This might come in handy some day:
Mass murder in Lewiston, Maine [UPDATED]
At least 22 people are dead and 50-60 more were injured in a mass shooting at two businesses in Lewiston, Maine, according to NBC News.
The Androscoggin County Sheriff’s Office said around 8 p.m. that a suspect was at large, sharing a photo of an armed man in what appeared to be a place of business. …
Lewiston police Lt. Derrick St. Laurent told NBC affiliate News Center Maine that the shootings occurred at Sparetime Recreation, a bowling alley, and Schemengees, a restaurant.
I know a fair amount about the town of Lewiston, so I’m going to add some things that don’t appear in any of the news stories I’ve read. Lewiston is the second largest city in Maine, but it’s nevertheless small – around 37K – and its population is somewhat atypical for Maine: 77.9% White, 13.9% Black or African American, 1.2% Asian, 0.4% Native American. The large number of black people in Lewiston are Somali immigrants and their descendants, starting in 1999. This caused a certain amount of upheaval at the time in a city that wasn’t doing well economically, having been dependent – like so much of New England – on mills. Lewiston also has an unusually large French-speaking population which is around 25% of the inhabitants. I know people from Lewiston whose first language in the home was French; it’s not at all unusual.
What does this have to do with the shooting in a town that ordinarily has an extremely low crime rate? Perhaps nothing. The photo of the alleged perp is definitely not of a Somalian, so that can be ruled out. I wonder, however, if his victims were random or if they were Somalian. There is virtually no information of this, so it is mere speculation on my part about whether it’s relevant at all.
RIP to all the victims.
UPDATE:
A suspect has been identified, and he is someone with documented and allegedly serious mental health issues. His name is Robert Card and he doesn’t live in Lewiston:
Fox-3 in New York reported that his last known address was in Bowdoin, Maine.
CBS News reporter David Begnaud posted on X that Mr. Card is ”a trained firearms instructor believed to be in the Army reserve stationed out of Saco, ME.”
Citing “law enforcement,” Mr. Begnaud also posted that Mr. Card “recently reported mental health issues including hearing voices and threats to shoot up the National Guard base in Saco.”
This was also not his first run in with the mental-health system, Mr. Benaud reported, saying the suspect was “committed to a mental health facility for 2 weeks in the summer of 2023.”
Why was this guy out on the streets?
What’s going on with the Israeli anti-Hamas offensive?
As with Ukraine, there are so many reports and so much speculation about what’s going on with Israeli plans for Gaza that it’s really hard to know who if anyone to trust.
There’s this report that they are waiting for the US to be able to protect its troops in the Middle East, with air support. And yesterday I found the following group, and although they have almost no traffic (and are quite un-telegenic), they seem to know a lot, have good credentials, and be covering many angles no one else seems to be talking about, including what’s going on in the Arab world post-October 7.
The entire video is worth watching, but I’ve cued up two short excerpts. Here are the participants:
Yoni Ben Menachem – A veteran Arab affairs and diplomatic commentator for Israel Radio and Television who served as Director General and Chief Editor of the Israel Broadcasting Authority
Also featuring:
Lt.-Col. (res.) Maurice Hirsch, Former Director of the Military Prosecution for Judea and Samaria
Dan Diker, President, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs
And here are the two brief clips:
Here are two more clips from another recent video:
Balancing the Israel/Palestine scale requires lies
As far back as I can remember – and since I’m pretty old these days, that’s quite far back – the MSM was interested in a particular narrative about Israel and Palestine. Let’s call it “equivalence.” Certain concepts were involved, but especially the “cycle of violence” – as though the entire thing was some sort of children’s squabble in which both sides were trading punches and neither side wanted the conflict to end.
And those were the media outlets who were relatively kind to the Israelis. There were others who put the blame squarely on the Israelis and saw Palestinians as their long-suffering victims.
To maintain such fictions it was necessary for the MSM to lie and to obscure. But the MSM was fully up to the task. Some of what reporters did was out of a combination of laziness and ignorance. Some was leftist anti-Semitism in which hatred of Jews combined with hatred of the Western world and the Enlightenment. Some was the need to cater to the Palestinians in order to preserve “access,” without which this illusion of coverage couldn’t happen. And some of the reporters have been Palestinian stringers whose sympathies were and are obviously with their fellow Palestinians and their terrorist leaders and against Israel
For example – and I know this looks like it’s from the Babylon Bee, but it’s not – here’s the latest from The NY Times:
The New York Times is defending its rehiring of a Gaza journalist who was previously exposed for praising Hitler.
The Times rehired freelance videographer Soliman Hijjy as part of its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. In August 2022, the pro-Israel media watchdog HonestReporting shed light on Hijjy, whose work had been featured by the Times between 2018 and 2021.
