Bobby Jindal Ends Presidential Run

Personally, I never understood why Bobby Jindal ever thought he was a viable presidential candidate.  He may have won the governorship of Louisiana, but I never saw much of the racist, Christofasist base of the Republican Party voting for someone who was of Hindu descent.  True, Jindal is Christian, but most in the GOP base cannot look beyond skin color - which why I find it so baffling that Ben Carson has done as well as he has in the polls of the GOP base.  Jindal may have recognized this reality and seemingly sought to counter it by shamelessly prostituting himself to the Christofascists and adopted every anti-gay, anti-equality, anti-modernity position popular with the worse knuckle draggers of the far right.  Apparently, shameless misogyny and self-prostitution simply was not enough.  Huffington Post looks at Jindal's decision to end his hopeless campaign.  Here are highlights:

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) ended his presidential campaign on Tuesday.

"I've come to the realization that this is not my time, so I've come here to announce that I am suspending my campaign for president of the United States," he told Fox News' Bret Baier.

Jindal, who entered the presidential race in June, has remained near the back of the Republican pack since then. In recent months, his persistently low polling numbers relegated him to the smaller televised events that preceded each of the main GOP debates.

Jindal has served as Louisiana's governor since 2008, the year he oversaw the mass evacuation of his state's coastal areas during Hurricane Gustav. Since then, he's established himself as a hard-line conservative  . . . . 

Earlier this year, the governor launched an executive order to fulfill the spirit of HB 707, a defeated bill intended to allow Louisiana citizens and businesses to discriminate against same-sex couples without punishment.

During his campaign, like many other GOP candidates, Jindal threw his support behind Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, citing her religious convictions.

Before Jindal exited the race, Willie Robertson, a star of the A&E reality show "Duck Dynasty," appeared to withdraw his support of Jindal and endorse Trump instead. Jindal's campaign denied that Robertson had broken bad on the governor, saying that Robertson simply "admires" Trump's "business acumen."

My view is "good riddance."  Now, Jindal needs to focus on repairing the huge damage that he has done to Louisiana, especially public education and public higher education. 

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

How the West Created Islamic Extremism

While we hear bellicose statements from Republicans and much scapegoating of refugees in the wake of the Paris attacks last week, there is far too little reflection on how and why ISIS and Islamic extremism has grown and spread.  A book review in the New York Times looks at the rise of ISIS.  A piece in Huffington Post looks at the roots of Islamic extremism in Saudi Arabia and how that country more than any other has exported virulent extremism more than any other, including Iran, the favorite bogey man of Republicans and the far right.  Sadly, much of such analysis ignores the role that the West - translate the United States - has played in creating the conditions for ISIS to flourish not to mention funding some of the early movements that have evolved into Al Quaida and now ISIS.  A piece in Salon looks at America and its allies' role in creating this nightmare.  Here are excerpts:

History takes no prisoners. It shows, with absolutely lucidity, that the Islamic extremism ravaging the world today was borne out of the Western foreign policy of yesteryear.

Gore Vidal famously referred to the USA as the United States of Amnesia. The late Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai put it a little more delicately, quipping, “One of the delightful things about Americans is that they have absolutely no historical memory.”

In order to understand the rise of militant Salafi groups like ISIS and al-Qaida; in order to wrap our minds around their heinous, abominable attacks on civilians in the U.S., France, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Nigeria, Turkey, Yemen, Afghanistan and many, many more countries, we must rekindle this historical memory.

Where did violent Islamic extremism come from? In the wake of the horrific Paris attacks on Friday, November the 13, this is the question no one is asking — yet it is the most important one of all. If one doesn’t know why a problem emerged, if one cannot find its root, one will never be able to solve and uproot it.

[W]e must delve into the history of the Cold War, the historical period lied about in the West perhaps more than any other.

How the West cultivated Osama bin Laden

We needn’t reach back far into history, just a few decades.  A much-circulated photo of an article published in British newspaper the Independent in 1993 exemplifies the West’s twisted hypocrisy. Titled “Anti-Soviet warrior puts his army on the road to peace,” it features a large photo of Osama bin Laden, who, at the time, was a close Western ally.

