Thomas Wictor

How immoral has American political culture become? Well, it equates words with mass murder. Actually, our political culture sees words as worse than mass murder. Look no further than this incredible op-ed.

San Bernardino bloodbath born of bigots

They were two hate-filled, bigoted municipal employees interacting in one department. Now 13 innocent people are dead in unspeakable carnage. One man spent his free time writing frightening, NRA-loving, hate-filled screeds on Facebook about the other’s religion. The other man quietly stewed and brewed his bigotry, collecting the kind of arsenal that the Facebook poster would have envied.

What they didn’t realize is that except for their different religions they were in many ways similar men who even had the same job.

One man, the Muslim, was a loser who had to travel all the way to Pakistan to get himself an email bride. (I refuse to add to their fame by using the killer and his murderous wife’s names.) That wife radicalized him and fueled his hatred. The FBI is investigating her ties to Al Qaeda and ISIS. Go to the Middle East, meet your new wife, meet some terror leaders, begin your wedded bliss back in the USA.

The other man, the victim, Nicholas Thalasinos, was a radical Born Again Christian/Messianic Jew, who also connected with his future wife online and had traveled across the country to meet her. The killer, however, became half of an Islamic Bonnie & Clyde, while the other died as the male equivalent of Pamela Geller.

This depraved bile was secreted by a woman aptly named Linda Stasi. The Stasi was the East German state security (Staatssicherheit) or secret police.

It has been described as one of the most effective and repressive intelligence and secret police agencies to have ever existed.

One of the methods that the East German Stasi used to maintain its control was equating words with violence. Simply saying certain things made you a danger to the state, so you had to be killed. Linda Stasi is saying in plain language that Nicholas Thalasinos deserved to be killed for his thoughts and words. She writes above that he was not an innocent victim.

Stasi also hopes that Pamela Geller will be murdered. Evelyn Beatrice Hall’s notion of “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” no longer exists in much of our culture. Imagine if American Southern Baptists were murdering hundreds of thousands in the name of their religion. Do you think Linda Stasi would blame the victims in the slightest, regardless of how offensive their words were?

Here’s what one of Linda Stasi’s fellow totalitarians said to me on Twitter today.

She was referring to a tweet I posted in response to this truly surreal remark by a producer at al-Jazeera America.

Hashem Said was upset that ABC News published a photo of dead terrorist Tashfeen Malik’s face.

I tweeted this to him.

According to “Noemí,” my tweet makes me as bad as mass murderers.

This is Noemí.

She’s a cartoon character. This isn’t a real person. What happened was that she moved into a motel where everything was already waiting for her: clothes, job, thoughts, politics, hobbies, and “friends.” Everything in her existence is scripted.

Immoral cartoon characters

The problem is that these immoral cartoon characters are getting us killed. Linda Stasi said this.

(I refuse to add to their fame by using the killer and his murderous wife’s names.) That wife radicalized him and fueled his hatred.

Stasi is obviously lying about why she didn’t write Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik’s names. The real reason she won’t write their names is that she doesn’t want to be associated with people like me. I’ve been bombarded by demands that I not call them “Muslim terrorists” because it’s racist[sic] and because “Terrorism has no religion.”

Sure, but TERRORISTS have religions. Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik were Muslim followers of the Islamic State. Linda Stasi is wrong or lying when she says that Malik “radicalized” Farook. He was a maniacal Muslim terrorist-in-waiting.

Syed Farook, father of San Bernardino terrorist Syed Rizwan Farook, has described his son as negatively “obsessed” with Israel.

In an interview with Italian daily La Stampa, Farook said that he once tried to console his son by promising him that Israel would not exist in another two years because “China, Russia and America will bring the Jews back to Ukraine.”

In Sunday’s La Stampa (link in Italian) report, Farook said, “My son said that he shared [IS leader Abu Bakr] Al Baghdadi’s ideology and supported the creation of the Islamic State. He was also obsessed with Israel.”

“I told him he had to stay calm and be patient because in two years Israel will not exist any more. Geopolitics is changing: Russia, China and America don’t want Jews there any more. They are going to bring the Jews back to Ukraine. What is the point of fighting? We have already done it and we lost. Israel is not to be fought with weapons, but with politics. But he did not listen to me, he was obsessed,” Farook explained to US correspondent Paolo Mastrolilli.

Syed Farook Sr is considered a Muslim success story, a fully integrated American citizen—who thinks that the US is going to invade Israel and forcibly deport the Jews to the Ukraine. How’s he different from these guys?

