Mateen was just a troubled youth who grew up in Trump’s neighborhood

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a typical and actually relatively subtle case of liberal propaganda about the Islamic terrorist Omar Mateen. Do they teach this stuff in journalism school, or does the press learn how to do it afterwards? Or does it just come naturally?

Here are the first few paragraphs, with my interpolations (some of them sarcastic) in brackets and bold:

If Omar Mateen was a disciple of “radical Islam,” as Donald Trump angrily [oooo, the mean Trump is angry!] described him, and “one of the soldiers of the caliphate,” as the Islamic State approvingly deemed him, he wasn’t a very impressive one, ideologically speaking. Mateen didn’t observe Islam terribly faithfully or seem to know much about what Islamists call the “true path.” [Why is his degree of observance the least bit relevant? Now someone has to be doctrinally pure and theologically knowledgeable in order to be a bona fide Islamic terrorist?] According to FBI Director James Comey, in the past few years Mateen confusingly expressed support for both the Islamic State and Hezbollah””even though the latter group is an avowed enemy of the Islamic State and is fighting against it in Syria on the side of Bashar Assad. [Oh no, I guess this “confusion” means he had nothing to do with Islam and couldn’t really have supported both of these two groups, who after all share the same anti-American, anti-infidel, anti-Western, anti-Israel, pro-Islamic supremicist, pro-terrorist bias.] The night he slaughtered 49 people in Orlando on Sunday, Mateen swore allegiance to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi at the last minute and with apparent self-doubt. Mateen called 911 twice, hanging up at first before finally fulfilling ISIS’s injunction to self-starter terrorists to declare allegiance to the group publicly before they act. [Again, does that mean he wasn’t a real jihadi?]

Based on the accounts of his aquaintances [sp.] and family, Mateen also appears to have been a deeply conflicted and possibly self-loathing homophobe who drank heavily, took drugs, dated men, frequented the same club he later attacked, Pulse, and used a gay dating app””not the sort of behavior one would expect of a faithful soldier of Islam. [Actually, homegrown terrorists often have a similar biography, because it’s when the temptations of the West interact with the restrictions of traditional Islam that a person is at his/her most vulnerable to the terrorist call. What’s more, there is evidence that Mateen’s contacts with gays were for the purpose of scouting the territory in order to plan his attack rather than any actual gay tendencies.]

Yes, Mateen was a terrorist””but what kind of terrorist? He had no known ISIS or Al Qaeda connection [of a formal sort, but who cares? He had plenty of exposure to and interest in them, and declared his allegiance. That certainly should be enough.]; he wasn’t getting operating orders from abroad; he hadn’t gone overseas to be trained [but he was recently in Sauda Arabia and authorities are just now investigating whether he might have made side trips to Yemenn or elsewhere for some training]; he followed no predicable course of radicalization [actually he followed an utterly predictable course of home-grown, internet-generated, radicalization followed by quite a few citizen children of immigrants from Muslim and/or Arab countries]. Mateen appears, in fact, to have been less a soldier than yet another deeply disturbed American [an American of the Muslim religion, born of immigrant parents from a Muslim country, however] (born in Trump’s own home borough of Queens) [egad, what possible significance does that have, except as an attempt to somehow create some equation with Trump?], who was full of hatred and uncontrollable anger””an example of what law enforcement officials describe as an aspiring violent criminal searching for a larger justification for the acts he’s desperate to commit. [He didn’t have to “search” very far, did he? In addition, all violent and sick ideologies always appeal most strongly to violent or sick people. I doubt that Hirsh would minimize the Nazi influence on individual Nazis who were “searching for a larger justification” for their acts, or for that matter the influence of ideology on individual white supremacists who might be moved to kill people of another race. No, I’m pretty certain that their ideologies would be front and center as motivation. Most human acts are determined by multiple factors, and to minimize the influence of Mateen’s declared Islamist and ISIS-inspired ideology is to either be a fool or a knave, or both.]

