Aftermath of Paris: Jihad Threat Increases, Muslim World Celebrates, US Governors urge Halt to Muslim Refugees

There is so much news related to Islam's Global Jihad against the West, that it is impossible to keep up with it all. I wanted to highlight in this post what I feel are some key headline stories, with direct links to the articles.

This could be the single most ominous headline since the Paris Jihad Attacks of November 13:

• Syrian ambassador to India says that over 20% of refugees to Europe may have links to the Islamic State 

Anecdotal evidence points to widespread Muslim approval of the Islamic State and jihad against Europe and America:

• Muslim soccer fans boo, scream “Allahu akbar” during moment of silence for Paris jihad victims

• Video: Muslims in Turkey celebrate Islamic State jihad massacre in Paris

• 30 Muslims Out of 1.8 Million in Paris Turn Up to Protest Terrorism

These stories report on Muslim clerics and mosques behind the Paris jihad terrorists:

• Muslim cleric in Belgium incited Paris jihad murderer to kill unbelievers

• Paris jihad murderer was incited to wage jihad at mosque in Chartres

Bomb Threats and Jihad Attacks Rampant around the Globe:

• Global Jitters: West on High Alert as Bomb Threats Force Flight Landings, Evacuations

• OBAMA MOCKS FEAR OF WIDOWS AND ORPHANS — HOURS BEFORE FEMALE SUICIDE BOMBER EXPLODES IN PARIS!

And, at last count, 29 US Governors refuse to take Muslim refugees:

• Governors’ Revolt Continues: No Syrian Refugees

• Why Governors Can’t Refuse To Take Syrian Refugees But That Doesn’t Mean They Have To

• RAND PAUL: STOP ALL IMMIGRATION, VISITORS AND STUDENTS FROM COUNTRIES WITH JIHADIST MOVEMENTS

Assyrians of Paris: 'There are now many jihadists in France. We have the impression of being invaded...'

"The entire Assyrian community is hugely disappointed and angry with the French Government. Government inaction has resulted in the problems in Syria and Iraq coming to France. The French authorities have been entirely reactive, not proactive. They have not anticipated, but waited until the problems were on their doorstep... We made public protests last year. We have issued press statements warning of the dangers. But the Government has been inactive."  —Max Yabas, Coordinator, Union des Assyro Chaldeens de France (UACF).

The Assyrians of Paris
by Peter Ahem, AINA, November 17, 2015

St. Thomas The Apostle Assyrian church in Sarcelles, France

(AINA) -- The shocking terrorist strikes in Paris on the evening of November 13 have caught the attention of the world. While political leaders send expressions of condolence and support to President Hollande and his nation, individuals with friends and family in Paris have been clambering to seek assurances of their safety.

I am a frequent visitor to Paris where I spent time as a student. Some of my student friends were Assyrians who lived in the neighborhood of Sarcelles, where two thirds of France's 16000 Assyrians are resident.

The Assyrian community in France represents the result of two major waves of immigration. The first influx followed the genocide of Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks by the Ottomans during the First World War. This second major wave of arrivals is far more recent, with many fleeing Iraq and Syria over the last decade because of rising persecution by Islamic radical groups. For decades France has been a place of refuge for Assyrians seeking relief from oppression.

Mark Durie: 'Paris attacks were not 'nihilism' but sacred strategy'

One of the most important Christian writers on Islam and the global Muslim persecution of Christians, Anglican pastor and theologian Mark Durie, weighs in on the struggle to accurately render the meta-narrative concerning the Paris Jihad Attacks.

For a variety of reasons, there are a great many policymakers, media analysts, elected officials, Christian leaders, and ordinary citizens who are having an extremely difficult time understanding what is happening. Mark Durie offers a practical corrective to the West's epistemological blindness.


Paris attacks were not 'nihilism' but sacred strategy
by Mark Durie, November 17, 2015

LEADING commentator Janet Daley's article in Saturday's Telegraph ‘The West is at war with a death cult’ stands for everything that is woeful about European elites’ response to Islamic jihad.

It is a triumph of religious illiteracy.

The jihadist enemy, she asserts, is utterly unintelligible, so beyond encompassing in ‘coherent, systematic thought’ that no vocabulary can describe it: ‘This is just insanity’, she writes. Because the enemy is ‘hysterical’, lacking 'rational demands', 'negotiable limits,’ or ‘intelligible objectives’ Daley claims it is pointless to subject its actions to any form of historical, social or theological analysis, for no-one should attempt to ‘impose logic on behaviour that is pathological’.

Despite this, Daley then ventures to offer analysis of and explanations for ISIS’ actions, but in doing so she relies upon her own conceptual categories, not those of ISIS.

Her explanations therefore fall wide of the mark.