HonestReporting found that Hijjy praised Adolf Hitler in a 2012 Facebook post, writing, “How great you are, Hitler” in Arabic.
In a 2018 post, Hijjy shared a photo of himself with a caption that translated to either “I’m in tune like Hitler during the holocaust” or “in a state of harmony as Hitler was during the Holocaust.” …
The Times is now standing by Hijjy.
“We reviewed problematic social media posts by Mr. Hijjy when they first came to light in 2022 and took a variety of actions to ensure he understood our concerns and could adhere to our standards if he wished to do freelance work for us in the future,” a spokesperson for the Times told FOX News Digital. “Mr. Hijjy followed those steps and has maintained high journalistic standards. He has delivered important and impartial work at great personal risk in Gaza during this conflict.”
This is beyond parody.
Most MSM reporters aren’t as obviously biased as Hijjy, but they nevertheless only feel comfortable when they can pretend that Israel is just as bad as Hamas. That’s why they were so very eager to take Hamas’ world for the hospital bombing. It was too good to not be true. And the fact that they were exposed as the liars they are will not stop them from doing it again and again, as they’ve done for decades.
Ben Shapiro writes:
The easiest moral place to stand is in the middle.
Standing in the middle is comforting. It grants you the illusion that you are being evenhanded, that you see nuance and complexity where others see black and white. It is flattering to be in the middle — no one hates your viewpoint enough to make you their opponent, and yet you get to stand apart from everyone, tut-tutting both sides.
When it comes to Israel and its terror-backing enemies, the West has, for some decades, taken precisely that position.
And those are the better reporters. The worse ones firmly take the Palestinian side.
As Shapiro writes, it’s based on lies:
The first lie is that Israel must be warned not to engage in human rights violations.
We hear this nostrum all the time: from the president of the United States, from the United Nations, from the media. The idea is that if Israel’s leadership isn’t reminded in the wake of the worst pogrom since the Holocaust, those rude Jews might carpet-bomb Gaza. The purpose of the lie is simple: to get Israel to stop defending itself at the first available opportunity. If you warn the world that Israel is likely to pursue atrocities, and then — as inevitably happens in war — something terrible happens, Israel can quickly be shoved back into the box of moral equivalence.
Voila! Status quo ante restored.
Of course, this lie is a lie. And it is a stupidly offensive lie, in the same way that it is a lie when the United Nations warns the United States about human rights violations. Israel is a professional military that abides by the rules of war. Its enemies openly cheer the death of civilians, both Israel’s and their own. By all rights, the entire political and media infrastructure ought to be using their supposed moral suasion on human rights to convince Hamas to release hostages and protect their own citizens. But, of course, there’s no real interest in that. The lie must be maintained. Israel has to be warned about human rights, because secretly, the Jews are just like Hamas.
Then there’s the second lie: that we must all remember the vaunted Peace Process …
The Peace Process is dead. It always was a fiction, but Hamas killed the last lingering remnants of that fiction and wiped its bloody sword on it.
NOTE: I’m not sure where best to put the following, which is a comment I saw to this article. I can’t vouch for its veracity, but to me it has the ring of truth, as well as (sadly) familiarity in its m.o.:
In 88-89 I was a reserve member of the military Govt in Gaza. I hated being there and requested to transfer back to my original unit in Lebanon but to no avail so I did my job of trying to keep the peace and stop Hamas from spreading out of the neighborhood of Ally Muktar, I was in the house of Yasseen [Hamas head at the time] twice as our officers tried to explain to him what he was doing to the city. But the blind fkr couldn’t see it nor would he listen.
Afterwards we had an emergency call to investigate a crime scene. The man of the house was tied to a chair badly beaten and bleeding profusely from stab wounds. His wife [and] daughters … lay on the floor lifeless in their own blood, having been tortured, raped, and killed while the father was forced to watch. This happened because he didn’t want to join Hamas.
As our medics tended to his wounds he dipped his hand in the blood of his family and swore that he would avenge them. I never knew if he came back from the hospital in Ashkalon.
But I saw this happen a few more times after this.
This is how Hamas got the vote by the people.
Thanks for the pep talk yesterday
I’m talking about your comments on this thread. Most of you know it’s been a hard year for me, and the October 7 massacre and the fact that it sometimes feels as though we’re on the brink of WWIII has increased the gloom.
Being a solo blogger is a strange activity. The blogger works quite alone, and puts out material at a fast clip. But the result is seen by so many people, most of whom are known to the blogger and each other only in cyberspace. When I began this blog I thought I’d do it for a month and see what happened. Now, nineteen years later, I guess this is what happened.
The heyday of the blog is over, and solo bloggers are much fewer in number than they used to be. But I have no intention of quitting.
Thanks again.
