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[ by Charles Cameron — simple fun, with a more serious footnote ]
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I just very much enjoy my friend Aaron Zelin‘s response [lower frame, below] to President Trump’s tweet [upper frame]:

To be honest, I think Aaron has a mildly warped sense of humor — a warp which I certainly share.

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Here’s the Christianity Today editorial to which Trump obliquely refers:

Mark Galli, Trump Should Be Removed from Office

[ by Charles Cameron — some quick recommendations, under pressure of time ]
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Baghdadi is dead, and as the dust settles we can re commend some readings.

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Our friend Tim Furnish has provided his WikiStrat entry, moving from the news otself (1) via apocalyptic fervor (2) to the eschatological implicationos of ISIS’ future (3), the latter reading:

ISIS remains, however, an eschatological movement dedicated to preparing the way for the coming of the (Sunni) Mahdi. It’s thus enamored with “hotwiring the apocalypse,” and this fervent belief will not end with the death of the Caliph.

Hotwiring the apocalypse is a concept the late Israeli analyst Reuven Paz offered up in a 2006 piece titled Hotwiring the Apocalypse: Jihadi Salafi Attitude towards Hizballah and Iran. A dozen years have passed since Paz wrote his piece, and the journey from “Hazbollah and Iran” to ISIS in the wake of its Caliph’s death is a long and winding one, but Dr Paz’ phrase continues to cover the possibility that an end-times oriented jihadism may seek to bring about the final sequence of events by threatening, inciting or unleashing sufficiently impressive violence. As Dr Furnish has pointed out with respect to Iranian (Shi’ite) eschatology, the great disadvantage of unleashing violence of sufficient potency is that it would leave the earth, or at least its holiest lands, devastated just as the Mahdi arrives to begin his rule over it.

Wikistrat, After Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi: a special report

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Graeme Wood is one of the most perceptive writers on ISIS and its religious impetus, author of What ISIS Really Wants, the article which first revealed ISIS’ apocalyptic driver to a wide audience. His Atlantic piece yesterday, Baghdadi’s Final Humiliation. Most striking of Wood‘s insights as I read him:

For Baghdadi to seek refuge among people who want to kill him probably means that the places where he had more support, such as within his home country of Iraq or near its border with Syria, could no longer provide him with any measure of safety. Finding him in HTS territory is like finding Derek Jeter hiding out in South Boston, or Martin Bormann living quietly by a synagogue on the Upper East Side.

Graeme Wood is a gifted writer, working here in a field of rubble and human destruction, and it is always a pleasure to read him.

Graeme Wood, Baghdadi’s Final Humiliation

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The great Rukmini Callimachi spent, she says, months working on the obituary of Baghdadi. Other writers find themselves confronted with a newly urgent topic to cover with Baghdadi‘s death. Callimachi, who also discovered and reported with AP an amazing cache of Al Qaida documents in 2013 Timbuktu — a cache which included “corporate workshop schedules, salary spreadsheets, philanthropy budgets, job applications, public relations advice and letters from the equivalent of a human resources division” — has somehow found time along with her grueling travel and reporting schedule, to prepare an extensive obit for Baghdadi — ready for publication now that news of his death can be dropped in:

NYT, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, ISIS Leader Known for His Brutality, Is Dead at 48

The son of a pious Sunni family from the Iraqi district of Samarra, al-Baghdadi parlayed religious fervor, hatred of nonbelievers and the power of the internet into the path that catapulted him onto the global stage. He commanded an organization that, at its peak, controlled a territory the size of Britain from which it directed and inspired acts of terror in more than three dozen countries.

Al-Baghdadi was the world’s most-wanted terrorist chieftain, the target of a $25 million bounty from the American government. His death followed a yearslong, international manhunt that consumed the intelligence services of multiple countries and spanned two American presidential administrations.

Callumachi and and Falih Hassan cover a lot of ground in few words. Here, for instance, is the brief overview of Baghdadi‘s attempt at a caliphate:

Although Osama bin Laden, the Qaeda leader, had dreamed of restoring the caliphate, he was reluctant to declare one, perhaps fearing the overwhelming military response that eventually cost al-Baghdadi his territory.

Yet it took five years before troops seized in March the last acre of land under al-Baghdadi’s rule. And in the interim, the promise of a physical caliphate electrified tens of thousands of followers who flocked to Syria to serve his imagined state.