The newspaper noted that bin Laden organized a militia of thousands of foreign fighters from throughout the Middle East and North Africa, and “supported them with weapons and his own construction equipment” in their fight against the USSR in the 1980s. “We beat the Soviet Union,” bin Laden boasted.

The mujahedin, this international Islamic extremist militia organized and headed by bin Laden, is what eventually morphed into both al-Qaida and the Taliban.

In Greek mythology, Cassandra was blessed with the power of prophecy, but cursed in that no one would ever heed her warnings. Eqbal Ahmad, the late political scientist, historian and expert in the study of terrorism, was a modern-day Cassandra.

In a speech at the University of Colorado, Boulder in October 1998, Ahmad warned that the U.S. policy in Afghanistan would backfire:

“In Islamic history, jihad as an international violent phenomenon had disappeared in the last 400 years, for all practical purposes. It was revived suddenly with American help in the 1980s. When the Soviet Union intervened in Afghanistan, Zia ul-Haq, the [U.S.-backed] military dictator of Pakistan, which borders on Afghanistan, saw an opportunity and launched a jihad there against godless communism. The U.S. saw a God-sent opportunity to mobilize one billion Muslims against what Reagan called the ‘Evil Empire.’

“Money started pouring in. CIA agents starting going all over the Muslim world recruiting people to fight in the great jihad. Bin Laden was one of the early prize recruits. He was not only an Arab. He was also a Saudi.

“Saddam was defeated, but the American troops stayed on in the land of the Ka’aba [the most sacred site of Islam, in Mecca], foreign troops. He wrote letter after letter saying, ‘Why are you here? Get out! You came to help but you have stayed on.’ Finally he started a jihad against the other occupiers. His mission is to get American troops out of Saudi Arabia. His earlier mission was to get Russian troops out of Afghanistan.”

For bin Laden, Ahmad added, “America has broken its word. . . .“They’re going to go for you. They’re going to do a lot more,” Ahmad warned, three years before the 9/11 attacks. “These are the chickens of the Afghanistan war coming home to roost.”

 

We now know that Ahmad was right. But, like Cassandra, the powerful ignored his sagacious admonition, and suffered the horrific consequences.

Extremist “freedom fighters”

In the 1950s and ’60s, Afghanistan was a somewhat secular country in which women were granted relatively equal rights. What turned Afghanistan into the hotbed for extremism it is today? Decades of Western meddling.

Throughout the 1980s, the U.S. government supported and armed bin Laden and his mujahedin in Afghanistan, in their fight against the Soviet Union. President Ronald Reagan famously met with the mujahedin in the Oval Office in 1983.

Those “freedom fighters” are the forefathers of ISIS and al-Qaida. When the last Soviet troops were withdrawn in 1989, the mujahedin did not simply leave; a civil war of sorts followed, with various Islamist militant groups fighting for control in the power vacuum. The Taliban came out on top, and established a medieval theocratic regime to replace the former “godless” socialist government.  

This Cold War strategy ended up being successful: After the fall of the USSR, the secular socialist groups that dominated the resistance movements of the Middle East were replaced by Islamic extremists ones that had previously been supported by the West.

It is not a coincidence that most of the secular countries in the history of the Middle East have been socialist of some sort. In contrast, the most reactionary countries — the countries where women are not granted equal rights and where the rule of law is based on Sharia — have frequently tended to be close Western allies. Why? The West was much, much more interested in preserving capitalism than it was in allowing secularism, gender equality and relative economic equality to flourish under socialism. 

[T]he reality is the Middle East was significantly more progressive and secular during the height of the Cold War than it is today. That’s not a coincidence. The U.S. and its allies destroyed secularism as part of their larger Cold War strategy.

The Cold War bites back

This Cold War strategy continues to bite back today, and hard. Because of this policy, we have now ended up with capitalist dystopias like those in Saudi Arabia, Qatar or the UAE — filthy rich oil states where businessmen are drowning in money while the migrant modern-day slaves upon which their economies are built die in droves, and theocratic monarchies imprison or even behead anyone who challenges the regime.

