me that this is a departure from the established type of attacks that you see or the established plans that you see of terrorism causing mass murder.

"You're into a new round of terror threats in this country, particularly as you don't know the full extent of it.

"As you don't know that – and I don't suppose the authorities know that – they have got to look at the worst case scenario.

"It is pretty horrific what has happened to this poor fella – to be murdered outside his own barracks just because he's a soldier, or at least that's what it looks like to me."

The security services and police have foiled more than a dozen terror plots on UK soil since 2005, including a major plot in every year since then.

They have included a plot to blow up airliners with liquid based bombs in 2006, targeting shopping centres and nightclubs with fertiliser based explosives, plans to target the Stock Exchange and this year 11 men were jailed as part of a plot to attack the UK with eight suicide bombers.

But the threat to soldiers has also been constant.

In 2008, a Muslim terror group was jailed for planning to kidnap a solder and film his execution.

And earlier this year three men were jailed for a terror plot that included targeting the military-linked town of Wootton Bassett.

Jihad Abhors a Vacuum

By Mark Steyn
National Review's Happy Warrior
http://www.steynonline.com/
May 22, 2013

Post-9/11, we in the omniscient pundit class were all Afghan experts. Post-Boston, we are all Chechen experts.

Strictly between us, I can count what I know about Chechens on one leg. A couple of years ago, while I was in Copenhagen picking up an award from the Danish Free Press Society, a one-legged Chechen prematurely self-detonated in the Hotel Jørgensen while assembling a bomb. His device, using the same highly volatile TATP as in the London Tube bombings, was intended for my friends at Jyllands-Posten, publishers of the famous Mohammed cartoons, to whom I chanced to be giving an interview. All things considered, I'm glad the poor fellow pre-activated in his hotel room rather than delivering his package in the midst of my photo shoot. His name was Lors Doukaiev, and he had traveled from his home in Liège, Belgium, in order to protest the Mohammed cartoons by exploding a bomb on September 11. Got that? A citizen of Belgium is blowing up a newspaper in Denmark on the anniversary of a terrorist attack on America.

So whatever was bugging him didn't have a lot to do with Chechnya. In Boston, before he was run over by his brother and found himself committing the jihadist faux pas of greeting his 72 virgins with tire tracks from head to toe, young Tamerlan Tsarnaev had apparently put on his Amazon wish-list the book The Lone Wolf and the Bear: Three Centuries of Chechen Defiance of Russian Rule. Yet while the Chechen-nationalist struggle has certainly become more Islamic in the last two decades, it's a bit of a mystery what it has to do with Jutland newspapers and Massachusetts marathons. Lors Doukaiev and Tamerlan Tsarnaev were young men in their mid twenties who had lived in the West for much of their lives. Both were boxers. Aside from the fact that Lors was one-legged and Tamerlan wasn't, the quotes their friends and neighbors offered in the wake of their sudden notoriety are more or less interchangeable: "He was perfectly integrated. He was jovial and very open." That was Fabian Detaille, young Doukaiev's trainer at the Cocktail Boxing Club in Droixhe, speaking to Belgian radio, but it could just as easily have been one of Tamerlan's boxing buddies on NPR in Boston.

The Washington Post covered much of the Tsarnaev narrative under the headline "A Faded Portrait of an Immigrant's American Dream." The story is about what you'd expect from the headline but the "faded portrait" is fascinating — a photograph of the family before they came to America: young Mr. and Mrs. Tsarnaev with baby Tamerlan, and Uncle Muhamad with a Tom Selleck moustache and Soviet military uniform. If you only know Ma Tsarnaeva from her post-Boston press conferences as a head-scarfed harpie glorying in her sons' martyrdom and boasting that she'll be shrieking "Allahu akbar!" when the Great Satan takes her out too, the "faded portrait" is well worth your time: Back then, just before the U.S.S.R. fell apart, the jihadist crone looked like a mildly pastier version of an Eighties rock chick — a passable Dagestan doppelgänger for Joan Jett, with spiky black hair and kohl-ringed eyes. She loves rock 'n' roll, so put another ruble in the jukebox, baby!

Then she came to America and, after a decade in Cambridge, Mass., returned to her native land as a jihadist cliché — pro-sharia, pro-terrorist, pro-martyrdom, pro-slaughter. She arrived here as Joan Jett, and went back all black heart.