Part of the caliphate’s excitement, attraction and repulsion came form its sheer brutality — some of it scripturally sanctioned, some definitely and indeed defiantly not:

Women accused of adultery were stoned to death, thieves had their hands hacked off, and men who had defied the militants were beheaded.

While some of those medieval punishments are also meted out in places like Saudi Arabia, the Islamic State shocked people around the world by televising its executions. It also offended Muslims by inventing horrific punishments that are not mentioned in Islamic scripture.

A Jordanian pilot was burned alive in a scene filmed by overhead drones. Men accused of being spies were drowned in cages, as underwater cameras captured their last tortured gasp. Others were crushed under the treads of a T-55 tank, or strung up by their feet inside a slaughterhouse and butchered like animals.

With the destruction of the geographical caliphate, the internet’s role becomes increasingly significant:

The militants harnessed the internet to connect with thousands of followers around the globe, making them feel as if they were virtual citizens of the caliphate.

The message of these new jihadists was clear, and many of those on whose ears it fell found it emboldening: Anyone, anywhere, could act in the group’s name. That allowed ISIS to multiply its lethality by remotely inspiring attacks, carried out by men who never set foot in a training camp.

In this fashion, ISIS was responsible for the deaths of thousands of people around the world. A shooting at an office party in San Bernardino, Calif. An attack on a Christmas market in Germany. A truck attack in Nice, France, on Bastille Day. Suicide bombings at churches on Easter Sunday in Sri Lanka.

Baghdadi‘s death will do little more than cause a pause in this virtual empire of jihad-enthusiasts — the story goes on..

For a whole other strand of Rukmini‘s commentary, see her unrolled Twitter-thread from today’s feed:

Threadreader, Two sources have confirmed..

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Richard Engel for MSNBC is another journalist with in-field expertise, and his story of the informant who assisted US troops in the eventual raid on Baghdadi‘s compound is stunning —

General Mazloum Abdi of the Syrian Democratic Forces said his intelligence service had a source deep in Baghdadi’s inner circle who described a room-by-room layout of the terrorist’s compound on the Turkish border, including the number of guards, floor plan and tunnels.

Kurdish intelligence operatives who managed the source passed that information to American forces, giving U.S. Special Ops a better understanding of Baghdadi’s safe house before striking it, according to Abdi.

Abdi, who is also known as Mazlum Kobane, said the unidentified source was on location during the raid and left with the attacking U.S. forces.

MSNBC, Kurdish informant provided key intel in operation that killed ISIS leader

— more detail is no doubt still to come..

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Well, that’s about all I van manage today. I think you’ll find a mine or two of valuable information here, if you read deep in.

I’ve a medical appointment after lunch which will wipe me out for the day, and hope to pick up with a piece on the issue of Baghdadi‘s possible successor(s), the Mahdi and the Day of Judgment tomorrow.

Until then!

[ by Charles Cameron — you know I’m fascinated by parallelisms and analogies — here are some I’ve noticed recently — enough for three fine posts, and you get three in one ! ]
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Parallelisms of interest that have surfaced in my reading recently include:

between Trump speeches and the Crusius El Paso manifesto

between Trump’s and Hitler’s uses of language

between AQ’s Sami al-Uraydi and French revolutionary Saint-Just

between ISIS strategy and use of social media and western Neo-Nazi terrorism

between Christchurch and El Paso

between the Gildead of Margaret Atwood and the Family of Jeff Sharlet

between the Family of Jeff Sharlet and the Muslim Brotherhood

between 11 Sept 2001, NYT, and 11 Sept 1683, Vienna

oh, and on a different note altogether, there’s:

between the arts of architecture and cartooning

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El Paso Shooting Suspect’s Manifesto Echoes Trump’s Language:

At campaign rallies before last year’s midterm elections, President Trump repeatedly warned that America was under attack by immigrants heading for the border. “You look at what is marching up, that is an invasion!” he declared at one rally. “That is an invasion!”

Nine months later, a 21-year-old white man is accused of opening fire in a Walmart in El Paso, killing 20 people and injuring dozens more after writing a manifesto railing against immigration and announcing that “this attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

Sources:

NY Times, El Paso Shooting Suspect’s Manifesto Echoes Trump’s Language<

Intercept, After El Paso, We Can No Longer Ignore Trump’s Role

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A professor of German history explains the true horror of Trump’s response to Charlottesville

We haven’t had a Reichstag blaze, nor a Kristallnacht — not even close!!! — still, if we consider rhetoric alone, there’s food for thought:

“You look at what is marching up, that is an invasion!” he declared at one rally. “That is an invasion!”