The Gulf states remain some of the most reactionary and extremist countries on the planet, and they happen to be close Western allies. Saudi Arabia, in particular, is the fountainhead of militant Sunni Islamism — and yet the Obama administration has done more than $100 billion in arms deals with the Saudi monarchy in just five years.
[M]odern Sunni extremist groups like ISIS and al-Qaida are “a product of Saudi ideals, Saudi money, and Saudi organizational support.” Government cables leaked by WikiLeaks demonstrate that the U.S. is well aware that al-Qaida and other Salafi groups are supported by rich Saudis. 

[I]t is now widely acknowledged that the illegal U.S.-led war in Iraq — a catastrophic occupation that led to the deaths of at least 1 million people — destabilized the entire Middle East, creating the extreme conditions in which militant groups like al-Qaida spread like wildfire, eventually leading to the emergence of ISIS. The former head of intelligence for the U.S. Central Command and Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, agrees. U.S. policies in Iraq “absolutely” strengthened Salafi militant groups like al-Qaida, Lt. Gen. Flynn conceded. “We definitely put fuel on a fire,” he lamented. 

Saddam Hussein was the first Frankenstein’s monster U.S. policy created in Iraq, al-Qaida was the second, and now ISIS is the third.

Blaming Islam is projection

The pundits in the West blaming Islam for the rise of extremism are projecting their own countries’ crimes onto the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims.

The kinds of people who blame Islam and Muslims for the spread of extremism are the kinds of people who have utmost faith in Western empire. . . . . they, deep-down, believe Western empire to be fundamentally rooted in good will, in humanitarianism, in progress, in the proselytizing of civilization.

 

This is the same logic that justified genocidal European colonialism, Western expansionism and Manifest Destiny, and the White Man’s Burden. And it is this same logic that promotes militarist policies and anti-Muslim and anti-refugee bigotries in response to Islamist militants’ attacks — only serving to further fuel the fire of extremism.

“Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.”

ISIS needs to be stopped.  But the West needs to defeated it without continuing the very policies that have fueled its rise. 

More Monday Male Beauty

"Christain" Pastor: Murdered Death Metal Concert Goers Had it Coming to Them

One thing that the aftermath of the horrific events in Paris has helped to clarify is that many of the "godly folk" are almost as hate-filled as the Islamic terrorists who killed at random.  But one example of the ugliness of far right Christianity in America is Pastor Steven Anderson who is best known for calling for the genocide of gay people and for openly praying for God to murder President Obama.  Anderson spent part of his sermon yesterday telling his congregation that the concertgoers at the Bataclan theater who were there to listen to the band Eagles of Death Metal were worthy of death because they were "worshiping Satan."  The only thing that separates Anderson and his fellow hate merchants from the ranks of ISIS is they level of violence they are willing to openly condone.  Patheos has details on Anderson's foul rant. Here are excerpts:

Pastor Steven Anderson spent part of his sermon yesterday telling his congregation that, while he doesn’t condone the actions of the Paris attackers, the concertgoers at the Bataclan theater who were there to listen to the band Eagles of Death Metal sorta had it coming:

When you go to a concert of death metal, somebody might get killed! You know, you’re worshiping death, and then, all of a sudden, people start dying!… Well, you love death so much, you bought the ticket, you love worshiping Satan! Well, let’s have some of Satan’s religion come in and shoot you!
I mean, that’s what these people should think about before they go into such a wicked concert…

Anderson, who rarely accept facts, has no idea that the group is more of a parody of death metal bands. They actually play “feelgood, bluesy boogie-rock.”

He proceeded to call the group’s leader a “drug-pushing hillbilly faggot.”
Anderson also criticized France. As if the nation’s social “sins” deflect from the violence that took place on Friday. (8:45)

Now, let me tell you a little bit about this sinful nation of France. Did you know that France is the only country in the world where more than 50% of the population thinks that adultery is fine?

The survey he cited says only 12% of French people think adultery is fine. (About 40% just don’t see adultery as a moral issue.)

This is what passes in these Independent Baptist churches as a biblical response to tragedy. 