Well folks, we have a Speaker
And he’s a Republican. And it was the GOP that elected him, not the Democrats.
So both of those are good things.
Who is it? Mike Johnson of Louisiana – no one I previously knew a thing about, but that’s okay. It’s done.
According to The Hill:
“I have been humbled to have so many Members from across our Conference reach out to encourage me to seek the nomination for Speaker,” Johnson said in his letter. “Until yesterday, I had never contacted one person about this, and I have never before aspired to the office.”
“However, after much prayer and deliberation, I am stepping forward now,” he added.
He was elected in a 220-209 vote on Wednesday afternoon, beating Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.).
He called the election “the honor of a lifetime” in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
Best of luck to him. I think he has his work cut out for him, with such differences of opinion among the GOP members and such a tiny margin. But maybe, just maybe, the 22-day battle over the speakership has gotten some of that out of their systems?
I know; wishful thinking.
Johnson comes through several rounds of nominees and votes to emerge as the Speaker nominee of the Republican conference, and while he may not be known by most, he is an incredibly conservative Congressman and has been a longtime fighter for conservative causes since before his time in the U.S. House. In Louisiana, he is well-liked in his district, winning re-election unopposed in 2022.
One of the things that worked in Johnson’s favor, however, is the fact that while he was once the Chairman of the Republican Study Committee, he is not a member of the House Freedom Caucus. Any affiliation with that group would likely have tanked his bid for Speaker, considering the strong feelings most of the more moderate wing has about Jim Jordan and how just about everyone seems to have about Matt Gaetz. Byron Donalds, also of the HFC, could not get further in his bid for Speaker due to that (as well as his relative inexperience).
So it seems he’s plenty conservative and probably not vulnerable to another Gaetz alliance with the Democrats to torch him, and most of the other members are probably relieved and will give him a chance at least for a while.
Open thread 10/25/23
Personal note
These days the news is overwhelming in at least two ways. The first is that it’s incredibly upsetting, and “upsetting” is really way too mild a word for what I mean. Distressing, devastating, horrific, frightening, , nightmarish, foreboding – words seem inadequate.
The second is that the sheer volume of news makes it difficult to know what to focus on in my writing. I must have at least thirty or so drafts for posts just on the topic of the Hamas/Israel situation since October 7. Some of those posts will probably never see the light of day and some will.
So if I miss big topics at times, I’ll just say that I’m well aware of it.
Hope you’re all okay.
Airplane sabotage attempt by off-duty Alaska Airlines pilot
An off-duty Alaska Airlines pilot was charged with 83 counts of attempted murder for allegedly trying to shut down a plane’s engines midflight on Sunday.
The big picture: Joseph David Emerson, 44, was riding in the jump seat of Alaska Airlines flight 2059 from Everett, Washington, to San Francisco and was subdued after attempting the shutdown, the company said.
Two observations of mine.
The first is that there is a precedent in this extraordinary case, although in the former incident it was not a passenger plane but a FedEx flight:
My second observation is that Emerson sounds like a regular guy:
Neighbors described Emerson as a “positive, very friendly, upbeat,” father of two.
On a quiet street in Pleasant Hill, Emerson, his wife, and two young sons live in a one-story house decorated with Halloween ghost, tombstone, and skeleton displays on the front lawn..
There’s a photo there of Emerson, whose face and expression arouse no red flags. So, what’s the deal? Well, the FedEx flight perp had a previously good resume but recently was about to face a disciplinary procedure and was apparently afraid of losing his job and worried for his family’s financial future. That was his motive:
Also in the airplane was 42-year-old FedEx flight engineer Auburn Calloway, an alumnus of Stanford University and a former Navy pilot and martial-arts expert, who was facing possible dismissal over falsifying of his flight hours. To disguise the hijacking as an accident, so his family would benefit from his US$2.5 million (equivalent to $4.9 million in 2022) life-insurance policy, Calloway intended to murder the flight crew using blunt force. To accomplish this, he brought on board two claw hammers, two club hammers, a speargun, and a knife (which was not used) concealed inside a guitar case. He also carried with him a note written to his ex-wife and “describing the author’s apparent despair”. Just before the flight, Calloway had transferred over US$54,000 (equivalent to $106,600 in 2022) in securities and cashier’s checks to his ex-wife.
My guess is that there’s some version of that for Emerson.
A Muslim speaking out
I’ve seen others, too.
ADDENDUM:
In response to some of the comments, I’ll add that of course her speaking out doesn’t change anything regarding jihadis, their goals, and their grip on so many ordinary Muslims. Nevertheless she models the possibility of disagreement within the faith. She is hardly alone, either. But the reason I included this video is because I often read commentary on the right side of the blogosphere saying something like, “Where are the moderate Muslims? Why aren’t they speaking out? I haven’t heard or seen a single one.”