Nine months later, a 21-year-old white man is accused of opening fire in a Walmart in El Paso, killing 20 people and injuring dozens more after writing a manifesto railing against immigration and announcing that “this attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

Source:

RawStory, A professor .. explains the true horror of Trump’s response to Charlottesville

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Here’s a nice one observed by jihad-scholar Cole Bunzel:

“Those who make revolution halfway only dig their own graves,” says AQ leader Sami al-Uraydi (of Hurras al-Din) in video message decrying idea of concessions in jihadi revolution. Does he know he’s quoting the French revolutionary Louis Antoine de Saint-Just? pic.twitter.com/sABdapOllp

— Cole Bunzel (@colebunzel) August 12, 2019

Looks good, though one wonders whether the parallelism comes from the translator’s memory-store rather than al-Uraydi‘s?

Wikipedia quotes St-Just thus:

Those who make revolutions by halves do nothing but dig their own tombs.

and gives the date as January 1793 and the source as Oeuvres Complètes de Saint-Just, vol. 1 (2 vols., Paris, 1908), p. 414.

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Here’s the Stratfor analysis:

Stratfor, What White Supremacism and Jihadism Have in Common
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Like jihadism, the various ideologies driving white supremacism are not going away any time soon, and comparing the two can provide valuable lessons for understanding the ongoing threat. [ more.. ]

I’ll have a separate post on whether white supremacists as well as jihadists should be classified as terrorists — a matter on which opinions are divided..

The other piece referenced in the DoubleQuote above:

Rantt, White Supremacist Terrorists Operate Like ISIS, Trump Shrugs

And here’s an impressive, alternative contrast by Tim Furnish:

Stream, White Terrorists vs. the Sultans of Slaughter

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There’s something akin to a waterfall of manifestos on the supremacist, arguably starting with Breivik, and thence to Christchurch and El Paso:

WaPo, Christchurch endures as extremist touchstone
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In the days after a gunman killed 51 people in March at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, analysts warned the attack could become a rallying point for extremists.

It was a high-casualty attack, intended to be imitated by others, live-streamed on social media, accompanied by the release of a white supremacist manifesto decrying immigration and immigrants.

On Saturday, a similar manifesto appeared online, with similar grievances. The author opened by expressing “support” for “the Christchurch shooter.” Within minutes, a gunman opened fire at a shopping center in El Paso, killing 20..

The second quote in this above DoubleQuote says what it needs to say in the subtitle: “the more oxygen these manifestos get…”.

Onwards. Here’s a rather more disturbing aspect of the El Paso > Christchurch parallelism:

WaPo. Two mass killings a world apart share a common theme: ‘ecofascism’
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Before the slaughter of dozens of people in Christchurch, New Zealand, and El Paso this year, the accused gunmen took pains to explain their fury, including their hatred of immigrants. The statements that authorities think the men posted online share another obsession: overpopulation and environmental degradation.

The alleged Christchurch shooter, who is charged with targeting Muslims and killing 51 people in March, declared himself an “eco-fascist” and railed about immigrants’ birthrates. The statement linked to the El Paso shooter, who is charged with killing 22 people in a shopping area this month, bemoans water pollution, plastic waste and an American consumer culture that is “creating a massive burden for future generations.”

The two mass shootings appear to be extreme examples of ecofascism — what Hampshire College professor emerita Betsy Hartmann calls “the greening of hate.”

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On the existence of “so much similarities between the family and Muslim Brotherhood: praying groups“<:

OK dear friend I have done a full thread to that in Arabic. I’ll try to make it in English:

First major similarity is the refusal to be organised with official presence. The founder and up tell now calling it “Al-gama’a”… And they call each other “Brother”..

[ thread ]

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The Family: More Gilead than Godly:

In both Gilead and Virginia, men in inner circles have been anointed by God to lead. Conversely, those women chosen to be of service remain in the background where they respond to these godly guys’ commands with a heavenly “blessed be.”

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A stunner:

#September11 1683 was far more important than the same date in 2001.https://t.co/9iZ784EB6x

— The Occidental Jihadist (@Occidentaljihad) September 12, 2019

Here’s from the London Review of Books review of Lawrence Wright‘s The Looming Tower:

Wright offers the sense among the jihadis that America was the centre of Christianity, and that the Christian world had been winning the battle of faiths since the Islamic host began to be beaten back from the gates of Vienna on 11 September 1683.

