Terrorism back in America after 14 year absence - Tragedy in San Bernardino - 14 dead, 21 injured

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Not since the World Trade Center disaster September 11, 2001 has the war on terrorism been in evidence here in America.  That all changed in San Bernardino, California this week when fourteen were murdered and twenty-one injured.

Armed to the teeth with assault rifles, hand guns, and pipe bombs, a home grown radicalized Islamic terrorist and his Pakistani wife invaded a Christmas party and left the horrendous carnage of bodies and blood.

Three hours later, when they were most likely returning to their bomb factory for more ammunition, they were spotted and after a short police chase a gun battle ensued and nearly 500 bullet blasts later the two terrorists were dead while just two cops were injured.

The chance encounter at the bomb factory most likely save many, many more lives as a dozen pipe bombs and thousands of more rounds of ammunition remained in the factory.

As of this morning, two days after the slaughter, our president still refuses to call it a terror attack saying it might be a terror attack or it might be a work place dispute.

Of course all evidence points to terrorism since the couple had to spend months preparing the arsenal and making the pipe bombs.  Also, his so called dispute at the Christmas party which is yet to be confirmed took place a couple of hours after he and his wife dropped off their six year old daughter with her grandmother.

In addition, she was from Pakistan, they met in Saudi Arabia, he traveled to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, she was on a green card, and they met through the Internet.

Need I remind the readers all the major participants in the World Trade Center disaster were from Saudi Arabia.

At first Obama, Hillary Clinton and the liberal media ignored the terrorist angle and called for more gun control and restrictions to prevent such disasters.  California has the toughest gun control laws in America and has banned assault rifles but the guns used in the attack were still legal.

After day one Hillary started moving apart from Obama by saying it might be terrorist related.  No one in the media is mentioning the fact the terrorism is directly related to the failed policy of the Obama/Clinton foreign policy.

As usual, the many law enforcement agencies and personnel performed heroically risking their lives to help the victims and end the attack.

If only the politicians (Obama, Clinton and fellow Democrats and liberals) could do the same and declare war on Apocalyptic Islamic terrorists maybe we could begin to rid the Earth of this evil threat.
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Trump Explodes in Latest CNN/ORC poll. Liberal Media Ignores Trump's Triumph!

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Look at the latest CNN/ORC poll today.  In the past few weeks, Trump has moved twenty points ahead of his nearest competition in the national polls.  Yet his national surge is just the tip of the iceberg compared to the trust people have in him to handle the issues most affecting their lives.

As noted by CNN, Trump holds massive margins over other Republicans as the candidate most trusted to handle the economy (at 55%, Trump stands 46 percentage points over his nearest competitor), the federal budget (51%, up 41 points), illegal immigration (48%, up 34 points), ISIS (46%, up 31 points) and foreign policy (30%, up 13 points).

Looking at those Republicans who consider each issue to be "extremely important" to their vote, Trump's standing on each issue is even stronger. Among those Republican voters who call the economy extremely important, for example, 60% say they trust Trump to handle that issue. Among immigration voters, 55% trust Trump on the issue. On foreign policy, Trump inches up to 32%, and among those who call terrorism an extremely important issue, 49% say they trust Trump most on ISIS.

Ironically, most liberal media refused to headline the massive Trump surged and chose to focus on the candidates whose numbers were far behind the leader.

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Sixty percent of Americans' no longer Trust the Mass Media for News - Up from forty-five percent in 1999!

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Fifty-five percent of Democrats do trust the mass media (radio, newspapers, and television), while just thirty-two percent of Republicans, and thirty-three percent of Independents trust the media, according to the latest Gallup poll.

Two things are clear from the latest Gallup results.  I guess we have to stop calling it the Main Street or Lame Street media since well below half of Americans trust it, and Democrats are more gullible since they are the last demographic still trusting the media.

 

There is no surprise in the numbers since the media has become the advocate for polarizing society, and long ago started moving in the direction of manufacturing news as opposed to reporting the news.

