Nov. 23, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
30:15
3135 This Week In Terrorism: The Latest on ISIS Threat
In the aftermath of the Paris Terrorist Attack, Stefan Molyneux explores the latest news related to terrorism and threats of violence in the world. Including: United States President Barack Obama, Al-Qaeda, threats by ISIS, controversy over Syrian refugees, French President François Hollande, the amazing reaction in Turkey, attacks thwarted in Germany, mass surveillance, encryption, threats of attack in Brussels and much more. Sources: http://www.fdrurl.com/this-week-in-terrorismFreedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.fdrurl.com/donate
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
So you may have noticed terrorism just a little bit in the news at the moment.
We're putting forward a new segment this week in terrorism.
We're going to break it all down for you so you know what's going on.
We're going to bring you all the information that you're not going to get from any other sources and help make it all abundantly, terrifyingly, and hopefully liberatingly clear.
For you.
So what's been going on this week?
Well, of course, President Barack Obama came under fire for saying that ISIS was contained mere hours before the Paris terrorist attack which left 130 dead and hundreds injured.
Quote, from the start, our goal has been first to contain, and we have contained them.
All right, well, it's not just Paris.
How contained are the terrorists overall?
Well, November the 12th, the day before the attack on France, you may or may not have heard, 43 people were killed and over 240 wounded in Beirut, Lebanon, in two suicide bomb blasts that were claimed by ISIS. 19 more were killed in a series of ISIS attacks in Baghdad, Iraq, on November 13th.
Other major terrorist activities also occurred, which were not just limited to ISIS. November 18, Boko Haram, a militant Islamist organization in Nigeria, carried out a series of suicide bombings that claimed the lives of 49 Nigerians.
The following day, 15 more died in Nigeria when two female terrorists blew themselves up in a follow-up Boko Haram attack.
On November 20th, Al-Qaeda terrorists killed at least 27 people and took 170 hostages in a hotel in Mali.
U.S. Special Forces led an attack on the terrorists, killing three of them.
I guess U.S. Special Forces were in the country.
We'll get back to that.
On November 21st, a suicide attack by suspected members of Boko Haram killed four civilians in the far north region of Cameroon.
The attack was carried out by one man and three teenage girls, but the female bomb was detonated prematurely and failed to claim any lives other than, I assume, their own.
Boko Haram has been fighting to establish an Islamist state for about six years now.
Now, on November 17th, Obama, during a press conference with the President of the Philippines, made the following remark, quote, These Republicans are the same folks, oftentimes, who suggest that they're so tough that just talking to Putin or staring down ISIL or using some additional rhetoric somehow is going to solve the problems out there.
But apparently they're scared of widows and orphans coming into the United States of America as part of our tradition of compassion.
First, They were worried about the press being too tough on them during debates.
Now they're worried about three-year-old orphans.
That doesn't seem very tough for me.
Ooh!
Smack!
Obama was talking about Republicans who have some caution or reluctance to admit Syrian refugees into the United States.
So apparently, according to Obama, women and children can do no harm.
They can't do any damage.
They're terrible at combat.
They have no courage.
They can't fight for their causes.
I don't know, seems a little misogynist to me and let's compare what Obama said about potential Syrian terrorists with what he said when the US military lifted its ban on women participating in combat.
Obama then issued a statement praising female soldiers and claiming that valor knows no gender.
He also noted, today, every American can be proud that our military will grow even stronger with their mothers, wives, sisters and daughters playing a greater role in protecting this country we love.
So, if I understand this correctly, the U.S. military becomes a stronger titanium-based Terminator-style fighting machine with women participating in combat activities, but Syrian women are completely incapable of fighting or carrying out any kind of military operations or attacks or terrorism.
Why this double standard?
Because...
Because politics...
So two days after Obama made this comment, two female suicide bombers, one of them only 11 years old, killed at least 15 people in Nigeria.
But hopefully they weren't orphans.
I guess Obama maybe also didn't pay attention to the news when child suicide bombers have attacked Israel repeatedly over the years.
So, ridiculously hypocritical statements aside, is Obama correct in implying that most of the refugees are women and children?