The Tsarnaevs were a mixed marriage. Pop was Chechen, Mom was Dagestani, from the Z-list stan on Chechnya's borders. But there's really no such thing as a "Dagestani." Dagestan is a wild mountain-man version of Cambridge, celebrating diversity until it hurts. Its population includes Azerbaijanis, whom you've heard of, because they're from the stan that thinks it's a jan. The rest of the guys are — stan well back — Avars, Dargins, Kumyks, Laks, Rutuls, Aghuls, Nogais, Tsakhurs, and Tabasarans. Oh, and Lezgians, a mountain tribe of fearsome female warriors high on fermented yak's milk. I'm making that last bit up, but for a moment you weren't sure, were you? Dagestan has everything except Dagestanis. They're all in Ingushetia, maybe.

For the last decade, I've been lectured by the nuancey-boys on how one can't generalize about Islam, and especially about Islam in the West: There are as many fascinating differences between Mirpuri Pakistanis in Yorkshire and Algerian Berbers in Clichy-sous-Bois as there are between Nogais and Lezgians in Dagestan. No doubt. But, whatever their particular inheritance, many young Muslims in the West come to embrace a pan-Islamic identity. The Tsarnaev boys, for example, fell under the influence of an "Australian sheikh." That's to say, a sheikh born in Sydney. While back in the Caucasus in 2012, Tamerlan is rumored to have met William Plotnikov, a Toronto jihadist whose Siberian parents are such assimilated Canadians they winter as Florida snowbirds. When they came back, they found a note from William saying he'd gone to France for Ramadan. And thence east, to his rendezvous with the virgins.

Like the photographs of Mrs. Tsarnaeva then and now, these are stories of dis-assimilation, of secularized Easterners who in the vacuum of Western multiculturalism search for identity and find a one-stop shop in Islamic imperialism.

Either that, or it's the local gym. Like Lors and Tamerlan, the Aussie sheikh and the Canuck terrorist were boxers. For African-Americans, boxing used to be the way out of the ghetto. For Western Muslims, boxing is apparently the way out of Cambridge, Mass. — and straight into jihad.

The IRS: Destroying Liberty Since before You Were Born

By Todd Keister

http://www.americanthinker.com/

May 22, 2013

In the fallout from the recent revelations about the Internal Revenue Service systematically persecuting conservative political groups and other enemies of President Obama, the establishment is putting on a good show of being shocked by the behavior. The reality is that the IRS is and always has been a tool of oppression and is routinely used by those in power to destroy their opponents.

Once the income tax expanded to include nearly every wage-earner and company in the country, it was immediately seized upon as a potent weapon by the worst tyrants in American history. Franklin Roosevelt loved the IRS and used it well to silence his opponents. When he wasn't illegally wiretapping members of Congress or other enemies, he was dispatching revenue agents to trump up charges against anyone who dared to oppose him. Roosevelt's own son, Elliot, said of his father, "[He] may have been the originator of the concept of employing the IRS as a weapon of political retribution." Roosevelt sent his minions to destroy Senator Huey Long, radio commentator Boake Carter, Congressman Hamilton Fish, Former Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, newspaper publishers William Randolph Hearst and Moses Annenberg, and dozens of others. FDR also intervened to derail IRS investigations into corrupt Jersey City Democrat Frank Hague and then-Congressman Lyndon Johnson.

Mississippi newspaper publisher Hodding Carter was audited repeatedly during the 1950s when he made the unpopular decision to support the Supreme Court's desegregation rulings. Likewise, Dr. Martin Luther King and several lawyers at his Southern Christian Leadership Conference were audited in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

John Kennedy and his little brother Bobby found the IRS valuable for intimidation, launching a massive tax probe of steel company executives who refused to set their prices at levels acceptable to Jack and Bobby. As Robert Kennedy himself later said, "[w]e looked over all of them as individuals ... we were going for broke ... their expense accounts and where they'd been and what they were doing[.] ... I picked up all their records[.] ... All of them were subpoenaed for their personal records."

In the mid-1960s, Missouri Senator Edward Long held hearings on the widespread corruption within the IRS. In retaliation, the IRS leaked information to an editor at Life magazine about Long's ties to infamous union boss Jimmy Hoffa. The result was Long's defeat in the 1968 Democratic primary. The editor at Life, William Lambert, said that after Senator Long was defeated, he received a personal phone call from IRS Commissioner Sheldon Cohen offering congratulations.

