No more collusion with Iran!

Ace informs us,

Trump Imposes Sanctions on Iran, Designates the Revolutionary Guards as a Terrorist Organization
—Ace of Spades
When Obama was coddling Iran, he was colluding with them.

He had foreign contacts with Iran. Valerie Jarrett herself had lots of foreign contacts with Iranians.

Ergo, collusion.

The IRGC [Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps] has long been implicated in terrorist plots against the U.S. military throughout the Middle East and provides major financial support to other known terrorist organizations such as Lebanese Hezbollah.
"Today, I am formally announcing my administration's plan to designate Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), including its Qods Force, as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) under Section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act," Trump said in a statement, adding, "The IRGC actively participates in, finances, and promotes terrorism as a tool of statecraft. The IRGC is the Iranian government's primary means of directing and implementing its global terrorist campaign."

The sanctions will not just punish the IRGC but any entity that does business with them.

Comparing atrocities

Mark Steyn shares his thoughts about the Las Vegas shootings and some other recent shootings.

...As often in America, it was met with a great deal of heroism by ordinary men and women rising to the occasion: There was, for example, an Englishwoman in a wheelchair who'd been seated on a raised platform so she could get a better view of the concert. If it were every man for himself, it would have been easy to leave her there, trapped on the dais, exposed to the gunman. Instead, as everyone fled, those around her nevertheless carried her to safety and raised her wheelchair over the fence they scrambled over. There were many stories like that throughout the day, far outweighing the grotesque Tweets glorying in the slaughter of presumed Trump voters. Twitter is an idiotic medium, but not, happily, a representative one.

I had thought by last night we would know more about Stephen Craig Paddock. By now the usual social-media non-paper trail and petty-crime police records and mental-health issues have emerged. Instead, nothing has - except some bizarrely distinctive details: He wasn't a loner, but lived with his girlfriend - an Australian citizen currently in Japan, but planning to return to the US today. He was not the usual loser, but a multi-millionaire. He had no apparent interest in guns and no military training, but he demonstrated remarkably lethal proficiency, either with semi-automatics he modified or with a genuine automatic he somehow acquired, a weapon that has been used in precisely three crimes in America since 1934. He didn't "snap", but instead calmly planned his act, identifying and securing the perfect corner suite in a massive hotel and then discreetly moving in dozens of weapons over four days and constructing platforms in front of those two windows.

Some of these quirks do not appear to be particularly consistent, and the Aussie in the adjoining room, for one, says there were "multiple shooters" and "they killed a security guard on my floor". On the face of it, "multiple shooters" would seem more plausible than Isis' claim that Mr Paddock had converted to Islam and changed his name to "Abu Abd Abdulbar al-Ameriki". But, pending any further revelations, it may well be that a wealthy retiree with no interest in guns got sufficiently interested sufficiently quickly to pull off America's all-time deadliest single-shooter massacre: An old dog taught himself a new trick, on a spectacular scale.

As I said on stage at the Guthrie Theatre, I had intended to talk about other matters - about the weekend's latest "vehicle attack" in Edmonton, Alberta, by a Somali immigrant (with an Isis flag on the seat of his car), who stabbed one policeman and ran over four people at Commonwealth Stadium; and about the two young women fatally stabbed (one with her throat slit) at the main rail station in Marseilles, by an illegal immigrant from the Maghreb; and the seventeen-year-old from the northern Caucasus who's just gone on trial in Oslo after being found with a bomb the day after the Stockholm jihad-motorist struck. But all these events, by fiercely committed ideologues in multiple jurisdictions in service of a global civilizational struggle, were all but forgotten, banished to the in-brief sidebars at the foot of page 37 by one apparently non-ideological American retiree who, unlike the aforementioned, was extremely good at killing large numbers of people.

