Europe.
Posted on 05/22/2005 2:48:58 PM PDT by CHARLITE
Editors note: To find out what governments and courts are doing to stop the growing threat of Islamic terrorist groups in Europe, reporter Mark Houser visited Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Spain in March and April on a journalism fellowship from the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Today's stories are the first in a series of reports on what he discovered.
Despite the brutal slaying of an Amsterdam filmmaker and tension broiling between Muslims and non-Muslims, Dutch courts continue a string of acquittals in terrorism trials.
Europe, the cradle of Western Civilization, also is a hiding place for enemies plotting its ruin.
The most infamous, Mohammed Atta, e-mailed U.S. flight schools and devised the airliner hijackings that would kill nearly 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11, 2001, while living in an apartment in Hamburg, Germany. A Spanish court is now deciding if an al-Qaida cell in Madrid helped Atta's group with money and a safe house.
To a small but growing number of angry young men in Europe, Atta was a martyr in a holy war.
Some of them hope to be next.
Across the continent, police are racing to round up networks of militant Islamic terrorists before they can strike. Italy arrested nine North African men on Wednesday who were allegedly planning attacks. Those arrests were the latest in a crackdown that has put hundreds of suspects in Europe behind bars awaiting trial. Courts with a tradition of leniency increasingly have to weigh the rights of the accused against national security.
(Excerpt) Read more at pittsburghlive.com ...
"Dutch judges last month cleared Samir Azzouz of terrorism charges, even after he was found in possession of chemicals useful for making bombs, a silencer and gun cartridges, night vision goggles and a bulletproof vest, jihadist literature and videos, and maps of the Dutch parliament and other potential targets along with notes on their security"
..."A German court in Hamburg cleared one alleged co-conspirator in the 9/11 attacks, while another man is being retried after his conviction was overturned. Eight of nine men charged in a plot to poison Londoners with ricin were acquitted or released last month"
The europeon leftist enablers--just like ours. None of us are going to get a handle on terrorism, until the fifth column is routed.
"There is still the notion in Washington that ... 'We are fighting terrorism and you are either with us or you are against us. And if you are a European sissy and you don't want to cooperate in the war on terror, then screw you,'" Bento Silva said.
That statement just about sums it up, but unfortunately the Euro-crat Bento Silva is not saying it with approval but with horror and disdain!! Poor prissy Euro-crats, who can't recognize obvious threats to thousands perhaps millions of innocent lives, but instead prefer to quack and squawk about the 'tough' line out of Washington, DC. Poor sissy Euro-crats, they would rather primp and preen themselves as great humanitarians than prevent a much worse Madrid or 9/11...... what a bunch of dangerous buffoons!
There have been theories put forth in recent years that "war" is as instinctive in the human condition as survival and species propagation. I don't know if this is true but think there may be something to it.
I have a feeling that the current war with Islam, at the insistence of Islamists, will make the WWII Pacific War benign by comparison. Yet, in the end, it will be a war the good guys dare not lose. If the "leaders" of Western Europe see that, it isn't yet evident.
Europe.
The problem with Europe is that they don't know how to defend themselves any more.
Part of it is our fault because for the last 60 years we have taken care of their defense and cuddled them so that they could create their socialist nirvana.
They now have to pay the piper and if we, ourselves, don't wake up to the Muslim threat, we will follow in Europe's unhappy footsteps.
Awesome comparison!
"There have been theories put forth in recent years that "war" is as instinctive in the human condition as survival and species propagation. I don't know if this is true but think there may be something to it."
I have often wondered if war is not God's way of keeping population in hand. Especially in the day and age of medical advances.
Please, nobody flame me, it's just a thought I've had.
... in the meantime no doubt hoping they'll eventually assimilate and become proper Dutchmen and good socialists, all.
Fat chance. They'll intimidate and murder the Dutch out of existence first. Holland will disappear like Christians in the Levant!
This is starting to sound like another job for the Eighth Air Force.
OMG....TOO FUNNY!
Like your screen name. :)
There are so many stories throughout the scriptures suggesting a capricious God. Yet the most armageddon like events always seemed to be reserved for societies that strayed furthest from the straight and narrow path. Still, war suggests an almost Job-like perniciousness.
No doubt wars in the last century either caused the deaths of or prevented the birth of somewhere between half a billion and a billion people. Yet still the population grows. The pernicious aspect of it is two-fold. Even when you take civilian populations as some of the targets, the majority of the victims are those in or just coming to the prime of life.
Then as the line from the song Ruben James tells it, the worst of men must fight and the best of men must die.
William Buckley alludes in one of his philosophy efforts to men climbing Mount Hubris. We like to think of ourselves as omipotent at least in the collective. Every now and then, as was the case in the scriptures, perhaps God likes to perform a task or two to remind us what a slippery slope is Mount Hubris. I thought last December's tsunami was an example. Maybe war in its most violent manifestation is another.
As the world gets smaller, my money is on some bug that God hasn't even thought up yet that will make the black death look like hay fever. It will move about the globe. It will spread so quickly, and when it has run its course we will only hope there is enough of a cross section of society left to pick up the pieces without plunging the world into another stone age.
The deity paradox asks how can omnipotent mercy allow evil to exist? We never stop telling God what to do. I recall even Job asked God, "Why?" I also remember God's response was, "It's none of your business." In great tragedies as in great triumphs, I like to think the next twenty five years will be the most interesting in the history of the world.
"If I lived in Belgium I'd be very scared"
I agree, and cannot believe the savage irony of history, that a land liberated from the Nazis is now sleepily succumbing to the neo-Nazis, the influx of Islamo-fascists. The Nazis drove my father's family out of Belgium in 1940 (they were war refugees, unwilling to live under Nazi rule and escaping while they still could). Fortunately, my father eventually made his way to the USA, after the war. American and Allied soldiers liberated Belgium in 1944-45, thank heaven..... who could have imagined that 60 years later all these neo-Nazis (Islamo-fascists) would be busy taking over Belgium and all of Europe, and that the supposedly free peoples of Europe would hardly utter a peep??? To paraphrase T.S. Eliot, this is the way civilization dies, not with a bang but with a whimper....
Fortunately the USA exists far beyond the seas, but will enough people here wise up in time to what's going on???
Your tagline reminds me of how Harry Belafonte described 3,000+ dead on 9/11 as "mischief."
Char
I hadn't heard that one but fortunately the far-left wacko Belafonte hasn't been too active lately (or if he has I've missed him, how sad).
Yes, I've kept my tagline because I think its importance goes far beyond the 2004 campaign and the close call we had with John "Vichy" Kerry. The whole mentality of terrorism is mainly a law enforcement matter, of people already forgetting or never knowing the immense significance of 9/11, goes so far beyond the foolishness of one candidate like Kerry or one year's campaign.
The latest onslaught from the ACLU and Amnesty International (obviously coordinated, as many of these left-wing groups work closely together) is another reminder that we are constantly under assault from within as well as without -- people in AI and the ACLU want us to pre-emptively SURRENDER.
....and exactly what do all of these pro-Al Qaeda, pro-terrorist, pro-Muslim groups think is going to happen, if their agendas for our America are fulfilled? Do they imagine that their own heads will remain on their necks?
Do they think that "KILL THE INFIDEL WHEREVER YOU FIND HIM" is just a quaint, meaningless 7th century phrase? - a historical anachronism?
Char
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