I will stop there; the article is very very long. But I will summarize the rest of it by saying that as it continues, Hirsh demonstrates that he actually is well aware of many aspects of Mateen’s radicalization by ISIS and of the FBI’s failure to discover it—or more importantly to be able to do anything about apprehending or stopping him before he acted. It’s an article with a split personality, in which Hirsch goes back and forth between propaganda and a sober and knowledgeable discussion of the problems inherent in the radicalization of violent Islamic terrorist “known wolves” who are citizens of Western countries such as the US.

It’s as though Hirsh feels the need to get the propaganda part over with at the beginning (that’s the part most people read), and then allows himself to get into the real reporting later.

[NOTE: In case you’re wondering who Hirsh is, he’s national editor for Politico and former foreign editor for Newsweek, as well as former member of the former JournoList.]

Polls: I just don’t see Trump winning

The New Neo Posted on by

If you want to look at some depressing polls on Donald Trump, see this and this.

Things can change, I know.

It’s early, I know.

But Trump’s abysmal showing in the polls against another weak candidate, Hillary Clinton, has been remarkably consistent, with only a few minor and transient upswings. This is something Trump supporters deny or explain away (and by the phrase “Trump supporters” I mean the diehards who supported him in the primaries over the other GOP candidates, not the reluctant ones who only support him now that it appears to be him or Hillary).

To accomplish their negation of the bad news on Trump, they usually cite what happened in the primaries. He started low and finished strong there, didn’t he? Yes, indeed he did. But early on—back in August—I noted with alarm that Trump had a decent chance of winning the GOP nomination, because it was becoming clear. I do not think the same about the general election.

In the primaries, Trump had a certain appeal to about 30-40% of GOP voters. With the remainder of the GOP voters, the field was split many ways. But now we have the general, not the primaries, and with a different and more diverse voting population that includes Democrats and Independents he faces off against only two people at the moment: Hillary Clinton and Gary Johnson. His popularity is in the tank, and he will have trouble not only with Democrats but most definitely with Independents and even with many Republicans.

It’s a recipe for disaster. That’s not to say it couldn’t turn around, but I just don’t see it happening. I say that with no joy. I see this campaign year as a tragedy, and I’ve felt that way for a long long time because I’ve taken his candidacy and his chances of winning the nomination very seriously. Even back in August of 2015 I wrote that Trump could end up becoming the GOP nominee:

From the start of Trump’s rise in the polls I’ve taken him very seriously as a phenomenon. I haven’t understood those who casually asserted “He’s never going to win the nomination.” I’ve long thought he could, because the force of that appeal is obvious, and he’s somehow made himself immune to being criticized for anything he says. His niche is “the more outrageous, the better,” and the more extreme his utterances the more his supporters seem to like him””although not all of what he says is extreme, of course, and some is just common sense.

If I were one of the other Republican candidates I’d be very very scared. And if I were one of the Democratic candidates I’d be scared, too.

I think the Democratic nominee’s fears have been assuaged, because voter rejection of Trump seems to be picking up speed right now. That fact gives me no joy whatsoever. Much as I detest Trump, I have been edging closer to the incredibly distasteful act of voting for him, for the obvious reason that on the whole I think Hillary Clinton could be worse (believe me, it’s a close call). To me, this is a lose/lose election, and a Donald Trump loss is something like an unfunny version of the old joke “the food is bad, and such small portions.”

As for the GOP, there are plenty of articles about how the Republican Party has destroyed itself (see this and this for two examples). But in my opinion those authors have the wrong focus. Trump never was the choice of the majority of Republican voters, except in a few states towards the end when a combination of weariness and momentum finally put him over 50% in those states. Trump’s nomination is the result of being the preference of a minority of party members (plus another unspecified number of non-party crossovers) who had become extremely angry at the GOP over a period of many years. Call it an insurrection, a hostile takeover, a rebellion, a civil war, it never was the party itself and in fact such voters had declared themselves to be at war with that party.