‘Civilians’

Daley writes: ‘We face a violent and highly contagious madness that believes the killing of civilians is a moral act.’  Here she appeals to Western concepts of war, reflected, for example, in the Geneva Convention, which provides detailed principles for the ‘protection of civilian persons’.

Yet the first step in understanding a cultural system alien to one’s own, is to describe it in its own terms.

ISIS does not subscribe to the Geneva Convention.  Its actions and strategies are based upon medieval Islamic laws of jihad, which make no use of the modern Western concept of 'civilian’.

They do, however, refer to the category of disbelievers (mushrik or kafir).

ISIS believes that killing disbelievers is a moral act, in accordance, for example, with Sura 9:5 of the Qur’an, which states :‘Fight and kill the idolators (mushrik) wherever you find them'.

Not nihilism

Daley writes: ‘The enemy has stated explicitly that it does not revere life at all’ and ‘Civilians are not collateral damage in this campaign: their deaths are the whole point.’  She goes on to lament that the latest French attacks lack any purpose, but are ‘carried out for the sheer nihilistic thrill of it’.

The claim that ISIS does not ‘revere life’ seems to refer to any number of statements by Islamic radicals, including an ISIS militant who vowed to ‘fill the streets of Paris with dead bodies’, and boasted that ISIS ‘loves death like you love life’ (see here).  This is a theological reference to a series of verses in the Qur’an in which Jews are criticised for desiring life (Sura 2:94-96, 62:6-8).

According to the Qur’an, loving life is a characteristic of infidels (Sura 3:14; 14:3; 75:20; 76:27) because it causes them to disregard the importance of the next life.  The taunt much used by jihadis, ‘We love death like you love life’,  implies that jihadis are bound for paradise while their enemies are hell-bound.

The point of these statements is that Muslims are willing to fight to the death, while their infidel enemies will turn back in battle. This is not about reverence for life, but about who has the will to win. This has nothing to do with nihilism, which is a belief that there are no values, nothing to be loyal to, and no purpose in living. In fact ISIS fighters have strong and clear loyalties and values, alien though they may be to those of Europe.

Were the Paris Attacks Motivated by Islam?

Including two excellent, brief commentaries by William DiPuccio:

• More Thoughts on Paris: Are Acts of Terrorism Islamic?
• Islam's Rule of Numbers —Again

(Anne Sophie Chaisemartin via AP)

In response to the Paris terrorist attacks, political and religious leaders around the globe have been issuing statements. Always rich with condolences, when it comes to actual responses to such horrific levels of bloodshed, the positions are predictably bi-polar: while there are many who urge a decisive and forceful response (even declared, open warfare) against the Islamic State, there are many who choose to declare that the attacks "have nothing to do with Islam."

A few of the more absurd, cognitive dissonant remarks by secular leaders include:

• NATO leader on Paris jihad massacre: “This is not a fight between the Islamic world and the western world”
• Bernie Sanders: “Climate change is directly related to the growth of terrorism”
• In the wake of the Paris jihad attacks, France says it’s “essential” to combat…climate change
• Minnesota state representative candidate: “ISIS isn’t necessarily evil”

In the Orthodox world, the positions are also very clear. Here are but three samples:

Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, head of the Synodal Department for Church and Society Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate:

"The fight against terrorism requires mobilization, first of all spiritual, moral. No one can stay safe in his cozy capitalist philistine world... 

"The age of tolerance, diversity, philosophical indifference and denial of truth [which characterized the 20th century] is over. We need to understand: in the world of ideas, religious and public processes, there is good and evil, there are moral and immoral convictions and ideas, and there are also criminal convictions and views..."

Fr. Tim Curtis, of St Anne’s Orthodox Christian Church in Northampton, UK:

“The people who are committing these attacks are using religion as an excuse. Nothing that they say or do looks like a faith in God. 

“They are not even taught Islam. They are in poverty and are told their children and families will be looked after and educated if they carry out these attacks. They are being sold a lie. 

“This terrorism is not about Islam. It’s about power and poverty.”

Patriarch Ilia II, head of the Georgian Orthodox Church:

“Human beings reveal their hostility and the Islamic has nothing to do with it... There are people who relate these [terrorist acts] to religion, Islam, but in fact religion has nothing to do with it; a person expresses evil will.”

While it might be a comforting thought to believe that Islam "has nothing to do with it," it seems that the purveyors of this position are willfully ignoring the origins of Islam, the example of Muhammad, and the cyclic history of Islam, which repeatedly features the arising of fundamentalist sects (Wahhabi, Salafi, Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic State, etc.) seeking to return to and fully restore the original purity of Islam, basing it exclusively on the Koran and the example of Muhammad, not mixing it with Christian morals and values, nor ameliorating it with appeals to Western values of human rights, morality and tolerance.

