Suleimani Is Dead, Iraq Is in Chaos and ISIS Is Very Happy

America's foreign policy in the Middle East has been a disaster for decades - perhaps back to the 1950's and certainly 1979 when the US failed to support the Shah of Iran - and was only made worse long term by the Iraq War. Now, with Iraq pushing for the exodus of all American troops from its territory and US allies stepping back from counter-terrorism efforts, things will likely go from bad to worse with the big winners being ISIS and Iran with Trump's assassination of Gen. Qassim Suleimani making the situation for American interests less safe. Trump needed a diversion from his impeachment problems and, putting personal interests ahead of long term national interests, we now have arguably a far worse situation.  A column in the New York Times looks at where America now finds itself. Here are highlights:

In 2016, Donald Trump, then a candidate for president, described Barack Obama as the “founder of ISIS.” In the end, it may be Mr. Trump who comes to be known not as the terrorist group’s founder, but as its savior.

The Islamic State has been weakened considerably since its peak in 2015, when it controlled a territory the size of Britain, but the Trump administration’s targeted killing of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani may have poised the group for a comeback. Just as the misguided American invasion of Iraq in 2003 revitalized Al Qaeda, some 17 years later, a return to chaos in the same country may yet do the same for the Islamic State.

Granted, the White House was correct to identify General Suleimani, the leader of Iran’s Quds Force, as an enemy of the United States. . . . But war in the Middle East is nothing if not complex; General Suleimani’s proxies also indirectly served American interests by fighting the Islamic State — to great effect.

Still, contrary to the breathless eulogies to him in Iran, he was not some indispensable hero who single-handedly defeated the Islamic State. Other commanders will fill his shoes, if not in star power then at least in strategic expertise. The real boon for the jihadists will be the second-order effects of his death.

First, and most obviously, American influence in Iraq is now living on borrowed time. One of those killed alongside General Suleimani, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, was the deputy commander of the Popular Mobilization Force, a coalition of pro-Iranian militias that nominally form part of the Iraqi armed forces. For many Iraqis, that made the strike an attack against Iraq as well as Iran, and put the Iraqi government, which already has a tense relationship with the United States, in an even tougher bind.

Recognizing the heightened tensions, the 6,000 American troops in the country have switched their focus to defending Americans in Iraq, rather than fighting the Islamic State or training Iraqi forces to do so. American allies including Germany and Britain have begun pulling their own forces from the country, . . .

Second, the chaos threatens Iraq’s stability. Tehran responded to the strike on General Suleimani with missile attacks on two American-run military bases last week. But it’s unlikely this will be the end of Iran’s retaliation. Iranian military strategy is defined by asymmetry — and particularly by the use of militant proxies. Under a screen of plausible deniability, Iran will most likely work to drive the United States out of Iraq.

In this, the Iranians will be brutal. During the American occupation — before the rise of the Islamic State made strange bedfellows of Washington and Tehran — Iranian proxies often exceeded Sunni extremists in terms of the number of casualties they inflicted on American forces. These proxies have lost no time in returning to attacks on American interests.

A conflict between Iranian proxies and the United States will tear at Iraq’s fragile governing structures, creating a power vacuum for the Islamic State to exploit. Iraq already has only a caretaker government. . . . . Iraq’s viability as a state is jeopardized. Add to that the harm to counterterrorism operations brought about by the “pause” in coalition assistance, and you have a combustible mix.

Third, and perhaps worst of all, General Suleimani’s death portends yet more sectarianism in Iraq. The parliamentary vote on Jan. 5 to expel American troops passed on the strength of votes from Shiite lawmakers; members of Parliament representing Iraq’s other main factions, the Kurds and the Sunni Arabs, abstained.

Extremist groups thrive on this kind of division. . . . . Moreover, the Iranian response to General Suleimani’s killing is likely to include an escalation in its conflict with Saudi Arabia, which is framed as a battle between Sunnis and Shiites. Ratcheting up these tensions will create still more openings for Sunni extremists such as the Islamic State.

The Islamic State still has deep pockets, affiliates around the world, and a knack for recruitment. General Suleimani’s death will have its leaders rubbing their hands in anticipation.

The damage is done. Without a major cooling of tensions, a jihadist resurgence might now be all but inevitable.

Carnage in Manchester - The Evil Fruits of Religion

In the aftermath of the horrific bombing in Manchester, it is appearing increasingly certain that the suicide bomber was either acting on behalf of ISIS or at a minimum following its anti-Western, anti-modernity religious based jihad.  While shocking, the atrocity is in keeping with what religion has unleashed throughout history: hatred and violence against those with different beliefs and those who have cast off Medieval ignorance and myths.  Be it Catholic versus Protestant, Hindu versus Muslim, or Christian versus Muslim, religion and the tribalism that it needs to survive are the common threads.  The religious tenets of ISIS, like those of fundamentalist Christians in America, are threatened by science, knowledge and modernity and those who through there lives demonstrate that there is another way of believing and living become hated an targeted.  ISIS uses murder and violence.  Here in America, at least to date, Christofascists push for passage of anti-LGBT laws and special rights to discriminate against others. Differing responses, yet both reactions to perceived threats to fairy tale based beliefs, or, in the case of Islam, the delusional writings of an individual who would likely be in a mental institution nowadays.  An editorial in the New York Times looks at the horrible situation.  Here are excerpts:

By Tuesday, 22 people had died, and 59 others had been hospitalized, some with life-threatening injuries. The dead included 8-year-old Saffie Rose Roussos, who had come with her mother and older sister, and 18-year-old Georgina Bethany Callander, who had posted an image of her brand new driver’s license on Instagram.