Once this sentiment found expression in support for Trump—which happened pretty early on in this primary season—it was check and then checkmate. The GOP only had one chance to save itself, which was to somehow winnow the field drastically and quickly, and even then it probably was not a way out for the party for the simple reason that Trump voters had already defected. They were not going to support the party’s nominee unless it was Trump. And without their support, that nominee would probably lose. But if the nominee were Trump, the party would probably lose the votes of the many Republicans who felt (and still feel) him to be an outrage and a danger for conservatism.

Lose/lose.

The problem was that the civil war had begun many years earlier, and for many many Trump supporters (remember how I defined that phrase earlier in this thread) he is merely the “tool” with which to dismantle the party. Revenge, ain’t it sweet? Those on the right who say they cannot support Trump are accused by many of his supporters of betrayal and of wanting Hillary to win, or at least not caring whether she wins. But I think it’s actually the other way around for a great many Trump supporters, who for months and months during the primaries declared that their goal was to destroy the GOP and then to rebuild it in their own image. If you destroy the opposition party, isn’t it logical to think that the other party (in this case, Hillary Clinton) will almost inevitably win the election?

The other Pavlova…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is Nadezhda, a Russian ballet dancer who burst onto the scene in the 70s dancing with the Perm Ballet and then the Bolshoi, and who revolutionized the “look” of ballet. I remember the first photos I saw of Pavlova, she of the extraordinarily hyperextended legs and exaggerated extensions.

Nadezhda was an excellent dancer, strong and expressive. But to me her line seemed somewhat distorted and gymnastic rather than balletic, the type of thing that had been frowned on previously as circus-like.

But she was a sensation, and the beginning of what I call “extreme ballet,” a trend that has persisted to this day and has replaced the more classic and restrained lines, and the emphasis on expression, of the dancers of my youth (not that Pavlova wasn’t also in my youth, but it was a relative youth by that time).

Here she is in rehearsal clothes, and you can see the exaggerated curve of her hyperextended legs and her large, dramatically arched feet:

npavlova

It almost seems impossible that she can hold her balance so well, because the sway of her legs (both of them, but especially the supporting one) would tend to throw her torso off-center and make it hard to find a balancing point over her hips. But somehow she did it, and the effect was electric.

[NOTE: I have hyperextended legs, too, so I can attest to how hard they are to manage. But mine are fairly mild compared to Pavlova’s.]

ADDENDUM: You might want to see a demonstration of how Pavlova’s hyperextensioned legs worked in motion, and also of her style. Here’s a clip from 1977. Pay particular attention to her supporting leg:

John Kasich “just can’t” support Trump…

The New Neo Posted on by

…right now:

“You know, it’s painful. It’s painful. You know, people even get divorces, you know? I mean, sometimes, things come out that, look, I’m sorry that this has happened,” the Ohio governor said in an interviewaired Thursday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “But we’ll see where it ends up. I’m not making any final decision yet, but at this point, I just can’t do it.”

I’ll tell you what’s painful—the fact that, during the primaries when it mattered, Kasich had no trouble supporting Trump by staying in the race himself long long past his pull date.

Main wreckage of EgyptAir Flight 804 located in Mediterranean

The New Neo Posted on by

They seem to have found the site of the wreckage of the EgyptAir flight that came down about a month ago in the Mediterranean, killing all 66 people on board.

Previously there had been parts of the airplane and some bodies, but this is the main area of debris, which has now been photographed:

Ships and planes from Egypt, Greece, France, the United States and other nations are searching the Mediterranean Sea north of the Egyptian port of Alexandria for the jet’s voice and flight data recorders, as well as more bodies and parts of the aircraft.

Egypt’s civil aviation minister has said he believes terrorism is a more likely explanation than equipment failure or some other catastrophic event. But no hard evidence has emerged on the cause, and no militant group has claimed to have downed the jet…

Wednesday’s announcement came after Egyptian investigators said that time is running out in the search for the black boxes. They said on Sunday that only five days remain before the batteries of the flight’s data and cockpit voice recorders expire and they stop emitting signals.