I’d be interested if anyone has evidence connecting 2001 to 1683 in the mind of UBL —

— Timothy McVeigh, after all, timed the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City to coincide with the date set for the execution of Richard Snell, who had earlier plotted to blow up the same building, also the date of the final holocaust of the Branch Davidians in Waco two years earlier, the 220th anniversary of the Battle of Lexington and Concord — the “shot heard ’round the world” –and the start of the FBI’s siege of the Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord compound in 1985. Quite an impressive concatenation of anniversaries!

Anniversary dating, indeed, is not solely a white nationalist phenomenon. According to Hussain S. Zaidi‘s Black Friday: The True Story of the Bombay Bomb Blasts, the principal suspect in the 1993 bombings, Tiger Memon says:

Friday, 12 March, is the seventeenth day of Ramazan. It will be the day when the Holy Prophet fought the first battle of Junge-Badr against the heathens of Mecca and forced them to retreat. The auspicious date will help us achieve success.

Or as Anuraga Kashyap‘s film Black Friday has it:

Tiger‘s memory reaches back to 624 CE.

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And for a sunnier thought..

Here’s a parallelism between architecture and cartooning, courtesy of Bill Benzon:

Scaffolding in making a drawing. When the outline is inked-in, the scaffolding is erased.
Witch Hunt https://t.co/tywDweL3vs via @YouTube

— Bill Benzon (@bbenzon) August 18, 2019

[ by Charles Cameron — from 1500 pp via ~80 to 4, the amount of writing irate people can manage has been diminishing — next up, silence! ]
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In 1999 — the year in which Ahmed Ressam on behalf of al-Qaida attempted to cross the northern border of the United States with a truck-load of explosives, hoping to detonate them at Los Angeles airport’s International terminal on the evening of the roll-over to a new millennium, but was mercifully stopped by a suspicious US Customs official and detained, currently serving 37 years in a Colorado supermax for his terrorist offence — another quasi-religious organization with terror on its mind published a manifesto.

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The group was Wotan’s Volk, and their publication the “Exclusive Millennial Wotansvolk Edition” of Ragnar Redbeard‘s 1890 novel, Might Is Right, or The Survival of the Fittest.

A Social Darwinist manifesto? plea for eugenics? Racial purity? — or is the book a satire on all of the above?

It wasn’t satire when Wotan’svolk republished it, it was a manifesto for race war:

Look at that sword — the phrase 14 Words inscribed on its blade refers to a popular white supremacist slogan coined by a member of the 1980s terrorist group, The Order:

We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.

Redbeard‘s book, like William Pierce‘s 1978 novel, The Turner Diaries, is more political pamphlet than literature — except in the widest sense of that term covering all textual materials including invite posters announcing the times and locations of church bingo sessions. Peirce‘s book inspired Timothy McVeigh to commit the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 of us: published or posted words have the potential to infect thought, and the fever at times spills over into violence. And Redbeard‘s 1890s novel inspired the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting, killing three plus the gunman just a week ago.

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But fiction is not alone in infecting thought that spills into violence: non-fiction “manifestos” — now also known as “screeds” — serve the same purpose, though with muted imagination.

Anders Breivik‘s “manifesto” 2083 – A European Declaration of Independence runs to just over 1,500 pages, and draws on other sources, though many of them, like “Pamela Geller, Paul Belien, Diana West, the Baron [Bodissey] and Dymphna from the Gates of Vienna blog”, have disclaimed any association with Breivik, the use he made of their texts, or his actions, extremely, fatally ugly as they were.
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Breivik‘s sources, in fact, were many and various, as this para, one of thousands, illustrates:

Since the publication in 1970 of his book The Poverty of Critical Theory, Rohrmoser has promulgated, in constantly varying forms, the view that Marcuse, Adorno, and Horkheimer were the terrorists’ intellectual foster-parents, who were using Cultural Revolution to destroy the traditions of the Christian West. Academics such as Ernst Topitsch and Kurt Sontheimer, who saw themselves as educators and liberal democrats, followed in Rohrmoser’s footsteps. In 1972 Topitsch, a critical rationalist who was Professor of Philosophy in Graz, had stated that behind the slogans of “rational discussion” and “dialogue free of domination” there was being established at the universities “a distinct terrorism of political convictions such as never existed before, even under Nazi tyranny.”