The Islamic State said one of its “soldiers” had carried out the bombing, which took the life of the man British police officials believe was behind it, Salman Abedi, a 22-year-old whose parents emigrated from Libya. It is still unclear whether Mr. Abedi acted alone or as part of a network. No one yet knows what motivated him to commit such a horrific deed. It is also unclear whether the Islamic State’s claim is legitimate. Only further investigation can answer these questions.

Meanwhile, as hard as it is amid the shock and the mourning, it is important to recognize this attack for what it is: an attempt to shake Britain — and, by extension, the rest of Europe and the West — to its core, and to provoke a thirst for vengeance and a desire for absolute safety so intense, it will sweep away the most cherished democratic values and the inclusiveness of diverse societies.

The Islamic State wants nothing more than to watch Western democracies embrace its mad version of a holy war pitting Muslims against Christians, the newly arrived against others. This has been the goal of other attacks in Europe. With cold calculation, extremists have ripped apart the lives of people simply out enjoying themselves — whether at a concert or sitting around cafe tables in Paris in November 2015, or gathering for Bastille Day fireworks in Nice last year, or shopping at a Christmas market in Berlin in December.

Maximum vigilance is needed, and Britain raised its threat level from severe to critical. Public spaces must be made as safe as possible, even as people recognize that more attacks will very likely occur, despite our best defenses. In Britain, as in the rest of Europe and in the United States, it is critical that immigrants, especially Muslims, are not stigmatized. As Richard Barrett, former director of global counterterrorism operations at MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence agency, said, “engaging the community and letting the community inform us” is one way “to understand why people do this” and to prevent future attacks.

The quickest way for open societies to lose the freedoms they enjoy and the Islamic State seeks to destroy would be to whip up divisive ethnic, racist and religious hatreds. But there will be those who try. The Daily Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson tweeted on Tuesday: “We need a State of Emergency as France has. We need internment of thousands of terror suspects now to protect our children.” Then there was the unbelievably vile tweet by Katie Hopkins, a British commentator: “We need a final solution.” She later changed “final” to “true” in a new tweet after her original was widely condemned.

Throughout history religion has needed an "us versus them" mentality to survive just like any cult or gang.  It is easy to reflexively blame Islam, but the real driving force is the rejection of knowledge and the embrace of ignorance and antiquated, myth based beliefs.   Religion is the real enemy of humankind be it Islam or Christianity.  Both have destroyed countless lives through the centuries and brought death and destruction.   

Treason? Trump Revealed Highly Classified Information to Russia

The irony that strikes me most about the self-style "patriotic Americans" and xenophobes who have blindly supported Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, - and that includes some "friends" who voted for Trump - is that treason is now apparently acceptable to these people.  First we have the obstruction of justice effort by Trump embodied by the firing of FBI Director James Comey with a goal of subverting the Russiagate investigation.  Now, as the Washington Post is reporting, Trump revealed extremely classified information to the Russia foreign minister and Russian ambassador even though the USA did not have permission to share such information.  Whether the disclosure of the information was a result of Trump boasting or simply undisciplined shooting off of Trump's mouth, true American patriots ought to be horrified at this latest betrayal of American interests.  And this concern does not even factor in who may now died as a result of Trump's loose lips.   Here are excerpts from the Post article:  

President Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting last week, according to current and former U.S. officials, who said Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State.

The information the president relayed had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, officials said.

The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said Trump’s decision to do so endangers cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic State.

“This is code-word information,” said a U.S. official familiar with the matter, using terminology that refers to one of the highest classification levels used by American spy agencies. Trump “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.”

The revelation comes as the president faces rising legal and political pressure on multiple Russia-related fronts. Last week, he fired FBI Director James B. Comey in the midst of a bureau investigation into possible links between the Trump campaign and Moscow.

One day after dismissing Comey, Trump welcomed Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak — a key figure in earlier Russia controversies — into the Oval Office. It was during that meeting, officials said, that Trump went off script and began describing details of an Islamic State terrorist threat related to the use of laptop computers on aircraft.

The CIA declined to comment, and the NSA did not respond to requests for comment.

But officials expressed concern about Trump’s handling of sensitive information as well as his grasp of the potential consequences. Exposure of an intelligence stream that has provided critical insight into the Islamic State, they said, could hinder the United States’ and its allies’ ability to detect future threats.

“It is all kind of shocking,” said a former senior U.S. official who is close to current administration officials. “Trump seems to be very reckless and doesn’t grasp the gravity of the things he’s dealing with, especially when it comes to intelligence and national security. And it’s all clouded because of this problem he has with Russia.”

In his meeting with Lavrov, Trump seemed to be boasting about his inside knowledge of the looming threat. “I get great intel. I have people brief me on great intel every day,” the president said, according to an official with knowledge of the exchange.

Most alarmingly, officials said, Trump revealed the city in the Islamic State’s territory where the U.S. intelligence partner detected the threat.

The identification of the location was seen as particularly problematic, officials said, because Russia could use that detail to help identify the U.S. ally or intelligence capability involved. Officials said the capability could be useful for other purposes, possibly providing intelligence on Russia’s presence in Syria. Moscow would be keenly interested in identifying that source and perhaps disrupting it.

“Russia could identify our sources or techniques,” the senior U.S. official said.  A former intelligence official who handled high-level intelligence on Russia said that given the clues Trump provided, “I don’t think that it would be that hard [for Russian spy services] to figure this out.”