…Finding them without the signals is possible but more difficult.

I hope they hurry up and succeed in finding them; we don’t want another airplane crash mystery. I strongly suspect that some sort of terrorism was involved.

Failure to connect the dots on Mateen

The New Neo Posted on by

We already know that the FBI had investigated Orlando shooter Omar Mateen twice, and that although he had made very suspicious remarks to his colleagues at work, nothing raised enough red flags to cause the authorities to take him off the job or even to continue to monitor him.

This is why:

Mateen first came to the FBI’s attention in 2013, when he was a security guard and co-workers heard him say he had connections to al Qaeda and Hezbollah, and that he hoped to martyr himself in a confrontation with the law, according to Comey. The FBI opened a preliminary investigation, which allows agents to conduct limited surveillance and searches, but not to use its most aggressive tools (like FISA or Title III warrants)”¦

Let’s just think about that for a moment. My first reaction is that this should have been more than a “preliminary investigation,” especially because this man was not employed at Burger King, he was a security guard in sensitive situations. But I suppose it might have mattered whether it was one person making the report (which could have been just a grudge thing, as far as the FBI was concerned) or many. In Mateen’s case it was obviously “many,” so the FBI doesn’t have that excuse.

This is what happened then:

Preliminary investigations of terrorist suspects can run for six months in search of evidence the person is a member of a terrorist group or is planning a specific terrorist attack. The agent on the case can get a six-month extension if he or she thinks there might be more to find”¦In Mateen’s case, the FBI got one extension of the preliminary investigation, then closed the case after a total of ten months.

Are they merely looking for official membership and/or a specific attack? Apparently there must be acts or plans for acts—sympathies are not enough, even for someone in a security position such as Mateen’s. It sounds rather similar to what happened with Nidal Hassan, the Ft. Hood shooter.

Now, I’m all for protecting citizens’ liberties and for innocent till proven guilty, and I don’t think thought-crime should be a charge. But somewhere along the line there must be more that can be done with people in positions of trust who have engaged in such obviously suspicious behavior. Should they lose their security clearances? Not be allowed to buy firearms? Is this a compromise of liberty that we should tolerate in the name of protection, or does it go too far and can be too easily abused?

At the very least, should they not be followed, rather than closing the investigations? Here are the current guidelines, which I think are obviously inadequate:

Murphy, the FBI’s former number two who worked with then-FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni in revising the bureau’s investigative guidelines, says they discourage agents from monitoring potential terrorists over the long-term. Those guidelines retained the requirement that any preliminary investigation that did not produce evidence of a crime must be closed after six months. “Someone should have been monitoring [Mateen’s] social media 24/7,” Murphy says. “but under the guidelines that is not allowed,” he says.

We are very sensitive to government intrusion, and I think we should be. But when someone has indeed expressed sympathies with violent terrorist groups and has demonstrated communication with members of such groups, I think ongoing monitoring (particularly of social media, which is not a private but a public thing) is absolutely warranted. If the problem is money, more funds need to be allocated. But the problem seems to not be money, but will.

I doubt that will change after Orlando.

Here’s another dot that was not connected:

The owner of a Florida gun store said Orlando nightclub shooter Omar Mateen tried to buy body armor and bulk ammunition from his store just a few weeks before the shooting but his staff turned him away.

“We knew by the questions he was asking he was suspicious,” Robert Abell, a co-owner of Lotus Gunworks in Jensen Beach, Florida, told ABC News…

An an alert salesperson refused to sell to Mateen, and Abell said he contacted authorities about Mateen before the massacre. The local sheriff’s office said it was unaware of the incident at the gun store, and other local authorities, including the local FBI office, have not responded to ABC News’ requests for comment.

Mateen got weapons (not body armor) from another store, as we know. But here’s a huge red flag that should have been connected to the previous red flags of the FBI investigations. Why not? Is it mere disorganization? Or is there another prohibition on putting two and two together and acting on it? Either way, this is a systemic problem that needs correction but probably won’t get it.