They indeed exist. The problem is that they don’t seem to matter much if at all. That doesn’t negate the fact of their courage.
The differences between the jihadis and the Nazis
I’ve already pointed out that one difference is that the Nazis tried to keep their crimes quiet, while Hamas proudly records its murders and atrocities and disseminates the videos worldwide.
Here are a few more differences.
(1) It’s my impression that although both the Nazis and Hamas jihadis were/are into torture, Hamas seems to prefer to torture a larger percentage of its victims, up close and personal.
(2) The Nazis killed about 2/3 of the Jews of Europe and approximately 1/3 of the Jews who had been alive in the entire world prior to the war. I don’t know what percentage of world Jewry has been killed in terrorist attacks by Hamas and other jihadis up to and including October 7, but it’s nowhere near a match to the efficiency of the Nazi Jew-killing machine. However, jihadis have the very same ambition: to eliminate Jews from the face of the earth. They also want to kill quite a few Christians along the way; maybe ultimately all of them, too, if they won’t convert.
(3) To accomplish the Holocaust the Nazis had to conquer country after county in Europe and conduct a staged roundup operation, usually with the cooperation of at least some of the locals. Some countries’ populations of non-Jews refused to cooperate, although that refusal was only successful in certain countries the Nazis were occupying with a temporarily lighter touch. But the whole thing was hard work for the Nazis. The jihadis have it much easier because many of the world’s Jews are concentrated in a very small area: Israel, surrounded by enemies.
(4) The Nazis were a German national party and although they had allies, Nazism wasn’t much of a movement worldwide. Muslims, however, represent about a quarter of the world’s population. What’s more, there are sizable numbers of Muslims in Western Europe and the US. What percentage of these Muslims support Hamas? I can’t say for sure, but I think it’s correct to say that percentage is very significant, given the extent of the demonstrations and the quality of the statements of Muslim leaders in many countries. And, for example, here’s a poll of Muslims in America:
A majority of Muslim-Americans agree that Israel has a right to defend itself, but in stark contrast to other demographic groups, a majority disagree that Israel should invade Gaza, and a majority agree that Hamas was justified in its attack on Israel.
(5) And then there is the left and the biased anti-Israel MSM. During WWII the left was with the Nazis while the USSR was allied with them, but after that the left was anti-Nazi (very flexible of them). Now much of the left is not just anti-Israel but pro-Hamas or at the very least in Hamas-atrocity-denial.
(6) In addition, we have the UN:
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres accused Israel of violating international law in its retaliation against the Hamas terrorist organization in the Gaza Strip and called for an immediate truce that would leave the terrorist organization in power after it massacred over 1,400 Israelis in the worst mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust.
“I am deeply concerned about the clear violations of international humanitarian law that we are witnessing in Gaza. Let me be clear: No party to an armed conflict is above international humanitarian law,” Guterres said during a Security Council meeting on the Gaza conflict.
Israeli officials railed at UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres Tuesday after he appeared to suggest the impetus for the Hamas terror group’s devastating October 7 attack on Israel was the Jewish state’s continued control of Palestinian territories.
“It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum,” Guterres said at a UN Security Council meeting on the Israel-Hamas war, which erupted when the terror group ravaged Israeli border communities, killing some 1,400 people, the vast majority of them civilians.
“The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing,” Guterres said. …
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres accused Israel of violating international law in its retaliation against the Hamas terrorist organization in the Gaza Strip and called for an immediate truce that would leave the terrorist organization in power after it massacred over 1,400 Israelis in the worst mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust.
“I am deeply concerned about the clear violations of international humanitarian law that we are witnessing in Gaza. Let me be clear: No party to an armed conflict is above international humanitarian law,” Guterres said during a Security Council meeting on the Gaza conflict.
Please read the whole thing, if you can stomach it. Guterres has apparently been reading The NY Times.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken held “listening sessions” with Muslim, Arab-American and Jewish staffers amid growing internal frustration over the department’s handling of the war in Israel and Gaza.
The meetings came after a State Department official resigned in protest this week over continued US support for an Israeli bombing campaign in the Gaza Strip that the Hamas-run health ministry says has killed more than 4,000 people.
On Friday afternoon, Blinken met with a small group of State Department staffers who are members of two Arab-American and Muslim employee organizations.
I doubt they’re upset that the US isn’t supporting Israel more and taking the gloves off.
NOTE: So far, all the casualty statistics of Palestinians in Gaza as a result of Israeli airstrikes have come from Hamas. There is zero reason to believe their figures, based on past experience with their lies. The MSM could be helpful in making that very clear. Instead, it generally does the opposite.
Open thread 10/24/23
Giant dahlias:
