Muslim Saves Jews In Paris Kosher Store

Lassana Bathily, Muslim employee of Paris kosher deli. Photo by Screengrab from Buzzfeed

One of the unsung heroes after Friday’s hostage crisis at a kosher supermarket in eastern Paris was a Muslim employee, who hid shoppers in a basement walk-in freezer while terrorists seized hostages just upstairs.

The shop was busy on a Friday as Jewish customers bought specialties for the Sabbath, which began at sunset that night. But its clientele was as diverse as the neighborhood where it sat: Twenty-five-year-old French Muslim Malik Zadi told The Washington Post that “It’s a kosher store, but not only Jews go there. I go there… In this neighborhood, there are Muslims, Jews, Christians.”

Four people were killed Friday when the terrorist Amedy Coulibaly took several hostages inside a Kosher market in Paris, but that number may well have been higher were it not for a quick-thinking employee of the market named Lassana Bathily.

Bathily, a 24-year-old Muslim from Mali, was working in the store in the Porte de Vincennes neighborhood when the Islamist gunman burst in.

As panic ensued, up to 15 customers in the store hurried down to the store basement, when Bathily had an idea.

“When they ran down, I opened the door [to the freezer],” he told France’s BFMTV.

He quickly shut off the freezer and switched off its light. As he closed the door to shelter the customers inside, he told them,“Stay calm here. I’m going out.”

Eventually police raided the market, killing Coulibaly. As the hostages were freed from the freezer, they had a few words of thanks for Bathily. “They congratulated me,” he told BFMTV.

ON SOCIAL MEDIA, BATHILY WAS BEING PRAISED AS A HERO FOR HIS ACTIONS.

France’s Jewish Defense League thanked Lassana Bathilyby name on Twitter, saying he “saved many Jewish lives by hiding them in the cold room,” and using the hashtag“ #JewsAndArabsRefuseToBeEnemies.”

I Am Not Charlie. I Am Ahmed!

Lest we forget, there are also Muslims who wear “white hats.” The majority are good, productive and loyal citizens.

#JeSuisAhmed Reveals The Hero Of The Paris Shooting Everyone Needs To Know

In the hours following the deadly attack on French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, much of the public support has been directed toward the victims that worked for the magazine, like editor-in-chief Stéphane Charbonnier, 76-year-old cartoonist Jean Cabut and economist Bernard Maris.

… but it’s equally important to remember that the lives of the victims extended beyond the confines of the magazine.

Two of those killed, 42-year-old Ahmed Merabet and 49-year-old Franck Brinsolaro, were police officers — the very people tasked with protecting Charlie Hebdo‘s staff. Merabet’s death was captured on film during a French television broadcast and shared quickly across social media. Two masked gunmen can be seen approaching him, ignoring his pleas to spare his life.

Who Was He? As information about the victims began to filter out, the world learned that Merabet worked at a police station in Paris’ 11th Arrondissement, near the location of Charlie Hebdo‘s offices. Reports also emerged that Merabet was himself Muslim.

He gave his life to protect Charlie Hebdo‘s right to ridicule his religion, a powerful fact that has now become a trending hashtag on Twitter

Merabet’s Sacrifice Matters: Each of the 12 victims deserves equal remembrance and respect. But given the Islamophobic backlash that has already ripped through France — several mosques were vandalized overnight, and many fear that the Charlie Hebdo attack is to blame — the country is in a dangerous place when it comes to anti-Muslim sentiment.

Instead of assuming that everyone who practices Islam is tied to the extremists who carried out Wednesday’s violence, we would do well to remember that that vast majority are, in fact, much closer to Ahmed Merabet.

“We Invented The Car Bomb”

Car bombing has become synonymous with the Middle East in recent years, so few people would be surprised to realise that this most destructive and indiscriminate form of terror became established in this part of the world.

However, less well known is the fact that this was originally a Jewish weapon used against the Arabs.

The method of killing and destruction was actually pioneered in 1920 in New York, and in a cart rather than a car. An Italian anarchist called Mario Buda packed a horse-drawn wagon with explosives and killed dozens of innocent bystanders on Wall Street in a protest against capitalism.

However, the first bomb to be transported to a target in a motorised vehicle was created by two fighters of the Lehi movement in pre-state Palestine.

These pioneers of a uniquely horrible form of warfare are still alive and were interviewed by the presenter, former CIA agent Bob Baer.

Yaakov Heruti and Eliezer Ben-Ami explained how they chose their target, the Soraya building in Jaffa, used as the headquarters of the armed Arab resistance. They parked their truck bomb outside the building and set it off, killing 28 people including innocent bystanders, and injuring hundreds more.

The two 83-years-old were unrepentant about the operation but regretted the non-combatant casualties. Said Heruti:

“We never wanted to kill innocent civilians and children, it happened by bad luck.”