I feel a sense of outrage and frustration. It’s one thing to say that hindsight is always 20/20 and you can’t predict in advance. It’s true. And I want to protect our liberties. But this was the proverbial smoking gun, several times over. And it ended up with actual smoking guns and a lot of dead bodies of innocent people.

[ADDENDUM: See also this.]

The trials of the officers charged with the death of Freddie Gray

The New Neo Posted on by

For a while, Freddie Gray’s death was the talk of every blog and every political talk show and every newspaper. It wasn’t even that long ago; you probably remember the furor.

Now that the political purposes of the incident have been served, you don’t hear much about the trials of the officers, do you? That’s because they are not going well for the prosecution.

However, the blog Legal Insurrection covers these trials in depth, courtesy of the intrepid Andrew Branca. Here’s today’s installment, but you can find them all if you go here and start scrolling down.

I could not possibly improve on Branca’s reportage, so I won’t even try. Please note that five of the six accused officers are also suing prosecutor Mosby for assorted violations such as defamation, invasion of privacy, malicious prosecution, false arrest, and violation of the Maryland declaration of rights.

Surviving Orlando

The New Neo Posted on by

Some days when I go to my computer to see the news I feel a strong sense of dread and weariness.

Today’s one of those days. The Orlando massacre has had the highly predictable result of exposing the fault lines in American politics—the myriad ways in which such events are hyped, sometimes distorted, and always used by each side to push certain agendas. I happen to agree far more with the agenda of the right than that of the left, but it doesn’t change the sadness and frustration I feel when I see the point we’ve come to.

Perhaps I’m bathing the past in the rosy glow of nostalgia, but I don’t remember it being that way in my youth. The disagreements were relatively mild, the sense of “we”-ness strong. Even as recently as 9/11 there was a brief return to that feeling, even though it was illusory. Since then, despite that little pause, it’s only grown worse.

So please forgive me if today I don’t go on and on about the specific issues that are being revealed moment by moment about Orlando. The gun control efforts (see this and this). The shooter’s two wives’ stories (see this and this). The back-and-forth between Trump and Obama, and Trump and Clinton (see these).

One thing I will remark on is how some of the survivors of the shooting managed to live. Many, of course, were able to escape by running away. But for the ones who were trapped in the room with the shooter, their stories are harrowing. They seem mostly to have a similar theme, which is that of surviving by playing dead.

Playing dead is a passive rather than an active tactic, but in the nightmare situation of facing a shooter and being unarmed yourself and taken completely by surprise, it can work for a few people. And even though it would seem at first as though it’s not especially heroic, it actually requires a remarkable amount of self-control and a certain form of bravery, even though it’s not the conventional type of bravery. Continue reading →

And then we have…

The New Neo Posted on by

…the Russian hackers:

Russian government hackers penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee and gained access to the entire database of opposition research on GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, according to committee officials and security experts who responded to the breach.

The intruders so thoroughly compromised the DNC’s system that they also were able to read all email and chat traffic, said DNC officials and the security experts.

What could possibly go wrong?

On the Orlando attack and Latinos, and the attitude of Islam towards gay people

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s heartbreaking to look at the photos of all these young people murdered by terrorist Omar Mateen. As I was doing so, however, I couldn’t help but notice that the vast majority of the victims seemed to be Latino, a fact I hadn’t seen previously remarked on. Putting that together with the fact that it was “Latin night” at the club makes me wonder whether that night was chosen because the terrorist not only wanted to kill gay people but also had it in for Latinos, and decided to make the killings a twofer. This does not dilute the fact that his motivation was Islamic terrorism; I will take his own word for that when he pledged allegiance to ISIS.

But that doesn’t mean he couldn’t have had multiple goals; terrorism doesn’t have to be determined by one thing only, and although Islamic terrorists are jihadis first and foremost, they are also human beings with a history and an agenda that can include other motives. Some in the Latino community in Orlando (30% of the general population but 90% of the Orlando victims) have spoken up (albeit hesitantly and gingerly) about the possible Latino angle:

“We’ve never really been, at least in recent history, the target of a terrorist attack,” she said. “Not to speculate that this was an attack on the Latino community, but to have been impacted to this magnitude, I don’t think we’ve ever seen that.”