I confess to a certain resentment at this. I regard the Albertan, French and Norwegian stories as far more relevant to where our world is heading. It is not a small thing when a young Frenchwoman can have her throat slit in broad daylight at a major public venue in a European metropolis, notwithstanding that the Mayor of London and others tell us we have to accept that it's now part and parcel of life in a big city. Yet in a certain sense these events are ineffectual - as the corpse count of a Stephen Paddock reminds us. And every Stephen Paddock makes it easier for all those who want to brush off Islamic supremacism and retreat to all those lame-o lines about how you've got more chance of being killed by a toppling household appliance than by a terrorist, and anyway, even when the shooting starts, half-a-dozen Isis cells can't match one white-male gun nut. Why didn't the Somali guy, the North African, the Caucasian jihadist figure out what one 64-year-old from a Nevada retirement community did? That all over the map there are soft targets with large numbers of people penned into small, tight, open-air spaces - and right across the street tall hotels whose upper floors offer easy opportunities for a bloodbath.

We have been, for the most part, very lucky. The foot-soldiers of the jihad are mostly dimwit Mohammedans: they have youth and energy and ideological fervor, but they are also largely stupid and unimaginative. The old guys are less energetic, but also less stupid: if Isis were right and there really were Islamic Stephen Paddocks - 40-50-60-somethings, worldly and full of low cunning - things would be very different.

Consider this year's two pop-concert atrocities: at Ariana Grande's in Manchester, 23 people died - in the cause of the new global caliphate; at Jason Aldean's in Vegas, 59 died - for no reason at all. It is a glum thought, but Paddock's all-time record will likely not stand for long. America's four deadliest single-shooter mass murders occurred in the last decade. Only one of them - the Orlando nightclub massacre - can be said to have a political or ideological component. The rest seem to be a peculiarly contemporary form of narcissism - that, when my life heads south, the only way to give it meaning is to take large numbers of people with me. There is no cause, no fealty, no "Allahu Akbar!" - because pointless slaughter is the supreme triumph of amoral will: Who needs Allah? You're your own Allah. Unlike Manchester or Nice or Paris or Berlin or Brussels, there is no meaning: Indeed, the only meaning is the meaninglessness; that is the point - the black void at the heart of the act.

To reiterate, I regard that Somali guy in Alberta as more relevant to the day after tomorrow, and a man like Paddock as peculiarly depraved, decadent and self-indulgent. But there's no arguing that (even with due allowance for the easier access to weaponry) the latter seem to be far more effective in their evil. In May, Isis called for attacks on Las Vegas - surely an iconic target for Islamic supremacists, but apparently not one they were capable of striking. So it was left to a retired accountant to do it for himself. I wrote in After America that, given the USA's open southern border, the best investment the jihad could make would be to try to convert three or four per cent of Mexicans to Islam. (There's some evidence they're doing that in parts of Latin America.) By the same token, imagine if Isis could really make good on their boasts and convert to Islam a few cool, cold, middle-aged men who over four days calmly walk multiple golf bags across the lobby and press the button for the 32nd floor...

Read more here.

"Dress it up however you want!"

Bookworm writes,

Radical Islam, not radical Christianity or radical Judaism or radical Buddhism, is a danger to the civilized world. You can dress it up however you want, but the number deadly religious attacks by people other than Muslims has to be, at a guess, fewer than 20 worldwide in the last 20 years. Maybe even fewer than 10. Islam, on the other hand, is nearing 30,000 terrorist attacks in the last 15 years alone.

Last night's mall shootings

The terror continues now almost daily.

Five people were fatally shot at a shopping mall in Burlington, Washington. The killer left the scene, and has not yet been found.

The shooting happened in the cosmetics area of a Macy’s department store at the Cascade Mall. A state patrol sergeant, Mark Francis, told reporters that four women died at the scene, and later tweeted that a fifth victim, a man, had died from his injuries in a local hospital.

Read more here.

Who is more likely to commit a terrorist attack in America?

Reihan Salam is alleged to have written in National Review,

...as a share of their population (1%), Muslims in America are 5,000% more likely than non-Muslim Americans to commit a terrorist attack.

I cannot find the link. I read the quote here.

San Bernardino terror, the FBI, Apple, and John McAffee

John McAfee is an antivirus software founder running for president in the US as a member of the Libertarian Party. He wrote an op-ed and gave permission to Business Insider to reprint it. Here are some of his most points.

Using an obscure law, written in 1789 — the All Writs Act — the US government has ordered Apple to place a back door into its iOS software so the FBI can decrypt information on an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters.