Or did he perhaps put forward a little bit of a straw man?
Well, a few months ago, the esteemed and a few degrees left of center fact-checking organization FactCheck.org published an article on the demographics of Syrian refugees.
This was in a response to presidential hopeful Dr.
Ben Carson's statement that most Syrian refugees are young males.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees data, they said, show that 50.5% of refugees are women.
Females aged 18 to 59 make up 23.9% of the refugees, while males in that age group make up 21.8%.
We have seen a different set of UNHCR numbers cited on a few conservative websites, figures for refugees and migrants who have tried to enter Europe by crossing the Mediterranean Sea.
There have been more than 400,000 such sea arrivals in 2015 and 51% of Syria, and the rest have come mainly from nine other countries.
Most of these refugees and migrants have been men, 72%, but these are not figures on Syrian refugees or even solely the 200,000-some Syrians who have been willing to take some type of boat to reach Europe by sea.
Alright, so 50.5% of all registered Syrian refugees are women.
This is Syrians who fled the civil war in the country.
That doesn't tell us anything about the demographics of the Syrians who are trying to seek refuge in the West.
The 72% figure is a lot more relevant, even though it doesn't directly measure Syrian demographics of people who flee the country.
But wait, there's more.
Apparently the author of the fact-check article didn't bother checking out the European Union database on asylum applications.
If she did, she'd have found out the following.
74% of all Syrians who sought asylum in Europe in the first nine months of 2015 were males.
Let's say that again.
It really can't bear repeating often enough.
74% of all Syrians that sought asylum in Europe in the first nine months of 2015 were males.
Furthermore, Syrian males aged 18 to 34 comprised 42% of the total Syrian refugee population.
So in other words, most of the migrancy from the Middle East to Europe should not be a series of highly colorful arrows, but really just a bunch of sausage links.
Obama claims that Republicans are afraid of the 26% female Syrian refugees, not the 74% males.
I mean, that's such a straw man.
I don't know.
I don't even know what to say.
That's such a straw man.
Obama also probably or apparently didn't talk to FBI Director James Comey, who expressed some grave concerns about allowing Syrian refugees into the United States.
But I mean, he's only the director of the FBI. What would he know?
He suggested that the vetting process would actually be, and I quote, impossible.
So, this guy would say to Obama, it's impossible, and Obama would say, yes we can, because wild, blind, idiot optimism, and he'd say, it's impossible, yes we can, impossible, yes we can, oh man, is this meeting over, can I go home?
On November 18th, the police raid in France resulted in the death of the suspected mastermind of the Paris attack.
In addition, French officers arrested eight people believed to be connected to the main suspect.
Okay, like you, I'm probably not alone in thinking that it would be nice if they'd hunted down these people before, but of course, in general, people are terrified of any kind of racial or ethnic profiling until after 130 bodies hit the floor, then they're fine with it, it which doesn't actually do a whole lot of good to the 130 bodies underground.
According to Reuters quote "police have taken 60 people into custody and put a further 118 under house arrest after more than 400 raids as of Wednesday in broader sweeps on suspected Islamist militants.
Arms fines during searches came to 87 weapons including 11 military-grade weapons, long rifles and handguns." All right Big picture time, people.
Zoom out to global perspectives.
Why is this happening?
What on earth is going on?
Why are the terrorists doing this?
Well, of course, a lot of people place the blame on Islam.
Islam is or has been at times a tad on the wall, like an expansionist side.
However, the terrorists themselves are in the majority motivated not by religion, but by politics.
To the degree with which religious conflict is there, you've got to look at it from outside the empire.
This is not to have empathy with terrorists, but to understand where they're coming from.
From the outside of the empire, from the outside of Western hegemony, what people see is the following.
Christian leaders of largely Christian countries keep sending troops into Muslim countries, and weapons, and bombs, and you name it.
Now, the concept of jihad or the holy war against the rest of the world was to some degree dormant for some people say about 400 years.
Now, one of the things that happened in the 20th century, of course, endless Western interventions.
CIA supported coups.
And in the 1980s, the CIA had the great idea of getting Muslims radicalized to help them fight against communism, which we'll come back to in a second.