President Richard Nixon knew the awesome power of the IRS to instill fear and silence opposition. As Nixon once said about his choice to head the agency, "I want to be sure he is a ruthless son of a b****, that he will do what he's told, that every income-tax return I want to see I see, that he will go after our enemies and not our friends. Now, it's as simple as that. If he isn't, he doesn't get the job."

In 1996, Senator William Roth initiated the first comprehensive investigation and oversight hearings in 70 years on the tactics of the Internal Revenue Service. In his 1999 book¹ detailing what the Senate Finance Committee discovered, he lays out a shocking tale of arrogance, corruption, mismanagement, malfeasance, harassment, and criminal activity. Senator Roth describes law-abiding citizens, hounded for years by rouge IRS agents, ultimately being driven to suicide, and their relatives continuing to be harassed and publicly embarrassed long after burying their loved ones.

Not only does the virtually limitless power of the IRS make it an irresistible weapon for authoritarian presidents, but its boundless authority to snoop, harass, and destroy lives inevitably corrupts its personnel. It is a universally recognized maxim that power corrupts -- and the IRS has more of it than any other entity in our country. The agency employ three times as many personnel as the FBI and has detailed files on every taxpayer in the nation -- including your Social Security number and those of your children, every place you work, how much you make, what you invest in, with whom you do business, the cost of your mortgage, and your financial account numbers. And the IRS answers to no one.

The arrogance of power was on full display as far back as 1925, when Senator James Couzens of Michigan was trying to conduct an investigation² into corruption within the Bureau of Internal Revenue (As the IRS was previously known). During one hearing, Senator Couzens was called away from the committee proceedings by none other than Internal Revenue Commissioner David Blair, who brazenly served him with charges that he owed $11 million in back taxes. After a costly and protracted legal fight, it was eventually determined that Senator Couzens was in fact owed a million-dollar refund.

That arrogance and abuse of power is only to be expected from an organization that has the authority to accuse anyone of criminal activity without any requirement of proof; if they accuse you of a crime, you bear the burden of proving yourself innocent.

A review of the Treasury Department's own Inspector General Reports for the past two years reveals the widespread nature of criminal activity at the IRS. During that period alone, there were more than 17,000 complaints made to the inspector general's office involving IRS agents engaging in "bribery, theft, impersonation, taxpayer abuses, and false statements."

What this latest scandal -- and indeed, the entire history of the IRS -- clearly demonstrates is the fact that the income tax is wholly incompatible with a free society. The notion that the government is entitled to a certain portion of your wages before you even receive your paycheck is a direct contradiction of the most basic tenet of liberty: private property. It is no exaggeration to say that once Congress was granted the power to levy an unlimited tax upon incomes, its members assumed the power to render every American under absolute tyranny. The 16^th Amendment imposes no limits on the income tax; quite literally, the Congress could vote tomorrow that Americans must pay all of their income directly to the government, and it would be legal and constitutional for them to do so.

The practical effect of all this has been the total abrogation of private property rights in America. If the income of every American is essentially state property, by what means can a person obtain any other private property? The income tax has made every wage-earner a slave to the federal government; the extent of his freedom is entirely dependent upon the whim of the Congress.

In 1871, on the eve of the repeal of Abraham Lincoln's Civil War income tax measure, the commissioner of internal revenue described the income tax as "the one of all others most obnoxious to the genius of our people, being inquisitorial in its nature, and dragging into public view an exposition of the most private pecuniary affairs of the citizen." This is a very apt description; a person's income is a very private matter, which the government now exercises constant surveillance over. Your employer reports to the government every cent you make. Your bank and broker, under threat of fines or imprisonment, report every penny of interest or profit you accrue. Likewise, you are required under penalty of law to file a tax return each year to reconcile your debt to the government. As former treasury secretary Albert Gallatin is reported to have said about consumption taxes, "a severe inquisition must take place ... and extraordinary and dangerous powers must be given to the collectors."

Unless and until the income tax amendment is repealed and the IRS's 98,000 henchmen are sent packing, the abuses will continue, as they have for nearly a century. Only when the government is no longer entitled to maintain constant surveillance over every citizen's personal financial affairs can we begin to restore the freedom Americans once enjoyed. Like all men in all ages, those given extraordinary and dangerous power will use it to tyrannize others, and as such, this particular power has no place in a free land.

Todd Keister is a former state police commander, a naval intelligence specialist, and a published author and columnist.

¹Roth, William V., and William Nixon. The Power to Destroy. New York: Atlantic Monthly, 1999.