Senior White House officials appeared to recognize quickly that Trump had overstepped and moved to contain the potential fallout. Thomas P. Bossert, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, placed calls to the directors of the CIA and the NSA, the services most directly involved in the intelligence-sharing arrangement with the partner.

[Senator Bob] Corker also said, “The chaos that is being created by the lack of discipline is creating an environment that I think makes — it creates a worrisome environment.”

“I’m sure Kislyak was able to fire off a good cable back to the Kremlin with all the details” he gleaned from Trump, said the former U.S. official who handled intelligence on Russia.

Be very, very afraid.

Former Acting CIA Chief: Trump's Dangerous Deference to Putin

While Republicans for the most part continue to act as apologists for the the batshit crazy things Trump, a/k/a Der Fuhrer, says and even go to greater lengths to normalize what would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, former acting CIA Director Michael Morell is calling out Trump's fixation on Russia's Vladimir Putin as nothing less than bizarre.   What is most frightening is that this deference is likely jeopardizing America's interest.  Worse yet, the possibility of Putin holding blackmail information on Trump or Russian financial leverage on the Trump empire remains disturbing.  A piece in Politico looks at Morell's concerns.  Here are highlights:

[Morell] suggested there is “some special bond” between Trump andVladimir Putin that is undermining U.S. interests.

“It suggests that he doesn't have a good understanding of what Putin has done over a very long period of time,” Morell said during an appearance on “CBS This Morning” Monday morning. “It’s a very bizarre statement.”

Trump has repeatedly stated admiration for Putin, which has led to bipartisan congressional blowback. During an interview with FOX’s Bill O’Reilly, Trump said a strong relationship with Russia is necessary to defeat the Islamic State.

The president defended Putin after O’Reilly said Putin is “a killer.”

“You got a lot of killers,” Trump said. “What, you think our country’s so innocent?”

Morell criticized Trump and said there’s “no equivalency” between the deaths of Russian journalists and political opponents and actions taken by the United States overseas.

He said Trump’s affection for Putin may come from goodwill accrued by Putin by complementing Trump during the campaign. However, more sinister reasons, such as financial ties or Russia having compromising material on Trump, may be to blame.

“There is some special bond here that seems to be overriding the facts and the interests of the United States of America.”

Although there are rumors of Russia having compromising material on Trump, those rumors have been unsubstantiated.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley and Vice President Mike Pence have voiced concerns about Russia’s actions in Eastern Ukraine. However, Putin likely cares primarily about Trump’s opinion, Morell said.

“I think Putin is an authoritarian, so he believes that the voice of the most powerful person is the most important,” he said. “So the voice he hears most loudly is the president's, and he will discount the voices of others.”

 I continue to hope that either the CIA or foreign intelligence services will obtain documentation that confirms whether Putin has financial or blackmail control over Trump.  Should it prove that Trump has betrayed America's interests, one can only hope impeachment - or better yet, treason - charges are brought against Trump and, in an ideal world, Pence as well. 

Florida "Christians" Demand Execution of Women Who Have Abortions

While Donald Trump was putting the insanity of today's Republican Party on display last night, some of the party base were also busy demonstrating that they want a Christian theocracy and the execution of women - and their doctors - who have abortions.  With these folks it is either there way or execution - much in the vein of how ISIS approaches non-believers and/or those with different understandings of a supposed common faith.  Christian News Wire looks at the batshitery.  Here are excerpts:

The political committee Abolish Abortion Florida (AAFL) has launched a ballot initiative to amend the state's constitution to punish abortion as capital murder. Under the proposed amendment, anyone who performs or procures an abortion would be charged with first degree, pre-meditated murder. "Abortion" would include any abortifacient drug or device that can kill an embryo by preventing implantation, as well as the intentional destruction of unwanted IVF embryos. The amendment would define life as beginning at fertilization rather than "conception," and declares that "abortion deprives an innocent human being of the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

According to AAFL, the idea is not only to collect enough signatures to get the measure onto the 2018 ballot, but also to encourage legislators to begin putting forward legislation to abolish abortion instead of merely regulating it. Per AAFL: "The Supreme Court cannot make murder legal. Pro-life politicians have passed incremental regulations for decades, but it's time to abolish abortion by recognizing it for what it is – cold-blooded murder – and prosecuting it accordingly."

The complete petition language can be seen atwww.abolishabortionfl.com.

As I have long said, there is really little difference between Christian fundamentalists and Islamic fundamentalist.  The open embrace of hatred of others and the embrace of ignorance is identical.  

How the Arab World Came Apart

As noted several times on this blog, the roots of the disaster now engulfing the Middle East truly began after World War I when western powers divided up what had been the Ottoman Empire.  In parceling out territories to themselves, France and Great Britain created artificial nations that combined disparate tribes and religious groups with no thought of creating future stable nations.  The result has been that without a strong monarch or dictator, the countries were destined to blow apart, starting with Iraq.  The trigger for much of the death and mayhem that has followed was the American invasion of Iraq - an invasion sold to the American people based on deliberate lies and untruths.   The New York Times Magazine has a lengthy, five part piece that looks at the disaster which while not totally avoidable,could have played out so very differently but for the insane megalomania of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and their henchmen.  Here are excerpts from the forward of the piece:

Why did it turn out this way? Why did a movement begun with such high promise go so terribly awry?