If you look at Afghanistan as a case study in the 1950s, believe it or not, women mostly had equal rights in Afghanistan.
The economy was growing.
Electricity was expanding in terms of its capacity to be consumed by the people.
Then, of course, you got the Russian invasion.
You've got 30 years of constant war.
These Western invasions destroyed the country.
Now only about one out of every five Afghanis have access to electricity and one in four Afghani children dies before his or her fifth birthday.
That is brutal.
Now, modern war is very different from war historically.
Modern war is economic war.
There are wild, incomprehensibly wild asymmetries between the cost of invasion and the cost of defense.
And exploiting these asymmetries is the only chance that defenders have to push back invaders.
So the CIA taught Osama bin Laden in the 1980s that the way to bring down a superpower was to exploit these asymmetries, to use a $20,000 Stinger missile to take down a multi-million dollar MiG jet fighter.
Ka-ching, ka-ching, Russia goes bankrupt.
Bin Laden was a Western ally at the time, just like Saddam Hussein was, and ISIS, of course, until the U.S. decided to keep its troops in the Holy Land of Saudi Arabia, which turned Bin Laden against the United States.
They kind of broke their word to him.
So they taught him, how do you take down an imperialistic empire?
By destroying its economy, which you do by getting it to attack you, and then just let the endless ke-ching of the cost of invasion take down the economy of the invader.
Case in point, France plans to spend about 600 million euros on additional security in 2016.
After President Hollande announced that European commitments to deficit control would have to take a backseat to spending on measures, they're going to hire 5,000 extra police, 2,500 extra judiciary staff and 1,000 extra customs office staff.
This is just one portion of the costs of attacking the Middle East and defending against terrorism and so on.
According to some estimates, the Paris terror attack may have cost as little as $7,500.
$7,500.
Compared to the amount that France plans to spend on extra security, that's over 85,000 times the cost difference.
To provoke $640 million in spending, you spend $7,500.
Is that sustainable?
No, it's not sustainable and that of course is the entire goal.
If you look back earlier, Al-Qaeda spent maybe a few hundred thousand dollars to commit the 9-11 attacks.
The 9-11 attacks and the resulting response of the American government destroyed between a third and a half of America's annual GDP. In other words, it was 10 million times the cost of the attacks.
That's how you bring down an empire, is you provoke it to an outlandish and fiscally destructive and human capital destructive response, and you wait for the inevitable mathematics to take their toll.
You see, in modern warfare, the invader usually loses.
The invader's economy is destroyed, especially if you have a welfare state.
I mean, you can have welfare or you can have warfare.
You can't have both.
Because, of course, welfare creates a susceptibility to another kind of economic destruction.
Middle Eastern migrants who bleed dry the Western welfare states, they're kind of following the same script, right?
I mean, this is what happened in Rome.
See, in warfare, when you cut off the army's supply lines, as people, everyone found who invaded Russia, if you cut off the army's supply lines, you win.
In modern warfare, the supply line is always money, which is the most vulnerable link, which you can destroy using the asymmetries of invasion versus defense.
Now, it was recently announced that the mastermind, and at least two others behind the Paris attack, smuggled themselves, quote, between Syria and mainland Europe, pretending to be refugees.
Despite this fact, French President Hollande committed to accepting 30,000 more Syrian refugees over the next few years.
Canada also promised to take in 25,000 Syrian refugees by the end of the year.
Meanwhile, Poland rescinded its offer to take in thousands of Syrian refugees and more than 420,000 people have signed a petition calling on the UK to close its borders.
Okay.
Reality check, everyone.
I know it's sometimes frustrating to get reason and evidence into these complicated emotional issues.
Basic question you have to ask.
Is it a war or not?
See, everybody wants the emotional lizard brain satisfaction of, bam, smashing back those who hurt you and get that, ugh, Hatfield and McCoy, shiv through the ribs, vengeance.
But if you're going to do that, then you're kind of declaring war.
And one thing that happens to any sane country that declares war is you close your borders.
I didn't notice in Europe or in England in 1942 a lot of acceptance of, well, a significant portion of fighting-age Germans coming to live in England.