²Ibid

France’s Growing Islamist Problem

By Ryan Mauro

http://frontpagemag.com/

May 21, 2013

The reaction to a recent Muslim robbery of a priest in France is a sad indication of where the country is headed. A Catholic officialpointed out, “If it had been an imam or rabbi, he [the Interior Minister] would already been on the spot.” This is no surprise, as Socialist President Hollande’s pandering to the Muslim population played a large role in his election.

The incident began when four Muslims surrounded the priest and told him to hand over his cell phone. One thief knocked him unconscious. The attack may have been motivated by criminality and not jihad, but the two are part of a common trend.

There are over 750 government-designated “Sensitive Urban Zones” in France, referred to as “No-Go Zones”by Dr. Daniel Pipes. About 5 million Muslims live in these areas of France where law enforcement doesn’t exercise decisive control. When the authorities do have to step in, a violent backlash quickly arises. There are many videos of Muslim worshippers holding illegal prayers in the streets when their mosques overflow without any response from police.

On New Year’s, about 1,200 cars were set on fire and police clashed with residents in the Muslim-majority districts of Strasbourg and Mulhouse. In August, a two-day rampage was sparked when a Muslim was arrested for driving without a license around the time of a funeral. Massive riots have broken out in these no-go zones because of the hostility to reasonable law enforcement. Over half of the French prison population is Muslim, where many are radicalized.

A lack of integration is the most common factor in Islamic terrorists. These unassimilated areas are not just breeding grounds for criminals, but for extremism as well—particularly when foreign Islamist governments and organizations get involved.

The Saudi Arabia-based Muslim World League, described by Andrew McCarthy as “the Muslim Brotherhood’s principal vehicle for the international propagation of Islamic supremacist ideology,” is helping finance the construction of 200 new mosques. The French Council of the Muslim Faith wants to eventually double the 2,500 mosques in the country.

Qatar, the supposed U.S. “ally” that subsidizes the Muslim Brotherhood, is also active in France’s Muslim community. It is financing mosques and the Union of Islamic Organizations in France, the Muslim Brotherhood’s main branch there. It demands the government to pass a law against “Islamophobia.” The Qatari government is also investing $65 million in the suburbs where over 1 million Muslim immigrants live.

This isn’t purely an act of humanitarianism or a business investment. The Qatari constitution is based on Sharia Law. The Christians in Qatar, almost 6% of the population, are allowed to practice their faith but cannot proselytize to Muslims. Hypocritically, Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani publiclypledged in December 2011 to “spare no effort” to proselytize the Islamic teachings of Muhammad al-Wahhab, the founder of what is often called “Wahhabism.”

In 2011, a secret French intelligence report warned of extremist trends in the city of Marseille, thanks to “self-appointed” and charismatic imams. Only a “relatively low” number of the 250,000 Muslims living there support violent jihad, but “Islamic fundamentalism has progressed to the point where it has won over the majority of the Muslim population.”

French President Sarkozy was not afraid to challenge the Islamist trend, even if it opened him up to false charges of “Islamophobia” and bigotry. In the months leading up to the election, his government instituted new requirements for citizenship, including language fluency, passing tests on history and culture and pledges of allegiance to “French values.”

On the one hand, Soeren Kern, who has closely watched the underreported Islamist trends in France, said Hollande’s victory over Sarkozy was “the first time that Muslims have determined the outcome of a presidential election in a major western European country; it is a preview of things to come.”

Hollande’s government has endorsed150 new mosque projects including a mega-mosque in Paris that was touted as a step towards “progressively building a French Islam.” Hollande also promised to grant amnesty to all 400,000 illegal Muslim immigrants and to modify the laws so non-citizen Muslim residents can vote in the municipal elections in 2014.

On the other hand, Hollande’s government has taken some action to encourage assimilation.

In August 2012, the French government re-designated 15 of the no-go zones as “Priority Security Zones.” Soeren Kern reported that this was part of a plan to reassert authority over the most crime-ridden zones. Aware of the resistance ahead, the French government deployed riot police, detectives and intelligence personnel. If the campaign is successful, another 40 of the no-go zones will become “Priority Security Zones.”

The Islamist trend in France must be reversed. Pew found that the current 6.5 million-strong Muslim population in France, which is 7% of the population, will grow to about 10.3% by 2030. That’s nowhere near a majority, but it’s enough to swing elections, politically Balkanize the country and create a cesspool for criminals and terrorists.

This article was sponsored by the Institute on Religion and Democracy.