By Nathan Barton
Good morning.
In France (and elsewhere) the terrorist attack drama continues to expand and reverberate, as 88,000 French police and troops scour the country to try and find two of the three attackers, despite early reports that they had been captured or killed. So far, the only killing and wounding seem to be of French Police. a policewoman was killed in a shoot-out in southern Paris on Thursday, triggering searches in the area as the manhunt widened for two brothers “suspected” of killing 12 people at a satirical magazine in an apparent Islamist militant strike. Police sources could not immediately confirm a link with the killings at Charlie Hebdo weekly newspaper which marked the worst attack on French soil for decades and which national leaders and allied states described as an assault on democracy. [But it turns out that the man and a woman ARE associates of the killers, and have now taken hostages in a kosher supermarket on Friday.] And at least one French policeman has been wounded in a Paris suburb. French Interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve said that the officer had stopped to investigate a traffic accident in the suburb of Montrouge when gunfire rang out. Cazeneuve said that a street sweeper was also wounded, and added that the gunman was still at large and cautioned against jumping to any conclusions about the attack. Sky News reported that the gunman had been wearing a bulletproof vest. Mama Liberty: I’d think the sight of such a vest would be unusual enough to be noted. Obviously, at least one witness did notice… so one wonders why this cop didn’t notice? Poor situational awareness? Probably long practiced complacency, in spite of the serious incentive provided by the Hebdo attack. Continue reading
Islamic Wars Continue to Boil (was: Libertarian commentary on the news, #15-01H)
By Nathan Barton
Once again, I seem to be devoting much of the commentary to the war on the rest of the world by Muslims (yes, “some” Muslims) and the latest manifestation in France. We must remember, though, that what France is suffering is nothing compared to the daily, even hourly, bloodbath and terror that stalks the streets and villages of a half-dozen Muslim nations and nations with much larger Muslim minorities. And it is also important to remember that it is not just non-Muslim cartoonists and cops that are the victims: most of the deaths in the Islamic wars are of other Muslims: they gleefully kill each other far more than they kill and wound western soldiers or police or whomever. But at the same time, they seek to make more and more of the world their own, part of the Ummah, the Dar al-Islam: the lands of submission to Allah in which the Koran, the Haditha, and Shari’a rule. Continue reading →