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And Breivik‘s work was itself a call to arms, inviting followers of his Oslo and Utøya “Knights Templar” killings to follow suit — albeit in a manner presented as fiction:

It [his “Manifesto”] also describes specifically how this hypothetical fictional group, “PCCTS, Knights Templar”, would choose to respond towards the so called ”enablers” or the so called “cultural Marxist/multiculturalist” elites that are allegedly allowing millions of Muslims to enter Europe. The book contains detailed strategies (guerrilla tactics, instructions to execute, political campaigns etc.) which normally would be partly incriminatory to anyone who published or distributed the book (had it not been fiction).

Indeed, Breivik himself later argued that “his main motive for the attacks was to publicize his manifesto” [Bloomberg, via Wikipedia].

Breivik claimed himself to be a “Justiciar Knight Commander for Knights Templar Europe and one of several leaders of the National and pan-European Patriotic Resistance Movement” and invited others to become “Knights Justiciar” thus:

The European military order and tribunal; Commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici – PCCTS is represented by self appointed European judges known as ”Justiciar Knights” or “Knight Judges” (Latin: justiciarius=man of justice, judge — Knight=Eques or Cavaliere in Old Italian, Chevalier in French, Ritter in German)”. Any self appointed Justiciar Knight has been given the authority, by PCCTS on behalf of;

1. The free indigenous peoples of Europe
2. Those Europeans not yet born
3. The legacy of our forefathers and fallen martyrs

– to act as a judge, jury and executioner until the free, indigenous peoples of Europe are no longer threatened by cultural genocide, subject to cultural Marxist/Islamic tyranny or territorial or existential threats through Islamic demographic warfare. It is therefore within any- and every-ones right to act in accordance with the given guidelines.

and:

All free Europeans have a right and a duty to become “Justiciar Knights” for the order/tribunal

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Breivik‘s call for more “Knights Justiciar” and more actions congruent with his killings in Oslo and Utøya, and in some cases the killings themselves, have infected other minds, albeit minds few and far between. JM Berger, author of Extremism and a friend of mine and this blog, describes the cascading waterfall effect:

The Newtown shooter Adam Lanza reportedly collected news clippings on Breivik’s attack and other incidents of mass violence before he killed 20 children at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. Other young men, such as the British college student Liam Lyburd, have been inspired to plan or carry out mass shootings based on their admiration for Breivik’s lethality, rather than his beliefs.

Then, JM tells us, the Coast Guard Lieutenant Christopher Hasson attempted to follow in Breivik’s footsteps:

planning a mass-casualty attack modeled in significant part on Breivik’s strategy, and bearing the marks of his belief system

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Fast forward to this March, and the Christchurch, NZ mosque attacks. The shooter here, Brenton Tarrant, wrote at 87 pages a far shorter “manifesto” than Breivik‘s — The Great Replacement — albeit in it he linked his attack explicitly to Breivik‘s, writing that he “took true inspiration from Knight Justiciar Breivik” and claiming:

I have only had brief contact with Knight Justiciar Breivik, receiving a blessing for my mission after contacting his brother knights

Manifesto to manifesto, rant to rant, action to action, the infection cascades, spreads and, thankfully, dilutes.

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A week ago, there was the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting, and this weekend we have witnessed the shootings in El Paso, TX and Dayton, OH .

The Dayton shooter I dealt with in the previous post, contrasting his leftist online presence with the El Paso shooter‘s online presence from the right.

In the El Paso shooting, the motive seems clear. Crusius begins his 4-page screed thus:

In general, I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto.

There’s the cascade. His immediate follow up gives his motive:

This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.

Further on he says, again referencing the Christchurch shooter’s rant:

Actually the Hispanic community was not my target before I read The Great Replacement.

He continues:

This manifesto will cover the political and economic reasons behind the attack, my gear, my expectations of what response this will generate and my personal motivations and thoughts.

And that’s pretty much what he delivers: lock, stock, you might say, and barrel.

But enough: all this delving into killers’ minds is disgusting.

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Documentation:

The Unabomber, Industrial Society and Its Future”

Ragnar Redbeard, Might Is Right, or The Survival of the Fittest

Anders Breivik, 2083 – A European Declaration of Independence

Brenton Tarrant, The Great Replacement

Patrick Cursius, The Inconvenient Truth

Added:

Dylann Roof, manifesto