It is hard to understand why so many strive to exonerate the religion of Islam from culpability for the methodology of Islamic terrorism. Perhaps it stems from ignorance of Islam's scriptures, teachings, the life of Muhammad, and its long (1400 year) history of violence against non-Muslims, coupled with some vague fear that IF this religion held by 1.5 billion persons on the planet is the root cause behind rising Muslim violence against Christians and other non-Muslims, all around the globe, THEN the conclusion is unthinkable.

Undoubtedly much of this willful blindness is epistemological; Christians and Western leaders project their own virtuous predispositions onto Islam as a whole when they assert that "Islam has nothing to do with terrorism."

The following two brief articles by William DiPuccio (whose excellent 2013 article, Islam and Extremism: What Is Underneath, should be required reading) effectively show exactly why Islam itself is the prime motivator and unchanging constant underlying all Muslim terrorism and violence against non-Muslims:

Avenging the Defeated Caliphate: The Significance of November 13 in the Paris Attacks

Did the Muslim jihadists in Paris choose November 13 for its symbolic value in planning their attacks?

Over at Terror Trends Bulletin, a brief but weighty post conveys what to most of us is a forgotten historical footnote (Thanks to Emanuel):

The Historical Significance of November 13th in Islam:

On November 13, 1918 the Allied troops occupied Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire was the Caliphate, the Islamic State of its day.

A little extra background, from the Wikipedia entry, Defeat and Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire:

The Occupation of Constantinople took place in accordance with the Armistice of Mudros [signed on 31 October 1918], ending the Ottoman participation in World War I. The occupation had two stages: the initial occupation took place from 13 November 1918 to 16 March 1920; from 16 March 1920 - Treaty of Sevres. 

1918 saw the first time Constantinople had changed hands since the Ottoman Turks conquered the Byzantine capital in 1453. An Allied military administration was set up early in December 1918. Haghia Sophia was converted back into a cathedral by the Allied administration, and the building was returned temporarily to the Greek Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch.

Now, several additional news reports are revealing that the Paris Jihad Attacks were not only carefully orchestrated in Paris, but across Europe, with cells acting in Germany and the UK:

• German police arrest Muslim linked to Paris jihad attacks: had guns, explosives, hand grenades
• London: Gatwick Airport terminal evacuated, police arrest man with grenade in his bag
• As Paris Burned, UK Muslims Told To ‘Struggle’ For Islamic State In Unprecedented Islamist Show Of Force

It seems clear that, whether or not the date was chosen by the jihadis for its link to the Western Allies occupying Constantinople in 1918, it was indeed a carefully planned and executed operation, spanning at least three countries, and marks an ominous turn in Islam's war on the West. 

Paris: 'The Beginning of the End...'

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”

Rod Dreher over at The American Conservative has posted a couple of updates on the Paris Jihad Attacks which convey the ominous sense that the situation has deteriorated in Europe, perhaps irretrievably so:

UPDATE: From a reader in Paris:

This is — in a way — the beginning of the end. More than 100 dead innocent people so far. At the same time, our best special ops troops are being deployed all over Africa. We don’t have enough soldiers and our enemy lives next door. This is war, a new kind of war and we better get ready ASAP. “Hell is empty and all the devils are here”. Thank you for you prayers, this is a combat beyond reason. We won’t go quietly into the night, but we might go at the end.

UPDATE.2: What the state of emergency means, according to French media analysis of the President’s statement:

• Under the countrywide state of emergency, “protection security zones” can be established.
• In the metropolitan Paris region (Ile de France):
• All people “whose activity is dangerous” can be consigned to their homes.
• Entertainment venues and meeting halls can be closed provisionally.
• The forced surrender of weapons and “administrative searches” permitted.
• Border controls reestablished, with mobilization of French Customs with immediate effect.
• Schools and universities in the Paris region to be closed on Saturday.
• School trips on Saturday cancelled.
• A defence council will meet at 9am and 1,500 extra troops have been mobilized

UPDATE.2: Some people on Twitter have their noses out of joint because I tweeted earlier saying that Angela Merkel’s generous refugee policy is going to guarantee much worse than what happened in Paris tonight in Germany. They had the idea that I’m blaming refugees for the Paris attacks. I am confident that refugees had nothing to do with this attack, nor do I expect that genuine refugees would carry out the same in Germany, or anywhere else. Merkel will have accepted over a million refugees by the end of this year, and her government is expecting millions more by 2017...

[From Politico.eu]:

On Wednesday, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble warned that Germany faced a potentially destructive “avalanche” of refugees, adding that “avalanches can be triggered when a somewhat careless skier heads down the hill, shifting just a little bit of snow.” Many viewed that as an analogy to Merkel’s September decision to welcome thousands of refugees stranded in Hungary.

It’s a different world now. If only a tiny percentage of those refugees are ISIS supporters or agents, Germany — and Europe — faces more of what Paris got tonight.