Colon, like some other Latino leaders, complained that the media has so far largely painted the shootings as an attack on the gay community.

“Although .”‰.”‰. the overwhelming majority of the victims were Hispanic, that’s been largely omitted from the narrative,” Colon said. “Yes, we stand in solidarity with the LGBT community and are not here to point fingers. But the fact that it’s not stressed and not emphasized in central Florida .”‰.”‰. it’s really difficult.”

Here’s a clue as to the makeup of this community:

At least some of the victims appeared to be Puerto Ricans, who make up the largest segment of the Latino population here. The Puerto Rican community has been booming, due in part to an economic crisis that has spawned the greatest exodus of people from Puerto Rico in 50 years.

And of course Puerto Ricans can come and go as they please, since they are citizens.

The article ends with a quote from a Latino leader promoting solidarity with Muslims, and speaking out against Donald Trump. But I wonder if that’s as common a feeling as it was a few days ago, before the shooting; I certainly doubt it. I would imagine some Latinos are even considering supporting Trump as a result, although I have no idea how many might react this way.

And then there’s the news that the terrorist Mateen might have been gay, or fighting against being gay, or something of the sort. It’s unclear whether this was the case or not, but if so it only adds a psychological underlay to his main agenda, which was set by groups such as ISIS and the attitude of Islam towards homosexuality. This seems obvious—and yet, to those people determined to make it about Christianity (yes, you heard that right, Christianity), this is a golden opportunity to twist the narrative in the more preferred direction:

Democrats…since Sunday…have focused on every possible thing besides the shooter’s overt radical Islam motivation, including guns, Christianity (seriously), and now … “he was gay!”

The logic, such as it is, goes like this: Omar Mateen was probably gay, and obviously a repressed, closeted gay man, and obviously that’s because of Christians refusing to make cakes and therefore this wasn’t ISIS-related…

But even if you were to argue that it was strictly repressed homosexuality were the real culprit here, it’s still beyond the scale of absurd to blame Christians and religious freedom laws. Why would you think he was more impressed by and under the influence of gay marriage debates than he was by the preaching from the pulpit of his own faith? The words weekly told to him with the weight of God behind them in his own place of worship? From his own faith leader? From his own parents and community. Even if you granted that societal or social pressure to be straight turned him into a monster, that society and social circle was Islamic in nature, not Christian. It was fellow Muslims, not Christians, preaching to his ears and beseeching his eyes skyward. Not to God of the Bible but Allah of the Quran.

It’s a ridiculous argument, and it comes from a place of cowardice and hate. The American left hates the Christian faith and they hate those who subscribe to it.

The worst thing Christians say about gay people is “hate the sin but love the sinner,” and of course many oppose gay marriage. That’s a far cry from hating gay people and certainly a very far cry from advocating their murder. That doesn’t mean that some individual people who profess to be Christian don’t do more hating than that, but it’s not part of Christianity and they aren’t being christian when they do it. Islam and sharia law have a very different attitude, and since Mateen was Muslim and professed his allegiance to a well-known Islamic terrorist group, there is every reason to see Islam as the genesis for his actions.

Simply put, killing gay people is not a fringe thing in Islam; it is rooted in Muslim sharia law. That doesn’t mean every Muslim you meet believes it should be done, and certainly most are not going around carrying it out. But it is folly to believe that sharia law was not the impetus for Mateen’s actions in Orlando:

The inspiration for Muslims to brutalize and mass murder gay people does not come from ISIS. It is deeply rooted in Islamic law, affirmed by many of Islam’s most renowned scholars. This is why, wherever sharia is the law, homosexuals are persecuted and killed.

There is, quite simply, no comparison to Christianity in the modern age. Anyone who makes it is desperate to ignore or to negate the truth.