Didn't really happen.
If you want to have a war, I'm not saying you should, but if you want to have a war, you've got to accept the consequences of that, which is you close your damn borders.
Oh, also, rationing is pretty important, but who wants that?
When you want your pizza and war on the TV, you can have both, but not for very long.
On a side note, liberals across the world are tying themselves in knots, trying to figure out, oh, the refugee passport found near the body of one of the terrorists.
Is it fake?
Is it stolen?
Did it actually belong to him?
Completely irrelevant!
Fingerprints taken by Greek authorities actually match the attacker, so yes, he snuck in as a refugee.
The question of whether his passport was legitimate or not, nothing more than a smokescreen.
Gotta hand it to Muslim countries.
They are unabashedly pro-Muslim.
You know, they're very pro-Muslim.
They like Muslims.
They're big on Islam.
How are the Christian countries doing in terms of being pro-Christian?
Well, according to official data from the United States State Department's Refugee Processing Center, 97% of Syrian refugees resettled in the United States are Muslim.
Now, close to 10% of Syrians are Christian.
Or were.
But in the last five years, only 2.5% of Syrian refugees accepted by the United States have been Christians.
Can you imagine?
If Europeans were fleeing the Second World War and they wanted to go into, I don't know, some Muslim country, and the Muslims said, No!
Unless you're Christian, we'll take you then.
We don't want any Muslims.
No Muslims coming in.
Only Christians.
The State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, oh look, another department, outright admitted to officials of a Christian relief agency that, quote, there is no way that Christians will be supported because of their religious affiliation.
This is like the U.S. refusing to take Americans fleeing Japan after the attacks on Pearl Harbor.
No!
We're not taking any Americans back.
We only want young, fighting-age Japanese men who can't speak English.
Are we at war or not?
I vote not.
But if you want war, there are consequences.
The Christian population of Syria was over two million souls before the war, but it's been decimated since 2011 in what Pope Francis has described as a religious genocide.
It could be said that they could find safe harbour, that they could be the equivalent of the Jews sailing around the world in World War II trying to get refuge from the Nazis, but apparently not.
According to Faith MacDonald from the Institute on Religion and Democracy, quote, When Christians flee as refugees, they cannot go to UN-run refugee camps because there they face the same persecution and terror from which they fled.
If they are not in the refugee camps, they are not included in the application process for asylum.
According to statements from aid workers in the UN camps and an ISIS defector, ISIS is sending individuals disguised as refugees into the camps to kidnap and kill Christians.
Quote, they're like a mafia.
People are even killed inside the camps and the refugees are afraid to say if they saw somebody get killed.
If you ask them, they'll say, I don't know, I was asleep.
I haven't put a lot of thought into whether Barack Obama is a secret Muslim.
I don't know.
I don't care.
But there are things that you shouldn't say right after an attack of this kind in Paris.
So this week Barack Obama spoke to G20 meters in Antalya, Turkey, about the Muslim issue.
And he said, and I quote, you can feel free to pause this video when you find the shocking statement.
He said, quote, I think on the one hand non-Muslims cannot stereotype, but I also think the Muslim community has to think about how we make sure that children are not being infected with this twisted notion that somehow they can kill innocent people and that is justified.
But I also think the Muslim community has to think about how we make sure the children are not being infected with blah blah blah blah.
We!
You know, when some Muslims have attacked Paris and killed a lot of people, I don't think you want to do the we thing.
Unless you're talking about the video game console.
Just, you know, my suggestion out there from the outside.
We!
And this is Turkey!
This is...
Earlier this week, there was a soccer game against Greece.
And the announcer asked for a moment of silence for the victims of the Paris attack.
And the Turkish fans booed the moment of silence for the victims of the Paris attack.
And then broke into a chant of Allah Akbar.
99.8% of the Turkish population is Muslim according to the CIA World Factbook.
Now some of the attackers in Paris have been identified as either French or Belgian nationals, but a number of them had traveled to Syria, joined ISIS, and then returned, posing as refugees.
The European Union as a whole has very little control over who enters their countries, and that's why people are concerned.