It has finally come to this. After years of arguments by virtually every industry specialist that back doors will be a bigger boon to hackers and to our nation's enemies than publishing our nuclear codes and giving the keys to all of our military weapons to the Russians and the Chinese, our government has chosen, once again, not to listen to the minds that have created the glue that holds this world together.

This is a black day and the beginning of the end of the US as a world power. The government has ordered a disarmament of our already ancient cybersecurity and cyberdefense systems, and it is asking us to take a walk into that near horizon where cyberwar is unquestionably waiting, with nothing more than harsh words as a weapon and the hope that our enemies will take pity at our unarmed condition and treat us fairly.

...The FBI, in a laughable and bizarre twist of logic, said the back door would be used only once and only in the San Bernardino case.

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, replied:

The government suggests this tool could only be used once, on one phone. But that's simply not true. Once created, the technique could be used over and over again, on any number of devices. In the physical world, it would be the equivalent of a master key, capable of opening hundreds of millions of locks — from restaurants and banks to stores and homes. No reasonable person would find that acceptable.

The government is asking Apple to hack our own users and undermine decades of security advancements that protect our customers — including tens of millions of American citizens — from sophisticated hackers and cybercriminals. The same engineers who built strong encryption into the iPhone to protect our users would, ironically, be ordered to weaken those protections and make our users less safe.

...The FBI may use different words to describe this tool, but make no mistake: Building a version of iOS that bypasses security in this way would undeniably create a backdoor. And while the government may argue that its use would be limited to this case, there is no way to guarantee such control.

...And why do the best hackers on the planet not work for the FBI? Because the FBI will not hire anyone with a 24-inch purple mohawk, 10-gauge ear piercings, and a tattooed face who demands to smoke weed while working and won't work for less than a half-million dollars a year. But you bet your ass that the Chinese and Russians are hiring similar people with similar demands and have been for many years. It's why we are decades behind in the cyber race.

So here is my offer to the FBI. I will, free of charge, decrypt the information on the San Bernardino phone, with my team. We will primarily use social engineering, and it will take us three weeks. If you accept my offer, then you will not need to ask Apple to place a back door in its product, which will be the beginning of the end of America.

Read more here.

Another plot foiled

Do you know about Anzac Day? It is a national day of remembrance in Australia and New Zealand that broadly commemorates all Australians and New Zealanders "who served and died in all wars, conflicts, and peacekeeping operations" and "the contribution and suffering of all those who have served." It is celebrated on April 25 each year.

Just prior to Anzac Day this year a punk named Sevdet Besim

allegedly discussed packing a kangaroo with explosives, painting it with an Islamic State symbol and setting it loose on police officers.


Sevdet Ramadan Besim, 19, of Hallam, is accused of plotting an Anzac Day terror attack in Melbourne that would have included a beheading.

He was committed to trial in the Supreme Court on Thursday after pleading not guilty to four charges.

Mr Besim is accused of planning to run over, then behead, a police officer.

Federal police allege Mr Besim and a person overseas had been in a series of communications in the lead-up to the alleged plot for Anzac Day.

Mr Besim allegedly said he was "ready to fight these dogs on there [sic] doorstep" in online communications with the person overseas, according to court documents.

"I'd love to take out some cops," Mr Besim is alleged to have said.

"I was gonna meet with them then take some heads ahaha."

Read more here.

Is Facebook an accomplice to terror?

A class action lawsuit will be filed Monday in San Francisco against Facebook.

Reports Algemeiner: ”10,000 Israelis had signed a petition, launched by Shurat HaDin-The Israel Law Center, indicating their desire to join a class-action suit against Facebook for acting as an accomplice to terror.”

Shurat HaDin, an NGO whose mission is combating terrorism through “lawfare,” took up the case, following multiple complaints lodged by concerned users about the proliferation of pages in Arabic that call for the killing of Jews. Since Facebook’s response has been blasé at best, with claims that content is monitored for adherence to certain “community standards,” and utterly ineffectual, since pages such as “Stab Israelis” have not been removed, Israel Law Center founder Nitsana Darshan-Leitner decided to take the social media giant to court.

PJ Tatler has the story here.