The scattershot nature of the Arab Spring makes it hard to provide a single answer. Some nations were radically transformed, even as others right next door were barely touched. Some of the nations in crisis were relatively wealthy (Libya), others crushingly poor (Yemen). Some countries with comparatively benign dictatorships (Tunisia) blew up along with some of the region’s most brutal (Syria). The same range of political and economic disparity is seen in the nations that remained stable.

Yet one pattern does emerge, and it is striking. While most of the 22 nations that make up the Arab world have been buffeted to some degree by the Arab Spring, the six most profoundly affected — Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen — are all republics, rather than monarchies. And of these six, the three that have disintegrated so completely as to raise doubt that they will ever again exist as functioning states — Iraq, Syria and Libya — are all members of that small list of Arab countries created by Western imperial powers in the early 20th century. In each, little thought was given to national coherence, and even less to tribal or sectarian divisions. Certainly, these same internal divisions exist in many of the region’s other republics, as well as in its monarchies, but it would seem undeniable that those two factors operating in concert — the lack of an intrinsic sense of national identity joined to a form of government that supplanted the traditional organizing principle of society — left Iraq, Syria and Libya especially vulnerable when the storms of change descended.

In fact, all but one of the six people profiled ahead are from these “artificial states,” and their individual stories are rooted in the larger story of how those nations came to be. The process began at the end of World War I, when two of the victorious allies, Britain and France, carved up the lands of the defeated Ottoman Empire between themselves as spoils of war. In Mesopotamia, the British joined together three largely autonomous Ottoman provinces and named it Iraq. The southernmost of these provinces was dominated by Shiite Arabs, the central by Sunni Arabs and the northernmost by non-Arab Kurds. To the west of Iraq, the European powers took the opposite approach, carving the vast lands of “greater Syria” into smaller, more manageable parcels. Falling under French rule was the smaller rump state of Syria — essentially the nation that exists today — and the coastal enclave of Lebanon, while the British took Palestine and Transjordan, a swath of southern Syria that would eventually become Israel and Jordan. Coming a bit later to the game, in 1934, Italy joined the three ancient North African regions that it had wrested from the Ottomans in 1912 to form the colony of Libya.

To maintain dominion over these fractious territories, the European powers adopted the same divide-and-conquer approach that served them so well in the colonization of sub-Saharan Africa. This consisted of empowering a local ethnic or religious minority to serve as their local administrators, confident that this minority would never rebel against their foreign overseers lest they be engulfed by the disenfranchised majority.

This was only the most overt level of the Europeans’ divide-and-conquer strategy, however, for just beneath the sectarian and regional divisions in these “nations” there lay extraordinarily complex tapestries of tribes and subtribes and clans, ancient social orders that remained the populations’ principal source of identification and allegiance. Much as the United States Army and white settlers did with Indian tribes in the conquest of the American West, so the British and French and Italians proved adept at pitting these groups against one another, bestowing favors — weapons or food or sinecures — to one faction in return for fighting another. The great difference, of course, is that in the American West, the settlers stayed and the tribal system was essentially destroyed. In the Arab world, the Europeans eventually left, but the sectarian and tribal schisms they fueled remained.

At least one man saw this quite clearly. For much of 2002, the Bush administration had laid the groundwork for the Iraq invasion by accusing Saddam Hussein of pursuing a weapons-of-mass-destruction program and obliquely linking him to the Sept. 11 attacks. In October 2002, six months before Firdos Square, I had a long interview with Muammar el-Qaddafi, and I asked him who would benefit if the Iraq invasion actually occurred. The Libyan dictator had a habit of theatrically pondering before answering my questions, but his reply to that one was instantaneous. “Bin Laden,” he said. “There is no doubt about that. And Iraq could end up becoming the staging ground for Al Qaeda, because if the Saddam government collapses, it will be anarchy in Iraq. If that happens, actions against Americans will be considered jihad.”

Part 1 focuses on three historical factors that are crucial to understanding the current crisis: the inherent instability of the Middle East’s artificial states; the precarious position in which U.S.-allied Arab governments have found themselves when compelled to pursue policies bitterly opposed by their own people; and American involvement in the de facto partitioning of Iraq 25 years ago, an event little remarked upon at the time — and barely more so since — that helped call into question the very legitimacy of the modern Arab nation-state. Part 2 is primarily devoted to the American invasion of Iraq, and to how it laid the groundwork for the Arab Spring revolts. In Part 3, the narrative quickens, as we follow the explosive outcome of those revolts as they occurred in Egypt, Libya and Syria. By Part 4, which chronicles the rise of ISIS, and Part 5, which tracks the resulting exodus from the region, we are squarely in the present, at the heart of the world’s gravest concern.

But what follows, ultimately, is a dark warning. Today the tragedy and violence of the Middle East have spilled from its banks, with nearly a million Syrians and Iraqis flooding into Europe to escape the wars in their homelands, and terrorist attacks in Dhaka, Paris and beyond. With the ISIS cause being invoked by mass murderers in San Bernardino and Orlando, the issues of immigration and terrorism have now become conjoined in many Americans’ minds, forming a key political flash point in the coming presidential election. In some sense, it is fitting that the crisis of the Arab world has its roots in the First World War, for like that war, it is a regional crisis that has come quickly and widely — with little seeming reason or logic — to influence events at every corner of the globe. 