Now the political left warns that the closed-door immigration policies cause further radicalization and exacerbate the humanitarian crisis.
A fellow at the Brookings Institute claimed, quote, anti-Muslim and anti-refugee sentiment really play into ISIS hands.
The more that happens, the more French Muslims feel alienated and are susceptible to extremist recruitment.
Oh, so he's very concerned about French Muslims feeling alienated from the culture around them.
I got a great idea.
Let's stop this weird welfare moat that keeps these populations isolated in this biosphere of cyst-like non-integration so that they can go integrate.
Stop giving them welfare so that they have to integrate into the economy, learn the language, get absorbed.
And I don't really like this approach.
Okay, I'm going to come to your country, you better give me tons of welfare and a really positive view of myself or I'm going to join ISIS and kill you.
I think that's actually called a shakedown.
I don't think that's really good public policy.
He went on to say, you hear Republicans saying clash of civilizations and civilizational war and they don't realize that's exactly what ISIS wants us to be saying.
It's remarkable to me and just shows a very basic lack of understanding of the threat that we face.
First of all, the radicalized Muslims are mostly driven by the fact that the West has killed millions of Muslims recently.
Sorry, it's a fact.
It's true.
I don't think it's the fact that somebody might have a negative opinion of them that's bothering them so much as the fact that entire countries have been destroyed, governments have been overthrown, horrible governments have been well armed by the West, and millions of Muslims have died as a result of Western interventions in Islamic countries.
I think that's a little bit more than, I don't know, we're saying anything bad about them.
And the idea that there's any kind of threat coming from Islam, I mean, Just think of Islamic countries.
You know, how well do they score in terms of rights for women?
How well do they score in terms of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, separation of church and state, even economic freedoms?
How are they doing?
Not that well, I would say.
And these are majority Muslim countries.
And so if your country becomes majority Muslim, What's gonna happen?
It's not an unrealistic fear, you know?
I mean, how would I do, for instance, in a Muslim country or my daughter?
Hello, Stumpy!
Not great.
That would be the answer.
So, I don't know, Islamophobia.
Not like this weird fear of spiderwebs or something.
I don't know, beheadophobia would probably be a little bit closer to what I would call it, but perhaps that's just me.
Let's turn to Germany.
Recently it was revealed that Germany possibly came extremely close to its own version of the French 9-11.
Reuters reported, quote, a group of several attackers planned to set off multiple explosives in Hanover Football Stadium, a Tuesday night's friendly match between Germany and the Netherlands, which was called off.
The German interior minister stated, quote, the indications were so concentrated that calling off the match was unavoidable.
Whether the indications were a real threat or just an indication, we don't know.
Angela Merkel planned to attend the match and President Hollande was in attendance at the French stadium targeted by suicide bombers.
Close.
What's been happening in terms of new threats?
Are you jumpy yet?
No?
Let me help you out with that.
On November 16th, ISIS released a video threatening an attack on Washington, D.C. On November 18th, ISIS released a video warning of an impending attack on New York City.
On November 19th, ISIS released another video threatening additional attacks in France, Italy and the United States.
The video featured two ISIS fighters threatening to blow up the White House, with one also mentioning a, quote, conquest of Rome.
On November 21st, Brussels was placed into a security lockdown.
Belgium's Prime Minister Charles Michel reported that such action was taken, quote, based on quite precise information about the risk of an attack like the one that happened in Paris.
Schools and other institutions will remain closed even tomorrow.
Now, the media is on hand to help you make sense of all of this.
Or not.
Does the media blame anything like, I don't know, foreign interventionalism, immigration policies, problems with multiculturalism, or the fiat currency counterfeit printing presses that make any kind of rational economic limitation on government spending impossible?
No!
Apparently the problem is your PS4! Or encryption.
Oh, encryption leads to terrorism.
Oh, unfortunately for that theory, many of the terrorists involved used simple text messaging applications without encryption, including the supposed mastermind of the Paris terrorist attacks.
And of course, they're already talking about cracking down on things like Bitcoin.
That's rather convenient for the political class that doesn't like Bitcoin.
It's out of control of central banking.
Oh, and another thing, boy, won't more mass surveillance help?