Today money and greed drive the competition between news sources rather than quality and fairness, and since the advent of the Internet more and more news stories come from cyber space than old fashion reporting.

The result is truth is no longer a necessary goal, plagiarism is an acceptable shortcut, and being objective is just plain stupid.  What a shame.

It seems we as a society apply the same twisted standards to content for mass media beyond the news.  When it comes to shows, or "content" to the politically correct, vulgar is kosher, more vulgar is kosherer, and downright disgusting vulgarity is kosherest.

If a television censor from the 1950's came back today, they would think the forces of Sodom and Gomorra had overrun America and that we finally achieved moral bankruptcy.  Demons would be ruling the land.  Then again, there might be some truth to the proposition.

The disintegration of faith in our institutions has been accelerating throughout the Obama presidency and today, with the unraveling of the American foreign policy throughout the world, the people are showing their disgust.

The policy of accommodation of all those forces in the world hating America, jealous of America, or tired of hearing about America as advocated by the Obama Administration and the major players under Obama like Hillary Clinton is taking a toll.

Even Obama's former Secretary of State Clinton is beginning to crack under the pressure of reality as she is distancing herself more and more every day from her former boss and his failed policies, policies that she developed and championed.

Gallup

Politics

September 28, 2015

Americans' Trust in Media Remains at Historical Low

by Rebecca Riffkin

Story Highlights

• Four in 10 Americans trust the mass media
• Ties 2014 and 2012 for the lowest trust level in Gallup's trend
• Younger Americans less likely than older to trust the media

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Four in 10 Americans say they have "a great deal" or "a fair amount" of trust and confidence in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly. This ties the historical lows on this measure set in 2014 and 2012. Prior to 2004, slight majorities of Americans said they trusted the mass media, such as newspapers, TV and radio.

Americans' confidence in the media has slowly eroded from a high of 55% in 1998 and 1999. Since 2007, the majority of Americans have had little or no trust in the mass media. Trust has typically dipped in election years, including 2004, 2008, 2012 and last year. However, 2015 is not a major election year.

This decline follows the same trajectory as Americans' confidence in many institutions and their declining trust in the federal government's ability to handle domestic and international problems over the same time period.

Trust in the Mass Media Has Fallen More Sharply Among Those Younger Than 50
Trust in the media continues to be significantly lower among Americans aged 18 to 49 than among those 50 and older, continuing a pattern evident since 2012. Prior to 2012, these groups' trust levels were more similar, with a few exceptions between 2005 and 2008.

Trust Among Democrats Remains Low, but Higher Than Among Republicans
For more than a decade, Republicans and independents have been significantly less likely than Democrats to trust the media. This pattern continues in the latest survey. In 2014, Gallup found that trust among Democrats fell to a 14-year low of 54%, and this figure is essentially unchanged at 55% this year. While more Democrats than Republicans continue to say they trust the media, the percentage of Republicans who report that they trust the mass media increased slightly this year, from 27% to 32%. This increase was offset, however, by a decrease in independents reporting trust, from 38% to 33%.

Bottom Line
Americans' trust level in the media has drifted downward over the past decade. The same forces behind the drop in trust in government more generally, as well confidence in many U.S. institutions, may also be at work with the media. But some of the loss in trust may have been self-inflicted. Major venerable news organizations have been caught making serious mistakes in the past several years, including the scandal involving former NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams in 2015 that some of his firsthand accounts of news events had been exaggerated or "misremembered."
Historical data are available in Gallup Analytics.

Survey Methods
Results for this Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted Sept. 9-13, 2015, with a random sample of 1,025 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. For results based on the total sample of national adults, the margin of sampling error is ±4 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. All reported margins of sampling error include computed design effects for weighting.