Perhaps, but it must have crossed their minds that by exploding a truck packed with explosives in a crowded street without any warning, civilians and children were likely to be blown away along with enemy fighters.

This was not a film that set out to make any moral points – indeed most of those interviewed showed little remorse for their actions – but it did demonstrate that in every single case, the reverberations of the explosions had a negative impact on those who planted the bomb as much as on those who were attacked.

After the Lehi bomb, an Arab called Fawzi El Kuttub set about wreaking vengeance on the Jews. Trained by the Nazis in bomb-making, he aped the Jewish fighters by setting off car bombs which killed Jewish civilians in Jerusalem, and came close to assassinating future Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. When the smoke eventually cleared, eight car bombs had been set off – four Arab, four Jewish – claiming 120 lives.

Source: The Jewish Chronicle

The Irgun: Terrorists or Freedom Fighters?

On Sunday, the 9th of 2014, I posted an article with appeared in the Jerusalem Post (Israeli) and The Telegraph (UK), stating that Tzipi Livni stated that her father, considered her father Eitan – who was the Irgun Zva’i Leumi’s director of operations during the pre-state days and fought British rule – as as freedom fighter.

Tom Segev responded to  her claim in a 2006 article in Haaretz Newspaper (Israeli):

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni stated that there is a difference between Palestinian freedom fighters who act against soldiers and terrorists, who act against civilians.

The Livni test is interesting, of course, both because the foreign minister was basically talking about her father, Eitan Livni, who was the chief operations officer in the Irgun and later a Knesset member.

Naturally, Livni does not view the Irgun people as terrorists, but as freedom fighters. And so says the Irgun’s official history, too: It operated against military and government facilities, not against civilians.

Livni most likely was raised on this myth, on the lofty self-image nurtured by Menachem Begin even before his organization fell apart.

The Truth Was Different:

On July 6, 1938, Irgun people snuck a bomb into the produce market on Hamelachim Street in Haifa. Two Irgun veterans reported later, in a book that was printed with the aid of the Defense Ministry, that 18 Arabs were killed and 38 wounded in the operation.

Two days later, Irgun people carried out an attack in Jerusalem; four Arabs were killed. Ten days after that, the Irgun returned to the Haifa market: 27 Arabs were killed and 47 wounded.

In their book, “Divrei hayamim le’milhemet hashihrur” (“Chronicles of the War of Independence”), editors Yaakov Amrami and Arie Melitz described how the attacks were carried out:

Twice, the bombs were brought in inside baskets of vegetables. One bomb was placed inside a crate of shoe polish. Over the years, the organization also struck at buses, coffee shops and movie houses. People from the Haganah and Palmach also carried out actions against Arab civilians. Both were terrorists, also according to the criteria presented by Livni on “Nightline.”

Livni focused on the targets of the attacks, for a moment it seemed that she ruled out in principle any harming of civilians. This also makes for a nice historic lesson: Indeed, there is no justification for harming civilians. Never: Not in Dresden or Hiroshima or Hanoi or Beirut or Ramat Gan or Gaza.

But Livni also justified the artillery fire on Gaza, and then the definition game requires other participants: state-sponsored terror, harming civilians during wartime.

Neither Israelis nor Palestinians have ever forsworn terror. Both have used it and found on occasion that it advances their goals. Arab terror in the 1930s almost led to the expulsion of the British from Palestine, on the eve of World War II; Jewish terror gave a push to their expulsion in the late 1940s. There is a generation of Israelis that grew up not only admiring the terror used by the underground organizations prior to the state’s founding, but also on a whole ethos of wars against colonialist regimes everywhere.

Yitzhak Shamir called himself “Michael” after Michael Collins, the famed leader of the Irish underground.

Naturally, Israelis also grew up admiring the partisans who fought against the Nazis.

In the 1950s and ’60s, they identified with the liberation movements in Africa and South America. Along with their admiration for Che Guevara and Steve Biko – a leader of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.

Israelis also nurtured friendships with leaders who had sat in jail up to then as terrorists: Israel gave them weapons and money, invited them to Israel and showered them with great honor. Their books were translated into Hebrew and published by national publishing houses. Nothing offended Israelis more than the pejorative “imperialists.”

Moshe Dayan compared the Fatah to the Irgun; in this comparison, Israel took the role of the despised British.

Many years later, Ehud Barak said that if he were a Palestinian, he would have joined the terror organizations. 

Fatah hijacked planes and thereby put the Palestinian problem on the world map – Who knows if anyone would have heard about their distress if it weren’t for their terror?

It’s doubtful if Ariel Sharon would have initiated the dismantling of the settlements in the Gaza Strip if not for Palestinian terror.

This is the same Ariel Sharon who in the 1950s stood at the head of a renowned paratroop unit that committed acts of terror in Palestinian villages across the border.