I’ll tell you one difference: There’s an order of magnitude more Syed Farook Sr and Jr’s than members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Now, I get a lot of stupid messages from surface skaters who have no actual knowledge. The FACT is that Sunni Islam has a kind of Vatican called Al-Azhar University, based in Cairo, Egypt. Here’s what al-Azhar says about the Islamic State.

Al-Azhar refuses to consider the Islamic State an apostate

Egypt’s Al-Azhar issued a statement Dec. 11, 2014, refusing to declare the Islamic State (IS) apostates. “No believer can be declared an apostate, regardless of his sins,” it read. Al-Azhar’s statement came as a Nigerian mufti seemingly declared IS apostates at a Dec. 4, 2014, Al-Azhar conference. Al-Azhar stated that various media outlets had misrepresented the mufti’s speech.

The sheikh of Al-Azhar, Ahmed al-Tayeb, repeated his rejection of declaring IS apostates on Jan. 1, during a meeting with editors-in-chief of Egyptian newspapers.

So: The Islamic State is Muslim. Period. Stop pretending that it isn’t. The only ways that Muslims become apostates is by practicing another religion, mocking Allah or Mohammed, mocking sharia law, or questioning or denying fundamental tenets of Islam. No believer is an apostate.

I like exposing liars. Linda Stasi uses this photo on her grotesquely immoral rants.

Here’s what she actually looks like.

To quote Satan in the brilliant film The Devil’s Advocate, “Vanity is definitely my favorite sin.”

Vain people always make gigantic mistakes. They choose a course and stick with it, no matter how obvious a failure it is. We’re lucky that men and women not crippled by the sin of vanity are secretly doing the work that we currently find too hard.

U.S.-backed forces in Iraq and Syria have retaken significant amounts of territory from the [Islamic State], depriving it of traditional sources of income, analysts say. Towns and villages that the Islamic State had relied on for tax revenue have been captured by Arab and Kurdish opponents. And lucrative spoils of war, including oil fields, properties to confiscate and captives to ransom off, have become scarcer as the group struggles to seize new areas.

But the Islamic State has lost as much as a third of the territory it had controlled in Iraq, including the city of Tikrit and the Baiji oil refinery. Iraq’s military and pro-government militias have recaptured those areas with the help of airstrikes from the U.S.-led coalition. In Syria, too, coalition air support has aided an alliance of Kurdish and Arab forces in seizing from Islamic State militants key areas near the group’s self-declared capital, Raqqa.

It’s not US or Coalition air strikes that are making a difference. The air strikes are virtually worthless.

Practically all the tools, techniques and specialized personnel the U.S. uses to deconflict airstrikes are unavailable in the air war against ISIS. U.S. JTACs [joint terminal attack controllers] are in Iraq, but they are removed from the battlefield, sitting in joint operations centers (JOCs) staring at video feeds to gain situational awareness (called “SA” by military members) of the battlefield.

It doesn’t matter what the US military claims. Since no JTACs are embedded with forward troops, the pilots are simply guessing at what they’re hitting. And the Islamic State has tunnel and bunker systems to protect its fighters.

Sudden gains are being made against the Islamic State because somebody has attached special-operations troops to the Kurds and the vetted Arab opposition groups. The fight is being taken to the enemy on the ground. Underground, actually. To our credit, we’re giving the Kurds and Arabs thousands of TOW antitank guided missiles (ATGMs).

Still, someone is going underground and killing the enemy in huge numbers. As magnificently brave as the Kurds and many of the Arab opposition groups are, they aren’t trained in unconventional warfare, and they don’t have state-of-the-art weaponry.

Everybody has to lie in order to make hand-wringing cartoon characters happy, even though nobody believes the deeply silly words being spoken. I predicted this days ago.

The 1,200-strong Bundeswehr task force’s deployment in Syria approved by the German parliament Friday might be reinforced by elite special forces, the KSK, according to local media.

To strengthen the task force, the Bundeswehr may send an additional unit of its elite Kommando Spezialkräfte (KSK) to Syria “in case of emergency,” Bild reports, citing its source in Bundestag’s defense committee.

This was “made very clear” by German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen and Bundeswehr chief of staff Gen Volker Wieker during preliminary hearings at Bundestag’s defense committee on Wednesday, Bild claims, adding that it’s unclear how many special troops could be sent to Syria.

What nonsense. The KSK is going to Syria to kill terrorists. Just say it!