Each sample of national adults includes a minimum quota of 60% cellphone respondents and 40% landline respondents, with additional minimum quotas by time zone within region. Landline and cellular telephone numbers are selected using random-digit-dial methods.
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How peculiar - Obama suddenly is almost silent on Chicago Police Murder of Black Man

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After inflaming racial tensions by condemning police treatment of Blacks in Ferguson and Baltimore on television and in the media, suddenly Obama uses Facebook

Here was the lead news story today, from Chicago, the number one city in America in murders in 2014 and for several years.

Journalist Brandon Smith, left, and activist William Calloway talk to reporters Thursday, Nov. 19, 2015, after a Cook County judge ordered the Chicago Police Department to release a video of an officer fatally shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald on Nov. 25, in Chicago. The video is said to show the officer shooting McDonald 16 times in October 2014. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

ABC News

By don babwin and jason keyser, associated press

CHICAGO — Nov 25, 2015, 1:54 AM ET

Officer Charged With Murder in Teen's Death

A white Chicago police officer who shot a black teenager 16 times last year was charged with first-degree murder Tuesday, hours before the city released a video of the killing that many people fear could spark unrest.

City officials and community leaders have been bracing for the release of the dash-cam video, fearing the kind of turmoil that occurred in cities such as Baltimore and Ferguson, Missouri, after young black men were slain by police or died in police custody.

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Obama goes from press conferences and television interviews to condemn police actions to just posting in his new Facebook account saying he is "deeply disturbed" by what happened!  Now wait a minute, this time there is no doubt the event was unjustified, an abuse of power, and an excessive use of a firearm and Obama is only "deeply disturbed."

Perhaps the media is protecting him from the real story.  Chicago, of course, is Obama's home.  The Mayor of Chicago is Obama's former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.  Not only was Rahm his right hand man, he was also the top fund raiser for the Obama campaigns because of his relationship as an executive in Goldman Sachs before he went to work for Obama.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein and Warren Buffett

The year-long lack of action by the prosecutor in Chicago and the brutal and senseless killing by firing sixteen shots into the victim, who was high on PCP at the time, were about as conclusive of evidence as possible.

A video from a camera mounted on a Police car was suppressed by the Chicago authorities, and only came to light when a judge order the release, which happened today, a year later.  It showed sixteen shots in fifteen seconds.

The City of Chicago seemed to try to minimize the impact of any evidence and keep the whole case out of the media while Rahm Emanuel ran and got re-elected as Mayor during the past year by paying $5 million in hush money, before any charges were even filed.

Maybe it is about time a federal investigation of the role Emanuel had in withholding the video and paying off the family should be investigate.  You might add to that investigate why Obama nearly ignored commenting on this racial incident after being all over the news on all previous incidents.

It seems awfully like a cover-up in Obama's hometown.  Emanuel won a run off for mayor just last April after none of the five candidates were able to get 50% of the vote.  Strange how the liberal media is selectively silent when it comes to our president.

Here is what he had to say about police actions before the incident happened in his hometown.

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President Obama's Facebook post says he's "deeply disturbed" by video showing teen shot by Chicago police officer.  November 25, 2015

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The Washington Times

Obama says Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson ‘stains the heart of black children’

By Dave Boyer - The Washington Times - Sunday, September 28, 2014

President Obama said the shooting death of a black teen by a white police officer last month in Ferguson, Missouri, exposed the racial divide in the American justice system that “stains the heart of black children.”

Speaking at the annual Congressional Black Caucus Foundation dinner in Washington on Saturday night, Mr. Obama said the death of Michael Brown “awakened our nation” to a reality that black citizens already understood.

“In too many communities around the country, a gulf of mistrust exists between local residents and law enforcement,” Mr. Obama said. “Too many young men of color feel targeted by law enforcement — guilty of walking while black or driving while black, judged by stereotypes that fuel fear and resentment and hopelessness.”