Islamic State Claims Responsibility for Attack in Nice

The fruits of fundamentalist religion

Once again religion, and fundamentalist Islam in particular, is proving that it is a scourge on humanity, as the ISIS claims responsibility for the mass murders in Nice, France on the night of July 14, 2016.   The Washington Post looks at the claim and also the Tunisian citizen who murdered so many, including 10 children.  Like the shooter in Orlando, he seems to have been a loser with a failed marriage and even a petty criminal record but without known ties to ISIS or extremists.  If the facts play out, it will be another example of religion preying on losers and promising them rewards in an afterlife with a mythical, magical friend in the sky.  It's pitiful.  Yet over the centuries religion, including Christianity,  has made such promises over and over again.  Also note that in the body of the piece ISIS references the crusaders who slaughtered Muslims nearly a thousand years ago.  The toxicity of religion simply never ends. Here are highlights from the Post story:

NICE, France — The Islamic State on Saturday claimed responsibility for an attack that killed 84 in this coastal French city, the organization’s news agency said Saturday, as French prosecutors took three more people into custody in connection with the attack.

It remained unclear whether the Islamic State had directed the attack, whether they were taking responsibility for an attack that they may have inspired, or whether they were simply seeking publicity from an attack entirely disconnected from them. The Islamic-State-connected Amaq news agency cited an “insider source” saying that Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, 31, “was a soldier of the Islamic State.” The Islamic-State-connected Amaq news agency cited an “insider source” saying that Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, 31, “was a soldier of the Islamic State.”  “He executed the operation in response to calls to target citizens of coalition nations that fight the Islamic State,” the news agency wrote.

But the oblique claim of responsibility left open the question of whether Bouhlel had acted alone or had any prior communication with the group, which has also claimed ties to the attacks that struck Paris twice last year and Brussels in March. French authorities have been scrambling to determine whether Bouhlel had a support network in Nice, where he appears to have been living for at least six years. 

Investigators on Saturday detained three additional people in connection with the attack, including one person who is believed to have spoken to Bouhlel by phone minutes before he started his deadly journey down Nice’s Promenade des Anglais,  and an additional man was detained late Friday, according to the office of Paris prosecutor François Molins. Authorities also detained Bouhlel’s ex-wife Friday and were questioning her.

The scale of the carnage wrought by a Bouhlel came into grim focus Friday, with 10 children among the dead and 202 people injured. Among the wounded, 50 were “between life and death,” according to French President François Hollande. 

The attack with a 19-ton rented Renault truck — the third mass casualty assault to hit to France in 18 months — shocked the nation and sparked questions about whether authorities had done enough to safeguard a country that is an obvious target of terrorist groups.

The identities of the victims testified to France’s diverse society and to the international appeal of the tony French Riviera. A vacationing father and his 11-year-old son from Lakeway, Tex. A headscarf-wearing Muslim woman who came to celebrate Bastille Day with her nieces and nephews. A French high school teacher, his wife, daughter and grandson. Others from Russia, Switzerland, Germany, Australia. 

Bouhlel was a Tunisian citizen who had lived in Nice since at least 2010, when he first ran afoul of authorities by engaging in petty theft, according to Molins, the prosecutor. Most recently, he had been given a suspended six-month prison sentence related to a January assault, Molins said. In that case, Bouhlel’s former attorney told the local Nice-Matin newspaper, a motorist complained the truck driver was blocking the road during a delivery. Bouhlel took a swing at the motorist with a wooden beam, causing a deep wound, according to the lawyer’s account. Bouhlel is divorced and has three children, neighbors said. The prosecutor said the suspect’s ex-wife was taken in for questioning. 

France Struck By Another Apparent Terror Attack

While no one has yet claimed responsibility, holiday revelers in Nice, France were targeted in a mass attack involving a tractor trailer running over pedestrians on a main street closed to traffic following a fireworks displace in honor of Bastille Day, a national holiday.  Some estimates have as many as 77 dead and hundreds injured.  All indications are that the driver of the truck intentionally struck as many people as possible and some reports state that the driver also shot into the crowd before being shot and killed by police.   Other reports indicate that the trailer was filled with explosives and grenades.  If this does prove to be another Islamic terror attack, it again shows that France and other secular nations with guarantees of freedom of and from religion are the antithesis to what religious fundamentalists want (including, Christian fundamentalist in America) .  Here are some excerpts from the Washington Post:

A truck rammed into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in the French Riviera city of Nice on Thursday night, killing at least 70 people in an apparent terrorist attack as the driver also opened fire on revelers, French officials said.

The truck struck the crowd on the Promenade des Anglais, a seaside walk in the center of the city in southern France, authorities said. More than 50 people were reported injured. The driver fired on the crowd before being shot to death by police, officials said.

Christian Estrosi, a former mayor of Nice and currently president of the Regional Council of Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, put the death toll at 75. He said in one of a series of Twitter messages that the truck was carrying arms and explosives when it struck the crowd at about 10:30 p.m. local time.

Estrosi told BFM TV that “the driver fired on the crowd, according to the police who killed him.”  He added that the driver’s behavior appeared to be “completely premeditated.”

There was no immediate information on the identity of the driver or what motivated his action.

Local authorities were treating the incident as a terrorist attack and urging people to stay home, the French television channel BFM TV reported. It occurred as a large crowd was watching a fireworks display celebrating the French national holiday.

In Washington, President Obama released a statement Thursday night condemning “what appears to be a horrific terrorist attack in Nice, France.” He said he has directed his team to get in touch with French officials to assist with the investigation into the attack.

"We stand in solidarity and partnership with France, our oldest ally, as they respond to and recover from this attack,” the statement said.

CNN quoted an American witness as saying he saw one person in the large white truck and heard gunfire, although it was not clear whether it came from the driver or was being fired at the vehicle.  The witness said the driver accelerated as he was mowing people down.

If this turns out to be a religious extremist attack by a lone wolf or otherwise underscores my belief that taken as a whole, religion is a a toxic force in the world that is best eliminated. 

Religion: The Underlying Source of Evil

Like most in the nation's LGBT community, I remain in shock over the massacre on early Sunday morning at Pulse, an LGBT club in Orlando, Florida.  So many mostly young lives snuffed out by a terrorist claiming allegiance to the Islamic extremists of ISIS.   Perhaps equally shocking is the reaction of far too many Americans to the slaughter, including pastors and some Republican politicians: they are either celebrating the deaths of so many LGBT individuals or saying that they deserved death for their failure to adhere to Bronze Age myths and babbling of ignorant herders from 2500 years ago.  

ABC News has a compilation of past violence against LGBT venues and ALL were perpetrated by those at least nominally Christian.  While foul individuals like Ted Cruz try to point the finger at Islam, he conveniently forgets that he himself shared the stage last year with a Christian pastor who advocates for the execution of gays.  Cruz is not much better than the gunman in Orlando when it comes to clinging to ignorance and religious based hatred.

Pastor Steven Anderson

Here's a sample of a sample of what some "godly" pastors have been saying via Patheos:

Pastor Steven Anderson, whose hate knows no bounds, celebrated the deaths of 50 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando in a 4-minute mini-sermon that cited the Bible as justification for why they needed to die. (And if it didn’t happen via a shooter, it should have happened by way of government execution.):

The good news is that there’s 50 less pedophiles in this world, because, you know, these homosexuals are a bunch of disgusting perverts and pedophiles. That’s who was a victim here, are a bunch of, just, disgusting homosexuals at a gay bar, okay?

But the bad news is that this is now gonna be used, I’m sure, to push for gun control, where, you know, law-abiding normal Americans are not gonna be allowed to have guns for self-defense. And then I’m sure it’s also gonna be used to push an agenda against so-called “hate speech.”

The Bible says that homosexuals should be put to death, in Leviticus 20:13. . . . these people all should have been killed, anyway, but they should have been killed through the proper channels, as in they should have been executed by a righteous government that would have tried them, convicted them, and saw them executed.

Sadly, this type of misogyny has probably been uttered from countless fundamentalist pulpits.

But the hate isn't coming just from church pulpits.  Politicians are stepping up as well, such as Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick tweeted Bible verses seemingly approving of the slaughter.  This from the New Civil Rights Movement:

At 8 AM EDT Sunday morning news was spreading that 20 people had been shot to death in an Orlando, Florida gay nightclub, Pulse. The death toll has now been raised to 50 dead.

Also at 8 AM, then 30 minutes later, Texas Republican Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, who has been working hard to position himself as a national leader against the LGBT community, posted two tweets.

The first bible verse, "Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows," from Galatians 6:7. The next, from Psalm 37:39: "The Salvation of the righteous come from the Lord; He is their stronghold in time of trouble." The second included the message, "Have a blessed Sunday!"

Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick

And if one truly wants to be sick, read some of the comments on places like here.

Closer to home, we have politicians like Randy Forbes who have repeatedly supported anti-gay legislation and organizations.  Indeed, one of the few things Forbes has done in all his years in Congress is to push resolutions that would grant special rights or recognition to Christian extremists. Right Wing Watch has a compilation of some of Forbes' anti-gay, pro Christian extremists activities. 

Anti-gay zealot Rep. Randy Forbes

Personally, I am done with religion other than opposing the hate and bigotry and violence it condones. 

Why the Brussels Attack Could Backfire for ISIS

While the extremists of ISIS want to depict their atrocities and genocide as a battle to protect Islam from the western world - and by extension, modernity, which threatens its Medieval religious dogma - some believes it attacks on the West, most recently in Brussels, could backfire.  Indeed, while ISIS wants a war of civilizations for recruitment purposes, if it gets its wish and the West unifies and becomes more willing to use military force, ISIS losses in the Middle East could well increase.  A piece in Slate looks at how ISIS may be unwittingly sowing the seeds for its ultimate destruction. Here are excerpts:

On the surface, the gains of an international attack like Brussels outweigh the risks. For a highly ideological group like ISIS, the Belgian deaths strike a blow to the West, fulfilling the group’s mission of taking the battle to the enemies of Islam. And such attacks counter the considerable losses the Islamic State has taken in Iraq and Syria.

Such battlefield losses move the Islamic State ever further from “consolidating and expanding” the dystopian state it hopes to build. Since declaring a caliphate in 2014, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and other ISIS leaders have trumpeted their creation of a state. And by taking over an area the size of Great Britain, they’ve achieved more than any other modern jihadi group. Military losses make a mockery of this claim and strengthen the appeal of its al-Qaida rival, which has criticized the declaration as premature. As the state shrinks rather than expands, ISIS must show its followers it is fighting.

Indeed, spectacular and bloody attacks like Brussels can win the group recruits in both Europe and the Arab world. A small but significant portion of European Muslims feel alienated and bitter toward their home countries, and the recriminations and stepped-up security after each attack make this problem worse. More than 5,000 European Muslims have traveled to Syria to fight with ISIS and other jihadis. 