By Tom Segev
Apr. 20, 2006
12:00 AM

Attacks On Israeli Soldiers Legitimate and Not Terrorism

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni came under fire for making a distinction between terrorists who attack civilians and enemy fighters who fight against IDF soldiers. 

 

“Somebody who is fighting against Israeli soldiers is an enemy and we will fight back, but I believe that this is not under the definition of terrorism, if the target is a soldier,” Livni said in an interview three weeks ago on US television network ABC’s Nightline that was broadcast on Israel Radio Tuesday. 

 

During the ABC interview, Livni was asked whether she considered her father, Eitan, who was the Irgun Zva’i Leumi’s director of operations during the pre-state days and fought British rule, a terrorist. 

 

She replied that her father fought against British soldiers, not civilians, and agreed that if Hamas used suicide bombings only against soldiers she would not call that “terrorism.”

Israel’s former Consul General Alon Pinkas, who was frequently interviewed on Nightline, said that groups that exclusively target soldiers can legitimately be called “guerrilla organizations.” 

 

Livni reiterated in an interview to Israel Radio Tuesday morning what she had said in the Nightline interview; namely, that attacks specifically against soldiers could be seen as “more legitimate” than attacks on Israeli civilians. 

 

Fury As Israeli Minister Says Deadly Attacks On Troops Are Not Terrorism

 

Israel’s foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, has broken a taboo by declaring that Palestinians who kill Israeli soldiers are not terrorists.

 

The row began when Israeli radio broadcast an interview in which 48-year-old Mrs Livni said that attacks on Israeli soldiers were “more legitimate” than attacks on Israeli civilians.

 

“Somebody who is fighting against Israeli soldiers is an enemy and we will fight back,” she said. “But I believe that this is not under the definition of terrorism if the target is a soldier.”

Mrs Livni first made her comments during an interview recorded several weeks ago by the American ABC television network, where they went largely unnoticed.

But when they were broadcast in Israel this week they provoked an immediate angry reaction.

[Tzipi Livni’s defining and making a distinction between legitimate acts of resistance and terrorism, occurred back in 2006. It’s a significant statement and assessment by a major Israeli official which remains relevant and can’t be recanted]

How Much Moral High Ground Does The US Have Over ISIS?

The United States’ war on sexual violence, mass murder and religious persecution should begin at home.

Without question, ISIS is an abomination. However, it is unclear whether America is the right agent to see this through. Part of the trouble relates to the Obama administration’s strategy, which seems likely to empower ISIS even as it undermines the security and interests of the Unted States and its allies – but there is an ethical dimension as well.

While ISIS poses a serious (although likely overstated) threat to the governments of Iraq and Syria, over the last two administrations, the United States has itself forcibly overthrown the governments of Iraq and Libya – each time in defiance of international law. And along with ISIS, the United States has spent the last three years seeking to undermine the Syrian government. Additionally, it has sheltered Israel from meaningful accountability to the international community, allowing the crisis in Palestine to fester.

It would not be a stretch to say that the United States is actually a greater threat to peace and stability in the region than ISIS – not least because US policies in Iraq, Libya and Syria have largely paved the way for ISIS’s emergence as a major regional actor.

But perhaps more disturbingly, many of the same behaviors condemned by the Obama administration and used to justify its most recent campaign into Iraq and Syria are commonly perpetrated by US troops and are ubiquitous in the broader American society. Until these problems are better addressed, United States’ efforts to undermine ISIS will be akin to using a dirty rag to clean an infected wound.

Sexual Violence

The initial driver of US involvement was the outrage over ISIS’ capture of thousands of Yazidi women and the sexual violence subsequently exercised against them – horrors which provided moral credence to the war against ISIS in much the same way that the 2001 US war against the Taliban was justified in part by highlighting the plight of Afghan women living under their rule.

However, over the course of that war, and the subsequent 2003 war in Iraq, US soldiers and contractors repeatedly used rape as a weapon of war, both against prisoners and the local civilian population. But perhaps more disturbing than the crimes committed by US personnel against Iraqis and Afghans were the atrocities committed by servicemen against their fellow soldiers.

As many as one out of three female soldiers are raped over the course of their military careers. Up to 80 percent of these assaults go unreported, in large part because reported cases rarely result in convictions or proportional punishment. In fact, the victims are frequently punished socially and professionally for reporting abuse, and they are barred from suing the government for reparations even when wrongdoing is proven.

The stats are not much better in the broader population. As many as one in five women who attend college in America are sexually assaulted over the course of their academic career, often with no justice even when the crimes are reported. This is commensurate with the broader trend in America – according to White House estimates, roughly a fifth of all American women are raped at some point in their lives.

As in the military, most of these crimes are not reported to the police, and most reported rapes are never prosecuted – let alone result in convictions for the perpetrators.

If the crimes against thousands of women in Iraq and Syria justify a US mobilization that costs nearly $10 million per day, how much more militant should Americans be about resolving the tens of thousands of cases of sexual violence that go unpunished and largely unnoticed in the United States each year?

Astonishing Cruelty

In addition to sexual violence, there was widespread outrage over ISIS’s uncompromising brutality and the pornographic way they record and broadcast these acts – which include beheadings, crucifixions, and occasional incidences of cannibalism.

Of course, US soldiers and contractors have and continue to torture their enemies, often taking obscene photos to brag about and reminisce upon their acts. The contractors who were implicated in these abuses have never been prosecuted. Instead, one whistleblower who initially exposed these crimes, Chelsea Manning, has been sentenced to 35 years in prison.

There are further reports of US servicemen committing massacres, desecrating the corpses of their enemies, or even hunting the locals for sport while collecting photos, and even body parts, as trophies. And these are just a sampling of the acts which have been picked up by war correspondents and detailed in the media – many more crimes have never received exposure abroad, with crimes committed against Iraqis and Afghans by US servicemen going largely under-prosecuted or altogether unprosecuted.

Because these atrocities are not sufficiently dealt with by the United States, the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan have demanded the right to try Americans in their own courts.However, as protecting US politicians and soldiers from international accountability formed the basis of US opposition to establishing or joining the International Criminal Court, the Obama Administration refused to cede anything to these nascent states.

As a result, concerns about accountability proved to be the main obstacle in the US reaching a security agreement with Afghanistan – and Iraq’s refusal to grant US soldiers immunity was the reason the US ultimately abandoned the pursuit of a status of forces agreement there, contributing significantly to the security vacuum that allowed ISIS to rebuild in Iraq and expand into Syria. That is, ISIS’s crimes were largely enabled by America’s refusal to face up to its own.

Americans should bear this in mind as the Obama Administration loosens its already overly permissive standards vis à vis collateral damage and targeting civilians in its current campaign. The killing of innocents is not somehow morally superior if committed remotely by a drone or missile rather than the tools at ISIS’ disposal.

Religious Persecution

Finally, many Westerners have been horrified by ISIS’s persecution of religious minorities (especially crimes against Christians). However, the United States is complicit in this as well: US policies in Iraq helped spark this cycle of sectarian violence.

Meanwhile, its own armed forces were indoctrinated with anti-Muslim propaganda – complete with recommendations for servicemen to resort to “Hiroshima tactics,” in a “total war against Islam,” in which protections for civilians were “no longer relevant.” 

Reflective of this mentality, the armed forces have been heavily infiltrated by white-supremacists, neo-Nazis and other hate groups who believe and act as though they are engaged in a holy war to begin in the Middle East and then be carried back into America. This institutionalized misrepresentation of Islam and dehumanization of Muslims probably played a significant role in the aforementioned atrocities.

However, this is hardly just an issue in the Army. Anti-Muslim discrimination and hate crimes are pervasive in America, from the classroom to the boardroom. In the popular culture, Islamophobia transcends the political spectrum and is fairly mainstream – to the point where pundits and politicians can openly call for Muslim internment camps, or push for laws restricting or altogether banning Muslims from practicing their faith, even as many of these same people work to obliterate the lines between the (Christian) church and state.

Muslim voices which could unapologetically challenge these tropes are largely excluded from the public discourse in favor of“house-Muslims“ who will nod their heads in condemnation of terrorism (emphasizing that most Muslims are “moderates“) while uncritically calling for (liberal) reform and revolution in Muslim lands of which they are no longer residents (if they ever were) – and all without voicing much (if any) substantive criticism of the Western countries in which they reside, beyond the narrow concerns about discrimination and persecution.

And yet despite these compliant spokespeople, and the fact that only 6 percent of terror incidents in the United States have been carried out by Muslims over the last 30 years (and the threat of terrorism is itself overblown), Muslims are frequently subjected to arbitrary surveillance and detention, as well as legal entrapment.

All of these practices are considered crimes against humanity according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the US ostensibly champions everywhere else in the world . . . perhaps nowhere more than in Muslim-majority countries – seven of which the US has bombed in the last 6 years, almost always under the auspices of “humanitarian intervention.”

Authentic Outrage, Authentic Patriotism

Criticisms like these invariably evoke charges of anti-Americanism among reactionary readers – unduly. If one were truly committed to defending America and promoting its values, if sincerely outraged by the sorts of atrocities committed by ISIS – rather than sanctioning condescending and counterproductive incursions abroad, Americans should dedicate much more time and energy to responding to these same problems within the United States and its institutions abroad.

In this way, the United States could respond to the ISIS challenge by growing better and stronger, rather than undermining American’s interests and freedoms in the name of “security.”