Mediaite

Obama on Baltimore: ‘No Dispute’ Men of Color Disproportionately Targeted by Police

by Tina Nguyen | 4:08 pm, May 4th, 2015

And that sense of unfairness and of powerlessness, of people not hearing their voices, that’s helped fuel some of the protests we’ve seen in places like Baltimore and Ferguson and right here in New York. The catalyst of those protests were the tragic deaths of young men and a feeling that law is not always applied evenly in this country. In too many places in this country, black boys and black men, Latino boys, Latino men — they experience being treated differently by law enforcement. In stops and in arrests and in charges and in incarcerations. The statistics are clear up and down the criminal justice system. There’s no dispute.

CNN

Obama: 'No excuse' for violence in Baltimore

By Eric Bradner, CNN

Updated 5:08 PM ET, Tue April 28, 2015

The growing violence in Baltimore, just 40 miles from the White House, represents another challenge for the Obama administration in addressing racial unrest across the country. Since the police killing of an unarmed teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, last summer, the administration has worked to acknowledge deep frustrations in minority communities while also supporting law enforcement.

Obama said he spoke with Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan on Monday. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who was sworn in Monday, said the Justice Department is investigating Gray's death.

Just hours after she was sworn in, Lynch was at the White House on Monday evening meeting with Obama to discuss the violent protests unfolding in Baltimore. She said she will send Vanita Gupta, the head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, and Ronald Davis, director of Community Oriented Policing Services, to Baltimore "in the coming days" to meet with religious and community leaders.

Federal Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms arson investigators are aiding local authorities in investigating 60 fires — 10 structure fires like a CVS and a nursing home construction site, the others vehicles — in Baltimore on Monday night.

The White House sent three representatives to Baltimore on Monday for Gray's funeral: Broderick Johnson, a native of the city and the chairman of the My Brother's Keeper Task Force; Heather Foster, an adviser in the White House Office of Public Engagement; and Elias Alcantara, the associate director of the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs.

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When Greed Dominates the Public Interest we get this! Pharmaceutical Giant Finds New Use for Viagra - Screwing the Public!

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Prolonged Erection Proves Profitable!

IT'S OFFICIAL: Pfizer agrees to a $160 billion deal to avoid US taxes

By Sam Ro 

The pharmaceutical giants Pfizer and Allergan will combine to form a $160 billion global drug behemoth.

Allergan shareholders will be receiving $363.63 worth of Pfizer stock as payment. Specifically, for each share of Allergan, investors will receive 11.3 shares (based on the Pfizer's Friday closing price of $32.18) of the new combined company.

Importantly, the combined businesses will be renamed Pfizer Plc but legally will be combined under Allergan Plc. This means the combined company will officially be domiciled in Ireland.

"Upon the closing of the transaction, the combined company is expected to maintain Allergan's Irish legal domicile," management said.

This type of deal, also known as a tax inversion, has been embraced by more and more US companies as a way to dodge relatively high US tax rates by moving to low-tax regions like Ireland.

For Pfizer, this means billions of dollars in savings.

"Pfizer anticipates the transaction will deliver more than $2 billion in operational synergies over the first three years after closing," management said. "Pfizer anticipates that the combined company will have a pro forma Adjusted Effective Tax Rate of approximately 17%-18% by the first full year after the closing of the transaction."

"The proposed combination of Pfizer and Allergan will create a leading global pharmaceutical company with the strength to research, discover, and deliver more medicines and therapies to more people around the world," Pfizer CEO Ian Read said. "Allergan's businesses align with and enhance Pfizer's businesses, creating best-in-class, sustainable, innovative, and established businesses that are poised for growth."

The combined company will continue to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker PFE.