Going international, however, often works out poorly for terrorist groups. Algerian terrorists in the 1990s found that attacks in France backfired, leading a once-skeptical West to favor the Algerian regime and increase France’s support for the government the terrorists were fighting. ISIS may discover similar problems. For one, the more global the threat, the more likely it is to grab the attention of the United States and its potent military and intelligence services. Jihadis not affiliated with al-Qaida criticized Osama Bin Laden after 9/11 because it led to U.S. intervention into what had once been local struggles and also greatly expanded aid to governments in the Middle East. As the jihadi strategist Abu Musab al-Suri lamented, the 9/11 attacks cast “jihadists into a fiery furnace … A hellfire which consumed most of their leaders, fighters, and bases.” 

The Obama administration has moved cautiously in Iraq and Syria so far, but each attack in the West increases, or at least sustains, pressure on U.S. leaders to step up. It also makes it more likely that the West will target Islamic State provinces in places like Libya and Sinai, even when the group is not currently targeting Europe or the United States: Better to hit them hard than wait too long will be the thinking. 

The attacks also lead to further security crackdowns on jihadi networks in Europe. Such losses do more than hinder the Islamic State’s ability to do future terrorist attacks. The group relies heavily on foreign fighters for its military operations, and crackdowns on its European network reduce an important source of suicide bombers and other operatives.

Because of these likely Western responses, the Islamic State’s international attacks risk substituting tactical gain for strategic loss. Attacks in the West will set back the Islamic State’s state-building imperative, in particular. Strikes in Brussels or other Western cities will hurt the Islamic State’s enemies and excite its followers but will not lead the group to victory.

Donald Trump and the Politics of Fear

Donald Trump supporters - in addition to being noted for their low educational levels in many cases - are defined by their fear: fear of blacks, fear of immigrants, fear of modernity and fear of the erosion of their perceived white privilege.  Sadly, Trump, a reality TV/carnival barker, seems to know how to use these fears and ignorance to whip up the allegiance of those who resent others and see a threat under every bush - and behind every non-white face.  A column in the New York Times looks at Trump's cynical use of fear mongering that has parallel's with Hitler's use of fear of internal and external enemies to get his followers to ignore the growing fascist takeover that was underway.  Here are column excerpts:

Among the volley of lies spit out of the coarse mouth of Donald Trump on a daily basis is his claim that he’s leading Hillary Clinton in the general election matchup for president. “I beat Hillary in many of the polls that have been taken, and each week I get better and better,” he said earlier this month.

Nope, not even close. The Bloomberg Poll that came out on Wednesday had Clinton besting Trump, 54 percent to 36. The Wall Street Journal survey had Clinton up by 13. She leads by 10 in the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. And she’s up 11.4 percent in the RealClearPolitics average of all the polls. With each passing week he actually does much worse.

So, rest assured, yes? At the least, our country won’t be in the undersize hands of a crazed narcissist. I wish. What keeps millions of people up at night is the one-trick pony that Trump could ride all the way into the White House: fear. If enough Americans cower in hysteria, Trump might be able to pull this thing off. Without a filter of decency or a shred of diplomacy, Trump gloated about how the latest mass murder by the Islamic State barbarians helped him. . . . . [He] said the fear cast by Islamic State terror “is probably why I’m No. 1 in the polls.” 

Let’s pause to behold a rare Trump acknowledgment of a bit of truthiness: The more people who are murdered by the savages from the Islamic State, the better it is for him. The Islamic State is a gift to Trump. And he is a gift to them, playing into the grand scheme of the killers. He would make the world far less safe, and bring the Islamic State closer to the global clash of worlds that those monsters desire. Paris — the slaughter of 130 people in November. 

In Trump’s telling, it was a wonderful turning point for him. “Paris happened, and Paris was a disaster,” he said. “And what happened with me is this whole run took on a whole new meaning.” From there, he lumped Paris, the Mexican border and the Syrian refugee crisis in one big rancid stew of fear. He ran dark and spooky television ads, including some in Arizona last week, showing Islamic terrorists, a picture of the Moroccan border that was supposed to be Mexico, and his promise to build the wall. In the wake of Brussels, he again said the United States should “close up our borders to people until we figure out what’s going on” and ramp up the torture of terror suspects. 

It gets tedious reminding people that Trump’s ideas on how to stop terror have nothing to do with the problem, but let’s give it another go. The Paris killers are not — repeat, not — Syrian refugees. Nor are they from Mexico. They are Belgian and French citizens, criminals and thugs, radicalized in the festering tenements of Brussels. The biggest wall in the world cannot prevent hatred from taking over a malleable mind, aided by Internet poison. 

As for torture, numerous military experts have concluded that it yields little useful information, and of course violates international conventions signed by the United States. 

[T] he Republican front-runner exposed himself, again, as someone who is monumentally ill prepared to be commander in chief. He listens only to himself, as he said this month, and what his gut tells him is that his only path to the White House is to do everything he can to make people feel very afraid.

ISIS' Cynical Use of Religious Extremism to Serve its Secular Objectives

Like many other groups throughout history the leadership of ISIS is using religious fervor - think of the Crusades and how the Catholic Church and European monarchs preyed on the religiosity of their respective subjects as but one example - and extremism to further totally secular goals of seizing power and controlling territory.  Yes, some may actually believe the poison they spew, but most likely use the guise of religion to recruit followers who can be used as canon fodder and/or recruited for suicide missions.  Normal, sane individuals are generally not inclined to blow themselves up with bombs, but religious zealots and those they have brainwashed are another matter. A piece in The Nation looks at this horrible cynicism and the secular goals ISIS is pursuing under the smoke screen of religion.  Here are highlights:

Terrorist groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda are widely seen as being motivated by their radical theology. But according to Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago and founder of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, this view is too simplistic. Pape knows his subject; he and his colleagues have studied every suicide attack in the world since 1980, evaluating over 4,600 in all.