By Musa al-Gharbi

Image: Warning: 72 virgin dating service. Apply here

Mexican Drug Cartels Are Worse Than ISIL

Western Obsession With The Islamic State Is Fueled More By Bigotry Than Any Genuine Assessment Of Risk Or Atrocities

The horrific rampage of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has captured the world’s attention. Many Western commentators have characterized ISIL’s crimes as unique, no longer practiced anywhere else in the civilized world. They argue that the group’s barbarism is intrinsically Islamic, a product of the aggressive and archaic worldview that dominates the Muslim world. The ignorance of these claims is stunning.

While there are other organized groups whose depravity and threat to the United States far surpasses that of ISIL, none has engendered the same kind of collective indignation and hysteria. This raises a question: Are Americans primarily concerned with ISIL’s atrocities or with the fact that Muslims are committing these crimes?

For example, even as the U.S. media and policymakers radically inflate ISIL’s threat to the Middle East and United States, most Americans appear to be unaware of the scale of the atrocities committed by Mexican drug cartels and the threat they pose to the United States.

CARTELS VERSUS ISIL

A recent United Nations report estimated nearly 9,000 civilians have been killed and 17,386 wounded in Iraq in 2014, more than half since ISIL fighters seized large parts on northern Iraq in June. It is likely that the group is responsible another several thousand deaths in Syria. To be sure, these numbers are staggering.

But in 2013 drug cartels murdered more than 16,000 people in Mexico alone, and another 60,000 from 2006 to 2012 — a rate of more than one killing every half hour for the last seven years. What is worse, these are estimates from the Mexican government, which is known to deflate the actual death toll by about 50 percent.

Statistics alone do not convey the depravity and threat of the cartels.

They carry out hundreds of beheadings every year. In addition to decapitations, the cartels are known to dismember and otherwise mutilate the corpses of their victims — displaying piles of bodies prominently in towns to terrorize the public into compliance. They routinely target women and children to further intimidate communities. Like ISIL, the cartels use social media to post graphic images of their atrocious crimes.

The narcos also recruit child soldiers, molding boys as young as 11 into assassins or sending them on suicide missions during armed confrontations with Mexico’s army. They kidnap tens of thousands of children every year to use as drug mules or prostitutes or to simply kill and harvest their organs for sale on the black market. Those who dare to call for reforms often end up dead.

In September, with the apparent assistance of local police, cartels kidnapped and massacred 43 students at a teaching college near the Mexican town ofIguala in response to student protests. A search in the area for the students has uncovered a number of mass graves containing mutilated bodies burned almost beyond recognition, but none of the remains have been confirmed to be of the students.

While the Islamic militants have killed a handful of journalists, the cartels murdered as many as 57 since 2006 for reporting on cartel crimes or exposing government complicity with the criminals. Many of Mexico’s media have been effectively silenced by intimidation or bribes.

These censorship activities extend beyond professional media, with narcos tracking down and murdering ordinary citizens who criticize them on the Internet, leaving their naked and disemboweled corpses hanging in public squares.

Yet American intellectuals such as Sam Harris appear to be more outraged when Muslims protest or issue threats in response to blasphemous or anti-Muslim hate speech than when cartels murder dozens of journalists and systematically co-opt an entire country’s media.

Similarly, Westerners across various political spectrums were outraged when ISIL seized 1,500 Yazidi women, committing sexual violence against the captives and using them as slaves. Here again, the cartels’ capture and trafficking of women dwarfs ISIL’s crimes. Narcos hold tens of thousands of Mexican citizens as slaves for their various enterprises and systematically use rape as a weapon of war.

U.S. media have especially hyped ISIL’s violence against Americans. This summer ISIL beheaded two Americans and has warned about executing a third; additionally, one U.S. Marine has died in efforts to combat the group. By contrast, the cartels killed 293 Americans in Mexico from 2007 to 2010 and have repeatedly attacked U.S. consulates in Mexico. While ISIL’s beheadings are no doubt outrageous, the cartels tortured, dismembered and then cooked one of the Americans they captured — possibly eating him or feeding him to dogs.

The US government cannot formulate an effective response to the narcos’ severe threats because the American public is far too busy disparaging Islam while the US military kills Arabs and Muslims abroad.

The cartels’ atrocities are not restricted to the Mexican side of the border. From 2006 to 2010 as many as 5,700 Americans were killed in the U.S. by cartel-fueled drug violence. By contrast, 2,937 people were killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Over the last decade, some 2,349 Americans were killed in Afghanistan, and 4,487 Americans died in Iraq. In four years the cartels have managed to cause the deaths of more Americans than during 9/11 or either of those wars.