Here are the bullets summarizing the deal via Pfizer:

·                          Creates a new global biopharmaceutical leader with best-in-class innovative and established businesses

·                          Enhances revenue and earnings growth profile of innovative and established businesses

·                          Broadens innovative pipeline with more than 100 combined mid-to-late stage programs in development

·                          Transaction expected to close in the second half of 2016

·                          Expected to be neutral to Pfizer's Adjusted Diluted EPS1 in 2017, accretive beginning in calendar year 2018 and more than 10% accretive in 2019 with high-teens percentage accretion in 20202

·                          Expect combined Operating Cash Flow in excess of $25 Billion beginning in 2018

·                          Increased financial flexibility facilitates continued investment in the United States

·                          Preserves opportunity for a potential future separation of innovative and established businesses

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CPT Terrorism Update - Part 5. Articles of Interest to those who want to be informed

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Jihad Watch

Exposing the role that Islamic jihad theology and ideology play in the modern global conflicts

Since 1948, almost 10 million Muslims have died at the hands of fellow Muslims

August 24, 2011 6:52 am By Marisol Seibold

Where is the outrage over that? Double standards abound. As the Israeli envoy Dan Gillerman said in 2008: “When Christians kill Muslims, it’s the Crusades. When Jews kill Muslims it’s murder, and when Muslims kill Muslims, it’s like talking about the weather. Nobody really cares about it.”

And as the late Samuel P. Huntington observed: “Wherever one looks along the perimeter of Islam, Muslims have problems living peaceably with their neighbors. The question naturally rises as to whether this pattern of the late 20th century conflict between Muslim and non-Muslim groups is equally true of relations between groups from other civilizations. In fact, it is not. Muslims make up 1/5 of the world’s population but in the 1990s they have been far more involved in intergroup violence than the people of any other civilization….Islam’s borders are bloody, and so are its innards.”

Note also the Ahmadinejadesque (to coin a new term) rhetoric from Turkey’s Erdogan. “Why Golda Meir was right,” by Burak Bekdil for the Hurriyet Daily News, August 23 (thanks to Joshua):

It has been more than two and a half years since Prime Minister Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan told to Israeli President Shimon Peres”s face, “You (Jews) know well how to kill.” Prime Minister ErdoÄŸan has also declared more than a few times that the main obstacle to peace in this part of the world is Israel, once calling the Jewish state “a festering boil in the Middle East that spreads hate and enmity.” In this holy month of Ramadan full of blood on Muslim territories, let’s try to identify who are the ones who know well how to kill.

As the Syrian death count clicks every day to come close to 2,000, the Turkish-Kurdish death count does not stop, already over 40,000 since 1984, both adding to the big pool of blood called the Middle East. Only during this Ramadan, the Kurdistan Workers” Party, or PKK”s, death toll has reached 50 in this Muslim Kurds vs. Muslim Turks war. This excludes the PKK casualties in Turkey and in northern Iraq due to Turkish military retaliation since they are seldom accurately reported.

Let’s speak of facts.

Sudan is not in the conventional Middle East, so let’s ignore the genocide there. Let’s ignore, also, the West Pakistani massacres in East Pakistan (Bangladesh) totaling 1.25 million in 1971. Or 200,000 deaths in Algeria in war between Islamists and the government in 1991-2006.

But a simple, strictly Middle East research will give you one million deaths in the all-Muslim Iran-Iraq war; 300,000 Muslim minorities killed by Saddam Hussein; 80,000 Iranians killed during the Islamic revolution; 25,000 deaths in 1970-71, the days of Black September, by the Jordanian government in its fight against the Palestinians; and 20,000 Islamists killed in 1982 by the elder al-Assad in Hama. The World Health Organization’s estimate of Osama bin Laden’s carnage in Iraq was already 150,000 a few years earlier.

In a 2007 research, Gunnar Heinsohn from the University of Bremen and Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, found out that some 11 million Muslims have been violently killed since 1948, of which 35,000, (0.3 percent) died during the six years of Arab war against Israel, or one out of every 315 fatalities. In contrast, over 90 percent who perished were killed by fellow Muslims.

It bears repeating that the Arab nations went to war with Israel with the expectation of annihilating the Jewish state once and for all. But the Arab states kept losing the wars.