Personally, I'd like to ship Ted Cruz, Pastor Anderson, all of the professional Christian set,  and half of the GOP to the Middle East where they can live under ISIS's rule.  They want a theocracy, so let's let them experience one first hand.  Oh, and I'd make sure that they had one way tickets with no return.  These people are horrible and if anyone is Satanic, it's them.  I truly do not want to be called a Christian any longer - I want no association with the likes of Anderson and similar hate merchants who wrap themselves in the Bible while spewing hate and division.

Ted Cruz's Hypocrisy on Christian Extremism

There's much to dislike - perhaps even hate - about most of the would be 2016 Republican presidential nominees.  But in many ways the most frightening is Ted Cruz. The man is not stupid, but then again, neither has Adolph Hitler.  Both are, in my view, equally mentally disturbed int their own way.  And both are only too willing to lie and play on prejudices to further their own egomaniacal ambitions.  With Hitler, the target of his hypocrisy and cynicism was the Jews.  With Cruz, it is gays and immigrants.   Perhaps Cruz's biggest lie of late (and there are so many) is that there’s “no meaningful risk of Christians committing terrorist attacks."   This after Cruz attended a gathering of hate filled extremists who want to execute gays.  Here are highlights from the Washington Blade:

Just days after attending an Iowa conference hosted by an evangelical media personality who called for the death penalty for gays, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz now says there’s “no meaningful risk” of Christians committing terrorist attacks.

“There is no meaningful risk of Christians committing acts of terror,” Cruz is quoted as saying in the Washington Post. “If there were a group of radical Christians pledging to murder anyone who had a different religious view than they, we would have a different national security situation.”

The U.S. senator from Texas made the remarks Sunday in the early primary state of South Carolina in the context of explaining his view that Muslim refugees from Syria should be barred from the United States, but borders should be open to displaced Christians.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush also said Sunday assistance for Middle East refugees should be focused on Christians.

“We should focus our efforts as it relates to refugees on the Christians that are being slaughtered,” Bush said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Cruz’s comments ignore the call made at the recent National Religious Liberty Conference by Iowa evangelical leader Kevin Swanson, who delivered a fiery tirade in favor of the government rounding up gay people and executing them in the name of Christianity.

Cruz appeared on the same stage as Swanson at the event along with fellow GOP presidential hopefuls Mike Huckabee and Bobby Jindal. Each of these candidates has remained silent on the views expressed by Swanson and their campaigns haven’t responded to a request for comment from the Washington Blade on whether they’d repudiate the remarks.

The Cruz campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment on why the candidate thinks there’s no “meaningful risk” of Christians committing terrorism in the aftermath of Swanson’s remarks.

GOP Threatens Government Shutdown Over Refugee

Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.)

While utterly ignoring the hate mongering elements of their own base - including those advocating for the execution of some 10-30 million LGBT Americans - the political whores in the Republican Party are now making rumblings about shutting down the federal government if the Obama administration does not limit access to Syrian refugees to those who are Christian.  Of course, how they would winnow out those who are not Christian is not specified nor is any cognizance given to the reality that any terrorist worth his or her salt who wanted to infiltrate America along with the legitimate refugees could easily provide falsified documentation as to their alleged - and false  - Christian faith.  Among those leading this charge is Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) who seems more delusional bu the day.  Politico looks at this latest wave of GOP batshitery.  Here are highlights:

A cascade of Republicans on Monday implored the Obama administration to scrap plans to resettle 10,000 Syrian refugees in the United States next year, saying they pose an unacceptable security risk in the wake of last week’s terrorist attacks in Paris.

And, in a dramatic twist, the sudden standoff is raising the possibility of a government shutdown next month.

Throughout the day a host of Republican governors around the country, wary that refugees could end up in their home states, blasted President Barack Obama’s plans. But those governors lack real sway over the process, and some are asking Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to insert a provision in the Dec. 11 spending bill that would bar more Syrian settlers.

In an interview, John Cornyn of Texas, the second-ranking Senate Republican, said “it’s a good time to hit the pause button [on the Syrian resettlement program] and to reevaluate where we are and what the risks are.”

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), one of the leading immigration hard-liners in the Capitol, sent a letter to colleagues calling for provisions in the omnibus spending bill that would give Congress more oversight over Syrian refugees.

And House Homeland Security Chairman Mike McCaul of Texas wrote a letter to Obama asking him to “temporarily suspend the admission of all additional Syrian refugees into the United States pending a full review of the Syrian refugee resettlement program.” In an appearance on CNN, McCaul said Congress should declare war on the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, also known as ISIS.

Ryan and McConnell will have to decide quickly on a course of action as they confront the first potential legislative crisis since Ryan became speaker. The government funding process offers powerful leverage over the Obama administration but would threaten a shutdown if Democrats balk at their demands.

Time is short. Just 25 days remain until government spending authority runs out, and Congress will recess next week for Thanksgiving.

Republicans’ chief concerns stem from reports that at least one of the suspects in Friday’s attacks may have crossed through Greece along with refugees. A Syrian passport discovered near the body of one of the attackers in Paris showed that the holder of the passport passed through Leros, Greece, in early October, according to Reuters. The Wall Street Journal reported Monday afternoon that the Syrian passport was fake, according to French officials.

Monday Morning Male Beauty

The MSN Belatedly Looks At Cruz at "Kill the Gays" Event

Ted Cruz at "kill the gays" event

I recently complained that most of the main stream media had ignored what should have been a major story: Republican presidential candidates attending a gathering where the killing of millions of Americans - i.e., the LGBT population - was advocated in strident language aimed at inflaming anti-gay hatred.  Other than MSNBC and a few other outlets, the story was ignored.  Imagine if Hillary Clinton had advocated killing selected evangelical Christians - the media coverage would have been 24/7.   Democrats have their issues, but you do not see Democrat presidential candidates attending events where murder and mayhem are advocated.  Now, belatedly, the New York Times has run an op-ed that looks at Ted Cruz's attendance at a hate group sponsored event and calls for Americans to wake up to the treat posed by the Christofascists.  Here are column highlights:

EARLIER this month, in Des Moines, the prominent home-schooling advocate and pastor Kevin Swanson again called for the punishment of homosexuality by death. 

Mr. Swanson proposed this at the National Religious Liberties Conference, an event he organized. Featured speakers included three Republican contenders for the presidency: the former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.

Mr. Huckabee later pleaded ignorance. Yet a quick web search will turn up Mr. Swanson’s references to the demonic power of “the homosexual Borg,” the unmitigated evil of Harry Potter and the Disney character Princess Elsa’s lesbian agenda.

Mr. Cruz apparently felt little need to make excuses. He was accompanying another of the featured speakers at the conference: his father, Rafael Cruz — a politically connected pastor who told a 2013 Family Leadership Summit that same-sex marriage was a government plot to destroy the family.

On Saturday, father and son traveled to Bob Jones University in South Carolina to join a Rally for Religious Liberty. Among the speakers was Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, who has called L.G.B.T. activists “hateful” and “pawns” of the devil.

Mr. Swanson is the product of a significant political movement that has coalesced around the theme of religious liberty. Many of its leaders and their allies appear at the Family Research Council’s annual Values Voters Summit. Other power centers include Liberty University (now a required stop on the campaign trail); conservative policy organizations like the  American Family Association and Concerned Women for America; and Christian legal advocacy groups like Liberty Counsel (whose co-founder, Mat Staver, acted as Kim Davis’s lawyer) and the Alliance Defending Freedom, the legal powerhouse behind the Hobby Lobby decision (whose president, Alan Sears, co-wrote a book in 2003 titled “The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today”).

When they hail religious liberty, they do not mean the right to pray and worship with other believers. Instead, the phrase has become a catchall for tactical goals of seeking exemptions from the law on religious grounds. To claim exception from the law as a right of “religious refusal” is, of course, the same as claiming the power to take the law into one’s own hands.

The leaders of this movement are breathtakingly radical. Like Mr. Swanson, they feel persecuted and encircled in a hostile world.
True, few share Mr. Swanson’s taste for genocidal fantasy. But they do share the ultimate goal of capturing the power of the state and remaking  society in ways most Americans would find extreme: a world in which men rule in families, women’s reproductive freedom is curtailed and “Bible believers” run the government.

All of this raises some unsettling questions about political life in the United States. When presidential candidates court support among the audience of a pastor who openly discusses the extermination of millions of their fellow citizens, why is this not major news? 