Barack Obama’s administration claims ISIL poses a severe threat to U.S. interests and national security. However, the militants were primarily concerned with seizing and holding territory in Iraq and Syria until the U.S. began targeting them. Even now, while they have called for lone wolves to carry out attacks on targets in the United States, so far those arrested in connection to ISIL have been trying to go and fight abroad rather than plotting domestic attacks. To the extent ISIL wants to kill Americans, its primary tactic has been to try to lure U.S. troops to its turf by publicly executing citizens they already hold hostage.

In fact, several U.S. intelligence officials have asserted that ISIL poses no credible threat to the United States homeland.

However, the same cannot be said of the cartels.

Narcos have infiltrated at least 3,000 U.S. cities and are recruiting many Americans, including U.S. troops and law enforcement officers, to their organizations. They have an increasingly sophisticated and robust foundation in the U.S., with Mexican cartels now controlling more than 80 percent of the illicit drug trade in the United States and their top agents deployed to virtually every major metropolitan area. There are no realistic assessments indicating that ISIL could achieve a similar level of penetration in the United States.

EXPLAINING THE DISSONANCE

It is clear that the anti-ISIL campaign is not driven by the group’s relative threat to the United States or the scale or inhumane nature of their atrocities. If these were the primary considerations, the public would be far more terrified of and outraged by the narcos. Perhaps the U.S. would be mobilizing 50 nations to purge Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel rather than shielding it from prosecution, helping it polish off its rivals or even move drugs into the United States.

Some may argue that despite the asymmetries, the cartels are less of a threat than ISIL because ISIL is unified around an ideology, which is antithetical to the prevailing international order, while the cartels are concerned primarily with money. This is not true.

A good deal of the cartels’ violence is perpetrated ritualistically as part of their religion, which is centered, quite literally, on the worship of death. The narcosbuild and support churches all across Mexico to perpetuate their eschatology. One of the cartels, the Knights Templar (whose name evokes religious warfare), even boasts about its leader’s death and resurrection. When cartel members are killed, they are buried in lavish mausoleums, regarded as martyrs and commemorated in popular songs glorifying their exploits in all their brutality. Many of their members view the “martyrs” as heroes who diedresisting an international order that exploits Latin America and fighting the feckless governments that enable it. The cartels see their role as compensating for state failures in governance. The narco gospel, which derives fromCatholicism, is swiftly making inroads in the United States and Central America. In short, the cartels’ ideological disposition is no less pronounced than ISIL’s, if not worse.

Unfortunately, the U.S. government cannot formulate an effective response to these much more severe threats because the American public is far too busy disparaging Islam while the U.S. military kills Arabs and Muslims abroad. One thing is certain: America’s obsession with ISIL is fueled by Islamophobia rather than any empirical realities.

Musa al-Gharbi is an instructor in the Department of Government and Public Service at the University of Arizona, and an affiliate of the Southwest Initiative for the Study of Middle East Conflicts (SISMEC). #CrimesAgainstHumanity   #DAESH

The 1920 Wall Street Bombing

The Wall Street Bombing occurred at 12:01 pm on Thursday, September 16, 1920, in the Financial District of New York City. The blast killed 30 people immediately, and another eight died later of wounds sustained in the blast. There were 143 seriously injured, and the total number of injured was in the hundreds.

The bombing was never solved, although investigators and historians believe the Wall Street bombing was carried out by Galleanists (Italian anarchists), a group responsible for a series of bombings the previous year. The attack was related to postwar social unrest, labor struggles and anti-capitalist agitation in the United States.

At noon, a horse-drawn wagon passed by lunchtime crowds on Wall Street in New York City and stopped across the street from the headquarters of the J.P. Morgan bank at 23 Wall Street, on the Financial District’s busiest corner. Inside, 100 pounds (45 kg) of dynamite with 500 pounds (230 kg) of heavy, cast-iron sash weights exploded in a timer-set detonation, sending the slugs tearing through the air. The horse and wagon were blasted into small fragments, but the driver was believed to have left the vehicle and escaped.

The 38 victims, most of whom died within moments of the blast, were mostly young people who worked as messengers, stenographers, clerks and brokers. Many of the wounded suffered severe injuries.The bomb caused more than $2 million in property damage ($23,500,000 with inflation) and destroyed most of the interior spaces of the Morgan building.

“We Are Declaring Israel A Terrorist State”

Bolivia renounced a visa exemption agreement with Israel in protest over its offensive in Gaza, and declared it a terrorist state.

President Evo Morales announced the move during a talk with a group of educators in the city of Cochabamba.

It “means, in other words, we are declaring (Israel) a terrorist state,” he said.

The treaty has allowed Israelis to travel freely to Bolivia without a visa since 1972.

Morales said the Gaza offensive shows “that Israel is not a guarantor of the principles of respect for life and the elementary precepts of rights that govern the peaceful and harmonious coexistence of our international community.”

Bolivia broke off diplomatic relations with Israel in 2009 over a previous military operation in Gaza.