According to Mssrs. Heinsohn and Pipes, the grisly inventory finds the total number of deaths in conflicts all over the world since 1950 numbering around 85 million. Of that, the Muslim Arab deaths in the Arab-Israeli conflict were at 46,000 including 11,000 during Israel’s war of independence. That makes 0.05 percent of all deaths in all conflicts, or 0.4 percent of all Arab deaths in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

In another calculation ignoring “small” massacres like the one that goes on in Syria and other deaths during the Arab Spring, only Saddam’s Iraq, Jordan, the elder al-Assad’s Syria, Iran-Iraq war, the bin Laden campaign in Iraq, the Iranian Islamic revolution and the Turkish-Kurdish conflict caused 1.65 million Muslim deaths by Muslims compared to less than 50,000 deaths in the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1950, including fatalities during and after Operation Cast Lead which came after the Heinsohn-Pipes study. For those who don’t have a calculator ready at their desks, allow me to tell: 50,000 is three percent of 1.65 million.

Golda Meir, the fourth prime minister of Israel, or rather the “Mother of Israel,” had a perfectly realistic point when she said that peace in the Middle East would only be possible “when Arabs love their children more than they hate us.”
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CPT Terrorism Update - Part 4. Articles of Interest to those who want to be informed

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Who's killing Muslims?

By Dean Obeidallah

 

Updated 11:33 AM ET, Thu January 15, 2015

Story highlights

Dean Obeidallah: Al Qaeda kills more Muslims than non-Muslims

Al Qaeda and ISIS focused on power, not principles, he says

Dean Obeidallah, a former attorney, is the host of SiriusXM's weekly program "The Dean Obeidallah Show." He is a columnist for The Daily Beast and editor of the politics blog The Dean's Report. He's also the co-director of the documentary "The Muslims Are Coming!" Follow him on Twitter: @TheDeansreport. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(CNN)We have all seen a great deal of hypocrisy from politicians, pundits and the like. But there's a new king of hypocrisy: al Qaeda.

On Wednesday, al Qaeda released a video featuring Nasr Ibn Ali al-Ansi, one of its top commanders in Yemen, claiming responsibility for the horrific attack last week on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. He gave two reasons for the attack.

First, he claimed it was in revenge for Charlie Hebdo's printing of cartoons lampooning the Prophet Mohammed. Al-Ansi then went on to state in much greater detail that the attack was in response to France and the West killing Muslims: "We will tell you once again ... stop spilling our blood." And then he urged Muslims across the world to "take vengeance for Muslim blood spilled."

Well, if spilling Muslim blood is the deciding factor for us Muslims to decide who we should take vengeance against, then al-Ansi and others in al Qaeda should immediately go into hiding. Simply put, al Qaeda has been slaughtering Muslims for years. Islamic clerics, doctors, nurses, women, children, etc. -- you name any type of Muslim, and al Qaeda has butchered them.

In fact, a report released in 2009 by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point documented the people killed by al Qaeda between 2004 and 2008. It found that only 12% of the victims of al Qaeda were Westerners. That suggests that al Qaeda has killed seven times as many Muslims as non-Muslims. And these attacks were just the ones for which al Qaeda had publicly claimed responsibility.

And since that report, al Qaeda in Yemen has engaged in even more vicious attacks on Muslims. Keep in mind that 99% of the population of Yemen is Muslim (65% Sunni and 35% Shia) so with a few exceptions, virtually every person the group kills there is a Muslim.

In December 2014, for example, an al Qaeda bomb killed 15 children and 10 adults when the bus they were on was blown up by an al Qaeda car bomb intended for a competing militia leader in the area.

This attack followed another in which al Qaeda sent a suicide bomber into a crowd of protesters in the nation's capital, killing 47 people and injuring 140.

And back in December 2013, al Qaeda launched an attack on a hospital, killing 52 people and wounding 167 with two car bombs before gruesomely shooting patients and doctors in the hospital.