He says that religious fervor is not a motive unto itself. Rather, it serves as a tool for recruitment and a potent means of getting people to overcome their fear of death and natural aversion to killing innocents. “Very often, suicide attackers realize they have instincts for self-preservation that they have to overcome,” and religious beliefs are often part of that process, said Pape in an appearance on my radio show, Politics and Reality Radio, last week.

According to Pape’s research, underlying the outward expressions of religious fervor, ISIS’s goals, like those of most terrorist groups, are distinctly earthly:

What 95 percent of all suicide attacks have in common, since 1980, is not religion, but a specific strategic motivation to respond to a military intervention, often specifically a military occupation, of territory that the terrorists view as their homeland or prize greatly. From Lebanon and the West Bank in the 80s and 90s, to Iraq and Afghanistan, and up through the Paris suicide attacks we’ve just experienced in the last days, military intervention—and specifically when the military

This view differs from that of Hillary Clinton and others who believe that ISIS “has nothing whatsoever to do” with Islam, as well as the more common belief, articulated by Graeme Wood in The Atlantic, that ISIS can be reduced to “a religious group with carefully considered beliefs.” It’s a group whose outward expressions of religious fervor serve its secular objectives of controlling resources and territory. Virtually all of the group’s leaders were once high-ranking officers in Iraq’s secular military.

Pape’s analysis is consistent with what Lydia Wilson found when she interviewed captured ISIS fighters in Iraq. “They are woefully ignorant about Islam and have difficulty answering questions about Sharia law, militant jihad, and the caliphate,” she recently wrote in The Nation. “But a detailed, or even superficial, knowledge of Islam isn’t necessarily relevant to the ideal of fighting for an Islamic State, as we have seen from the Amazon order of Islam for Dummies by one British fighter bound for ISIS.”

Pape says that it’s important to distinguish between ISIS’s long-term goals and its shorter-term strategies to achieve them:

It’s about the timing. How are you going to get the United States, France and other major powers to truly abandon and withdraw from the Persian Gulf when they have such a large interest in oil? A single attack isn’t going to do it. Bin Laden did 9/11 hoping that it would suck a large American ground army into Afghanistan, which would help recruit a large number of suicide attackers to punish America for intervening. We didn’t do that – we used very limited military force in Afghanistan. But what Bin Laden didn’t count on was that we would send a large ground army into Iraq to knock Saddam out. And that turned out to be the most potent recruiting ground for anti-American terrorists that ever was, more so than Bin Laden had ever hoped for in his wildest dreams.

Another theory holds that ISIS—and Al Qaeda—set their sights on France in order to polarize mainstream French society against its Muslim community. As University of Michigan historian Juan Cole put it after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, “The problem for a terrorist group like Al Qaeda is that its recruitment pool is Muslims, but most Muslims are not interested in terrorism. Most Muslims are not even interested in politics, much less political Islam.” In Cole’s formulation, if violent Islamic fundamentalists “can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start creating a common political identity around grievance against discrimination.”   Pape says this analysis is also consistent with his research.

In Pape’s view, most of the conventional wisdom about what terrorists want to achieve is wrong, and that disconnect has limited the effectiveness of the West’s response to terrorism.

While far more horrible and violent, what ISIS is doing is but a variation of what the GOP has done for years now: using religious extremism and zealotry to rally ignorant voters - especially in the Bible Belt - to support Republican candidates who profess to honor "Christian values."  Like the captured ISIS fighters mentioned in the article, most right wing Christians are woefully ignorant about the Bible and church history.  Like their Muslim counterparts, they are played as fools and manipulated and encouraged to define themselves by hate and bigotry - and sometimes violence.

ISIS Beheads 15-Year-Old Iraqi Boy for Listening to Pop Music

ISIS continues to demonstrate the evils of religion as the Jerusalem Post reports that a 15 year old boy has been executed for listening to western pop music.  Hate, the embrace of ignorance and barbarity in the name of God, of course, are not unique to Islam, and if one knows the true history of Christianity, the death toll is enormous.  Yes, the photo above is disturbing, but one needs to look at it and remember that this is what happens when people put belief in mythical writings or, in the case of Islam the rantings of a lunatic above science, knowledge and decency towards others.  Here are story highlights:

Just when you thought the Islamic State had reached its limit of depravity, it manages to outdo itself.

According to Kurdish media reports, the jihadist group that has captured wide swaths of Syria and Iraq beheaded a 15-year-old boy in Mosul for the crime of listening to Western pop music.

Reports cite officials in the northern Iraqi city as saying that the boy, Ayham Hussein, was discovered by ISIS henchman as he was listening to a portable compact disc player.

Hussein was detained by ISIS operatives as he sat inside a shop owned by his father in an open-air market in western Mosul. The boy was beaten and tried in a local sharia court, which sentenced him to be executed.

“The boy was executed by beheading in a town square in the center of the city,” a source told Kurdish media. 

The execution shocked and angered Mosul residents, some of whom staged a protest at the home of the victim’s family.

A world free of all religion would likely be a far better world.  Religion's main fruits are death, division and hatred of others.   While ISIS is perhaps an extreme example of religion's poisonous effects, many evangelical Christians likewise harbor wide hatred of others.  Sadly, Americans and the media continue to give them a free pass.