In mid-July, Morales filed a request with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to prosecute Israel for “crimes against humanity.”

Non-Muslims Perpetrated 94% Of All Terror Attacks On US Soil

The Threat To The U.S. From “Muslim Terrorists” Has Been Greatly Exaggerated

An FBI report shows that only a small percentage of terrorist attacks carried out on U.S. soil between 1980 and 2005 were perpetrated by Muslims.

Princeton University’s Loon Watch compiled the following chart from the FBI’s data.

According to this data, there were more Jewish acts of terrorism within the United States than Islamic (7% vs 6%). These radical Jews committed acts of terrorism in the name of their religion. These were not terrorists who happened to be Jews; rather, they were extremist Jews who committed acts of terrorism based on their religious passions, just like Al-Qaeda and company.

(The chart is misleading in several ways. For example, it labels “Extreme Left Wing Groups” and “Communists”, but not “Extreme Right Wing Groups” or “Fascists”. It should have either discarded allpartisan labels, or included labels for both ends of the spectrum. In addition, “Latinos” is misleading, as Loonwatch is actually referring to Puerto Rican separatist groups, Cuban exile groups and the like. However, as shown below, many of the basic concepts are correct.)

U.S. News and World Report noted in February of this year:

Of the more than 300 American deaths from political violence and mass shootings since 9/11, only 33 have come at the hands of Muslim-Americans, according to the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security. The Muslim-American suspects or perpetrators in these or other attempted attacks fit no demographic profile—only 51 of more than 200 are of Arabic ethnicity. In 2012, all but one of the nine Muslim-American terrorism plots uncovered were halted in early stages. That one, an attempted bombing of a Social Security office in Arizona, caused no casualties.

Wired reported the same month:

Since 9/11, [Charles Kurzman, Professor of Sociology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, writing for the Triangle Center on Terrorism and National Security] and his team tallies, 33 Americans have died as a result of terrorism launched by their Muslim neighbors. During that period, 180,000 Americans were murdered for reasons unrelated to terrorism. In just the past year, the mass shootings that have captivated America’s attention killed 66 Americans, “twice as many fatalities as from Muslim-American terrorism in all 11 years since 9/11,” notes Kurzman’s team.

Law enforcement, including “informants and undercover agents,” were involved in “almost all of the Muslim-American terrorism plots uncovered in 2012,” the Triangle team finds. That’s in keeping with the FBI’s recent practice of using undercover or double agents to encourage would-be terrorists to act on their violent desires and arresting them when they do — a practice critics say comes perilously close to entrapment. A difference in 2012 observed by Triangle: with the exception of the Arizona attack, all the alleged plots involving U.S. Muslims were “discovered and disrupted at an early stage,” while in the past three years, law enforcement often observed the incubating terror initiatives “after weapons or explosives had already been gathered.”

The sample of Muslim Americans turning to terror is “vanishingly small,” Kurzman tells Danger Room. Measuring the U.S. Muslim population is a famously inexact science, since census data don’t track religion, but rather “country of origin,” which researchers attempt to use as a proxy. There are somewhere between 1.7 million and seven million American Muslims, by most estimates, and Kurzman says he operates off a model that presumes the lower end, a bit over 2 million. That’s less a rate of involvement in terrorism of less than 10 per million, down from a 2003 high of 40 per million, as detailed in the chart above.

Yet the scrutiny by law enforcement and homeland security on American Muslims has not similarly abated. The FBI tracks “geomaps” of areas where Muslims live and work, regardless of their involvement in any crime. The Patriot Act and other post-9/11 restrictions on government surveillance remain in place. The Department of Homeland Security just celebrated its 10th anniversary. In 2011, President Obama ordered the entire federal national-security apparatus to get rid of counterterrorism training material that instructed agents to focus on Islam itself, rather than specific terrorist groups.

Kurzman doesn’t deny that law enforcement plays a role in disrupting and deterring homegrown U.S. Muslim terrorism. His research holds it out as a possible explanation for the decline. But he remains surprised by the disconnect between the scale of the terrorism problem and the scale — and expense — of the government’s response.

“Until public opinion starts to recognize the scale of the problem has been lower than we feared, my sense is that public officials are not going to change their policies,” Kurzman says. “Counterterrorism policies have involved surveillance — not just of Muslim-Americans, but of all Americans, and the fear of terrorism has justified intrusions on American privacy and civil liberties all over the internet and other aspects of our lives. I think the implications here are not just for how we treat a religious minority in the U.S., but also how we treat the rights & liberties of everyone.”

Kurzman told the Young Turks in February that Islamic terrorism “doesn’t even count for 1 percent” of the 180,000 murders in the US since 9/11.