The list goes on, but al Qaeda is not alone in killing Muslims who stand in its way. ISIS has done the same in Iraq and Syria.

A U.N. report released late last year found that ISIS had killed thousands of Muslims -- both Sunni and Shia -- between July and September of that year. This includes the slayings of three nurses in Mosul, Iraq, because they refused to provide medical care to ISIS fighters. ISIS also killed numerous Sunni imams for refusing to swear allegiance to ISIS, and beheaded another Sunni leader for refusing to support the group.

And the reality is that that's truly what al Qaeda and ISIS are about. They are not about the concept of "submit to Islam or die," as some have claimed. It's submit to ISIS/al Qaeda or die. Both organizations clearly don't care how many Muslims they kill. Yet at the same time they will both claim they are carrying out their actions in the name of Islam. In fact, al-Ansi stated in Wednesday's video that the terrorist brothers who carried out the attack on the Charlie Hebdo officers were "two heroes of Islam."

He couldn't be more wrong.

But that isn't to say there weren't heroes of Islam in Paris that day -- it's just that they are two quite different people.

Ahmed Merabet was the French police officer shot in cold blood while lying on the sidewalk by the so-called "heroes of Islam." As his brother stated at a press conference, Merabet was a proud Muslim who gave his life defending French values of "liberty, equality and fraternity."

And there was Lassana Bathily, the Muslim employee at the kosher deli in Paris who reportedly saved the lives of seven Jewish patrons by helping them hide when Amedy Coulibaly entered the store with guns blazing. Bathily's actions exemplified the famous Quranic verse, "Whoever saves one -- it is as if he had saved mankind entirely."

Obviously, calling out the hypocrisy of al Qaeda and ISIS won't change these organizations' goals -- they will continue to invoke Islam as cover for their political ambitions because it helps them entice new recruits and raise funds which are vital for their continued existence.

But maybe if their hypocrisy is consistently laid bare then it might help all understand the true motivation of these terrorist groups and hopefully even give pause to any Muslims thinking of joining their un-Islamic cause. After all, al Qaeda and ISIS aren't interested in upholding the principles of Islam. They are focused only on power, however many Muslim lives they take.
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CPT Terrorism Update - Part 3. Articles of Interest to those who want to be informed

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Tears of Jihad

Mar 3 2008 | by Bill Warner

These figures are a rough estimate of the death of non-Muslims by the political act of jihad.

Africa
Thomas Sowell [Thomas Sowell, Race and Culture, BasicBooks, 1994, p. 188] estimates that 11 million slaves were shipped across the Atlantic and 14 million were sent to the Islamic nations of North Africa and the Middle East. For every slave captured many others died. Estimates of this collateral damage vary. The renowned missionary David Livingstone estimated that for every slave who reached a plantation, five others were killed in the initial raid or died of illness and privation on the forced march.[Woman’s Presbyterian Board of Missions, David Livingstone, p. 62, 1888] Those who were left behind were the very young, the weak, the sick and the old. These soon died since the main providers had been killed or enslaved. So, for 25 million slaves delivered to the market, we have an estimated death of about 120 million people. Islam ran the wholesale slave trade in Africa.
120 million Africans

Christians
The number of Christians martyred by Islam is 9 million [David B. Barrett, Todd M. Johnson, World Christian Trends AD 30-AD 2200, William Carey Library, 2001, p. 230, table 4-10] . A rough estimate by Raphael Moore in History of Asia Minor is that another 50 million died in wars by jihad. So counting the million African Christians killed in the 20th century we have:
60 million Christians

Hindus
Koenard Elst in Negationism in India gives an estimate of 80 million Hindus killed in the total jihad against India. [Koenard Elst, Negationism in India, Voice of India, New Delhi, 2002, pg. 34.] The country of India today is only half the size of ancient India, due to jihad. The mountains near India are called the Hindu Kush, meaning the “funeral pyre of the Hindus.”
80 million Hindus