[W]hy are the rest of us complacent? Because a majority of the public has swung behind same-sex marriage, pundits would have us believe that the culture war is over. The leaders of the religious liberty movement may have lost that fight, but they’re still on the march — crusading through the courts and state legislatures.  It would be foolish to underestimate their resolve.  

Here we are worrying about the treat of the work of religious extremists in Paris, yet the media closes its eyes to the domestic threat posed by the Christofascists.  This needs to end.

Refusing to Give in to Fear

As regular readers  know, back in May of this year the husband and I and three friends spent a week in Paris and journeyed all over the city, including to points mere blocks from some of the sites that witnessed carnage last Friday.  I hear some saying that they won't be going to Paris any tie soon or may avoid going to Europe all together - which is precisely what the ISIS connected terrorists want.  They want to impose fear and they want to replace freedom and openness with fear and disrupted lives.   By giving into fear or by using fear mongering to exacerbate hostility to Muslims for self-promotion, those included to embrace fear and despicable Republican politicians are doing exactly what ISIS wants.  I for one would go back to Paris in a heart beat - I have a higher risk of being  victim of gun violence here in America.   A column in the New York Times looks at the phenomenon.  Here are excerpts:

Like millions of people, I’ve been obsessively following the news from Paris, putting aside other things to focus on the horror. It’s the natural human reaction. But let’s be clear: it’s also the reaction the terrorists want. And that’s something not everyone seems to understand.

Take, for example, Jeb Bush’s declaration that “this is an organized attempt to destroy Western civilization.” No, it isn’t. It’s an organized attempt to sow panic, which isn’t at all the same thing. And remarks like that, which blur that distinction and make terrorists seem more powerful than they are, just help the jihadists’ cause.

Think, for a moment, about what France is and what it represents. It has its problems — what nation doesn’t? — but it’s a robust democracy with a deep well of popular legitimacy. Its defense budget is small compared with ours, but it nonetheless retains a powerful military, and has the resources to make that military much stronger if it chooses. (France’s economy is around 20 times the size of Syria’s.) France is not going to be conquered by ISIS, now or ever. Destroy Western civilization? Not a chance.

So what was Friday’s attack about? Killing random people in restaurants and at concerts is a strategy that reflects its perpetrators’ fundamental weakness. It isn’t going to establish a caliphate in Paris. What it can do, however, is inspire fear — which is why we call it terrorism, and shouldn’t dignify it with the name of war.

The point is not to minimize the horror. It is, instead, to emphasize that the biggest danger terrorism poses to our society comes not from the direct harm inflicted, but from the wrong-headed responses it can inspire. And it’s crucial to realize that there are multiple ways the response can go wrong.

It would certainly be a very bad thing if France or other democracies responded to terrorism with appeasement . . . .

A much bigger risk, in practice, is that the targets of terrorism will try to achieve perfect security by eliminating every conceivable threat — a response that inevitably makes things worse, because it’s a big, complicated world, and even superpowers can’t set everything right. On 9/11 Donald Rumsfeld told his aides: “Sweep it up. Related and not,” and immediately suggested using the attack as an excuse to invade Iraq. The result was a disastrous war that actually empowered terrorists, and set the stage for the rise of ISIS.

[P]eople can and do exploit terrorism for political gain, including using it to justify what they imagine will be a splendid, politically beneficial little war. 

Oh, and whatever people like Ted Cruz may imagine, ending our reluctance to kill innocent civilians wouldn’t remove the limits to American power. It would, however, do wonders for terrorist recruitment.

Finally, terrorism is just one of many dangers in the world, and shouldn’t be allowed to divert our attention from other issues.  

Paris may have changed that calculus a bit, especially when it comes to Europe’s handling of refugees, an agonizing issue that has now gotten even more fraught. And there will have to be a post-mortem on why such an elaborate plot wasn’t spotted. But do you remember all the pronouncements that 9/11 would change everything? Well, it didn’t — and neither will this atrocity.

Again, the goal of terrorists is to inspire terror, because that’s all they’re capable of. And the most important thing our societies can do in response is to refuse to give in to fear.