While the Boston marathon bombings were horrific, a top terrorism expert says that the Boston attack was more like Columbine than 9/11, and that the bombers are “murderers not terrorists”. Theoverwhelming majority of mass shootings were by non-Muslims. (This is true in Europe, as well as in the U.S.)

However you classify them – murder or terrorism – the Boston bombings occurred after all of the statistical analysis set forth above. Moreover, different groups have different agendas about how to classify the perpetrators (For example, liberal Mother Jones and conservative Breitbart disagree on how many of the perpetrators of terror attacks can properly be classified as right wing extremists.)

we reviewed all of the terrorist attacks on U.S. soil as documented by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START). (2012). Global Terrorism Database, as retrieved from http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd.

The START Global Terrorism Database spans from 1970 through 2012 (and will be updated from year-to-year), and – as of this writing – includes 104,000 terrorist incidents. As such, it is the most comprehensive open-source database open to the public.

We counted up the number of terrorist attacks carried out by Muslims. We excluded attacks by groups which are obviously not Muslims, such as the Ku Klux Klan, Medellin Drug Cartel, Irish Republican Army, Anti-Castro Group, Mormon extremists, Vietnamese Organization to Exterminate Communists and Restore the Nation, Jewish Defense League, May 19 Communist Order, Chicano Liberation Front, Jewish Armed Resistance, American Indian Movement, Gay Liberation Front, Aryan Nation, Jewish Action Movement, National Front for the Liberation of Cuba, or Fourth Reich Skinheads.

We counted attacks by Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Black American Moslems, or anyone who even remotelysounded Muslim … for example anyone from Palestine, Lebanon or any other Arab or Muslim country, or any name including anything sounding remotely Arabic or Indonesian (like “Al” anything or “Jamaat” anything).

If we weren’t sure what the person’s affiliation was, we looked up the name of the group to determine whether it could in any way be connected to Muslims.

Based on our review of the approximately 2,400 terrorist attacks on U.S. soil contained within the START database, we determined that approximately 60 were carried out by Muslims.

In other words, approximately 2.5% of all terrorist attacks on U.S. soil between 1970 and 2012 were carried out by Muslims.* This is a tiny proportion of all attacks.

We determined that approximately 118 of the terror attacks – or 4.9% – were carried out by Jewish groups such as Jewish Armed Resistance, the Jewish Defense League, Jewish Action Movement, United Jewish Underground and Thunder of Zion. This is almost twice the percentage of Islamic attacks within the United States. In addition, there were approximately 168 attacks – or 7% – by anti-abortion activists, who tend to be Christian. Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional – a Puerto Rican paramilitary organization – carried out more than 120 bomb attacks on U.S. targets between 1974 and 1983, and there were some 41 attacks by Cuban exiles, and a number of attacks by other Latin American groups.

Another study undertaken by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism – called ”Profiles of Perpetrators of Terrorism in the United States” – found:

Between 1970 and 2011, 32 percent of the perpetrator groups were motivated by ethnonationalist/separatist agendas, 28 percent were motivated by single issues, such as animal rights or opposition to war, and seven percentwere motivated by religious beliefs. In addition, 11 percent of the perpetrator groups were classified as extreme right-wing, and 22 percent were categorized as extreme left-wing.

Preliminary findings from PPT-US data between 1970 and 2011 also illustrate a distinct shift in the dominant ideologies of these terrorist groups over time, with the proportion of emerging ethnonationalist/separatist terrorist groups declining and the proportion of religious terrorist groups increasing. However, while terrorist groups with religious ideologies represent 40 percent of all emergent groups from 2000-2011 (two out of five), they only account for seven percent of groups over time.

Similarly, a third study by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism Religion found that religion alone is not a key factor in determining which terrorists want to use weapons of mass destruction:

The available empirical data show that there is not a significant relationship between terrorist organizations’ pursuit of CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear) weapons and the mere possession of a religious ideology, according to a new quantitative study by START researchers Victor Asal, Gary Ackerman and Karl Rethemeyer.

Therefore, Muslims are not more likely than other groups to want to use WMDs.

* The Boston marathon bombing was not included in this analysis, as START has not yet updated its database to include 2013 terrorist attacks. 3 people died in the Boston attack. While tragic, we are confident that non-Musliims killed more than 3 during this same period.

We are not experts in terrorism analysis. We would therefore defer to people like Kurzman on the exact number. However, every quantitative analysis of terrorism in the U.S. we have read shows that the percent of terror attacks carried out by Muslims is far less than 10%.

Postscript: State-sponsored terrorism is beyond the scope of this discussion, and was not included in our statistical analysis. Specifically, the following arguments are beyond the scope of this discussion, as we are focusing solely on non-state terrorism:

Arguments by University of Michigan Professor Juan Cole that deaths from 20th century wars could be labeled Christian terrorism

Arguments that our recent use of torture and double tap drone strikes are terrorism