Buddhists
Buddhists do not keep up with the history of war. Keep in mind that in jihad only Christians and Jews were allowed to survive as dhimmis (servants to Islam) everyone else had to convert or die. Jihad killed the Buddhists in Turkey, Afghanistan, along the Silk Route, and in India. The total is roughly 10 million. [David B. Barrett, Todd M. Johnson, World Christian Trends AD 30-AD 2200, William Carey Library, 2001, p. 230, table 4-1.] 10 million Buddhists

Jews
Oddly enough there were not enough Jews killed in jihad to significantly affect the totals of the Great Annihilation. The jihad in Arabia was 100 percent effective, but the numbers were in the thousands, not millions. After that, the Jews submitted and became the dhimmis (servants and second class citizens) of Islam and did not have geographic political power.

This gives a rough estimate of 270 million killed by jihad.
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CPT Terrorism Update - Part 2. Articles of Interest to those who want to be informed

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The Sunni-Shia divide: Where they live, what they believe and how they view each other

By Michael Lipka

The ongoing and intensifying conflict in Iraq has fallen – at least in part – along sectarian lines, with the Sunni Muslim militant group ISIS (the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) advancing against the Shia Muslim-led Iraqi government and Shia militias. Sectarian affiliation has played a role in the politics of the region for hundreds of years.

Iran and Iraq are two of only a handful of countries that have more Shias than Sunnis. While it is widely assumed that Iraq has a Shia majority, there is little reliable data on the exact Sunni-Shia breakdown of the population there, particularly since refugees arriving in Iraq due to the conflict in Syria or leaving Iraq due to its own turmoil may have affected the composition of Iraq’s population.

The few available survey measures of religious identity in Iraq suggest that about half the country is Shia. Surveys by ABC News found between 47% and 51% of the country identifying as Shia between 2007 and 2009, and a Pew Research survey conducted in Iraq in late 2011 found that 51% of Iraqi Muslims said they were Shia (compared with 42% saying they were Sunni).

Neighboring Iran is home to the world’s largest Shia population: Between 90% and 95% of Iranian Muslims (66-70 million people) were Shias in 2009, according to our estimate from that year.

Their shared demographic makeup may help explain Iran’s support for Iraq’s Shia-dominated government led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Iran also has supported Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria, where only 15-20% of the Muslim population was Shia as of 2009. But the Syrian leadership is dominated by Alawites (an offshoot of Shia Islam). Under Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, which was dominated by Sunnis, the country clashed with Iran.

The Sunni-Shia divide is nearly 1,400 years old, dating back to a dispute over the succession of leadership in the Muslim community following the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632.

Despite periods of open conflict between Sunnis and Shias in countries such as Lebanon and Iraq, the two groups are not all that different in terms of religious beliefs and commitment. In Iraq, for example, both groups express virtually universal belief in God and the Prophet Muhammad, and similar percentages (82% of Shias and 83% of Sunnis) say religion is very important in their lives. More than nine-in-ten Iraqi Shias (93%) and Sunnis (96%) say they fast during the holy month of Ramadan.

In some countries, significant shares of Muslims don’t even see the distinction between Sunni and Shia Islam as relevant. A survey of Muslims in 39 countries that we conducted in 2011 and 2012 found, for example, that 74% of Muslims in Kazakhstan and 56% of Muslims in Indonesia identified themselves as neither Sunni nor Shia, but “just a Muslim.” In Iraq, however, only 5% answered “just a Muslim.”

On some religious issues, including whether it is acceptable to visit the shrines of Muslim saints, the differences between the sects are more apparent. For some, the divide is even exclusionary. In late 2011, 14% of Iraqi Sunnis said they do not consider Shias to be Muslims. (By contrast, only 1% of Shias in Iraq said that Sunnis are not Muslims.) Even higher percentages of Sunnis in other countries, such as Sunni-dominated Egypt (53%), say that Shias are not Muslims.

Topics: Middle East and North Africa, Muslims and Islam
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