Remember how all of those cameras in England cut down all of that crime?
No, they didn't.
But they get to watch every human being on the planet, and I guess that makes power junkies happy.
One French counter-terrorism expert said that, quote, our intelligence is actually pretty good, but our ability to act on it is limited by the sheer numbers.
The problem was not a lack of data, they got tons of data, but a failure to act on information that the authorities already had about the individuals behind the Paris attack.
I mean, they collect so much data, it's like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
Oh!
By the way, Donald Trump didn't actually say that all American Muslims should be put into a database.
Well, we'll do that story another time.
What are the real concerns?
What is actually happening and why?
Well, as we mentioned before, Christian countries are bombing Muslim countries.
Christian countries are toppling Muslim governments.
And if you just look at what George Bush talked about in 2003 as to why he would have invaded Iraq, he said he prayed to the Christian God and the Christian God told him to.
So that kind of looks like a Christian attack.
Again, if you're off the reservation, if you're outside the biodome of empire, that's kind of how it looks.
Foreign intervention becomes a negative feedback loop of violence, right?
We go and destabilize their countries.
They react and hit back at us, which causes us to bomb them more, which creates more radicals, which hits back at us.
Rinse, repeat, and escalate until civilization totters like Baba Yaga's hut, drunk on vodka.
A couple of things, you know, could be helpful in terms of solving this problem.
Let's say that France, China, the United States, Russia, you could stop selling arms to warlords, terrorists, and morally entirely questionable regimes.
Yes, I'm looking at you, United States and France.
I'm going to expect this stuff out of Putin, but you guys are supposed to be a little bit different.
Open borders?
Yeah, let's have open borders, but not with a giant welfare state and not when you're in a conflict with another country.
That no-worky.
You can have it both ways.
Or I guess you can, just not for very long.
Now, of course, we need to have a whole conversation about the welfare state as a whole and the degree to which it creates a near-permanent underclass and destroys the sort of bedrock of society as a whole.
But I'm going to leave you with just a little analogy so that you can emotionally, I think, and intellectually get the challenges of understanding this stuff.
So imagine, and I've got a video called The Story of Your Enslavement about all of this, but imagine That you're a cow.
Moo cow moo.
And you're kept warm and comfortable and safe and healthy because the farmer likes your milk and likes your meat and likes the fact that you produce more taxpayers.
I mean calves.
So if someone comes along to you and says, what's the farmer like?
You're going to be like, yeah, the farmer's pretty nice.
Keeps me warm in the winter, gives me electric blankets according to my children's books, gives me food, gives me health care when I need it, and so on.
So yeah, I'm pretty happy.
He's a pretty nice guy.
But imagine that the farmer, your farmer, is also a hunter who goes out with a shotgun and blows the heads off animals outside the farm.
Now, the animals, if they could talk to you, they'd say, your farmer's kind of an asshole.
Like, he's a sociopathic, murderous son of a bitch.
He's out here blowing the heads off our kids.
He's out here blowing the heads off our herds and killing for no good reason.
He doesn't even eat us, just kills us and steps on our heads and moves on.
He's kind of a sadist.
He's crazy.
Ah, come on, moo!
The farmer's great!
He got food, health care.
I'm comfortable.
I'm warm.
Got all the straw I can sit on.
Beautiful!
This is the difference, right?
How your governments treat you internally is very different from the view outside of how your governments treat the world.
Your farmer takes care of you because that's how you remain most productive to him.
Farmers don't go around hunting their own livestock because they want to profit through them other ways.
But the view outside the farm where the farmer is out there shooting at people is a very, very different view.
And if you don't understand that two differences, the stuff is going to continue to escalate.
Because the animals outside the farm can't change a farmer.
Maybe you can, but they can't.
This is what this escalation is all about.
That's this week in terrorism.
Next week we're going to bring you more details, more clarity.
Please, please, like, subscribe and share this essential information so that we're going to begin to actually solve these problems rather than just doing this ridiculous escalation which has become progressively more dangerous as weapons have become more powerful and its infiltration has become more powerful and as the response to bad policies is always a further restriction of human liberties on both sides of the fence.
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