Turkey Shoots Down Russian Fighter Jet (VIDEO)

There's a huge live blog at the Telegraph UK, "Putin's fury after Turkey shoots down Russian jet, killing at least one pilot before rebels destroy rescue helicopter • President warns of 'serious consequences' but Obama says Turks have right to defend airspace":

There are dark corners of the Internet where Russian nationalists will argue the toss with Americans about whether the Su-24 is better than an F-16. I guess that argument was resolved today.

Also at WSJ, "Skies Darken for Accord on Syria With Turkish Downing of Russian Fighter":

Fallout of fatal incident threatens to destroy chances for grand coalition of international powers to change course of chaos in war-torn country.

When Turkey destroyed a Russian warplane it had warned away from its airspace, the fallout threatened to destroy chances for any grand coalition of international powers to change the course of chaos in Syria, at least for now.

The fatal incident in the skies Tuesday immediately escalated, and complicated, what had already been an intensely difficult enterprise—trying to bridge divides and corral longtime adversaries into a pact to combat their one shared enemy, Islamic State.

The Turkish-Russian aerial altercation quickly hardened the positions held by all sides. While the U.S. and its ally France dug in on their demands on resolving the Syrian conflict, Russia and its ally Iran adhered to theirs.

Aggravating the conflict was a war of words, with Mr. Putin leveling charges that Turkey, an ally of the U.S. and France, finances terrorism—accusations widely aired on Russian television in a daylong propaganda blitz.

Amid the strife, President Barack Obama and French President François Hollande presented a united front, speaking at the White House Tuesday after their first meeting since the Paris attacks. They outlined changes they said Russia must make to its military strategy in Syria and to its position on a political resolution to the conflict before the U.S.-led coalition, which includes Turkey, would cooperate with Moscow in the fight against Islamic State.

The demands made by the U.S. and French leaders—including the key issue of the future of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whom Russia supports—now have set the stage for a tense meeting between Mr. Hollande and Russian President Vladimir Putin scheduled for Thursday.

The downing of the Russian jet is likely to redraw the lines of engagement in Syria and affect Russians’ perceptions of their country’s intervention, analysts say.

“Hollande’s mission was to reach some kind of coordination with Russia,” said Alexei Makarkin, deputy director at Center for Political Technologies. “Now it is very, very doubtful that it is even possible to coordinate actions. The maximum that we can talk about now is avoiding shooting each other.”

Mr. Hollande’s visit to Moscow this week was supposed to be a crowning moment for Mr. Putin’s plan to bring more countries into his antiterrorism tent, as well as any potential rapprochement with the West after isolation over his intervention in Ukraine and annexation of Crimea.

But Mr. Obama, after expressing a new openness to coordinating with Russia since he met with Mr. Putin in Turkey last week, on Tuesday sought instead to isolate him.

“Russia right now is a coalition of two—Iran and Russia, supporting Assad,” he said. “We’ve got a global coalition organized. Russia is the outlier.”

At the same time, the U.S. and French leaders sought to demonstrate enhanced cooperation in their coalition.

Mr. Hollande said the immediate priority in the military campaign in Syria is to take back territory currently controlled by Islamic State and secure the border with Turkey.

Mr. Obama called on the European Union to implement an agreement that would require airlines to share passenger information.

“By targeting France, terrorists were targeting the world,” said Mr. Hollande.

Mr. Hollande’s stop in Washington was part of a whirlwind international tour to build a “single, grand coalition” of nations to take on Islamic State, which he called for last week.

French diplomats, however, have in recent days inched away from Mr. Hollande’s call for such a sweeping coalition. Instead officials in Paris have spoken of “coordination” in the strikes against Islamic State and have ruled out any shared command center for bombing targets in Syria...

And see, "Turkey Shoots Down Russian Military Jet Near Syrian Border."

New Books on the Salem Witch Trials

At Amazon.

See Benjamin C. Ray, Satan and Salem: The Witch-Hunt Crisis of 1692.

And Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692.

More, Books in Colonial History.

Ellie Goulding for Rollacoaster Magazine

At Studio Invisible UK, "ROLLACOASTER MAGAZINE: ELLIE GOULDING."

The photos are posted at Imgur, "Ellie Goulding Rollacoaster Magazine.

Shot cover for @rollacoaster with lovely @elliegoulding out now :) #EllieGoulding #photography #fashion #music pic.twitter.com/MHcOhr8aKA

— Alexandra Leese (@aleckyleese) September 19, 2015

GRAPHIC: Police Release Video of Officer Shooting Laquan McDonald

At the Chicago Tribune, "Chicago releases dash-cam video of fatal shooting after cop charged with murder," and "A moment by moment account of what the Laquan McDonald video shows."

Also, at WSJ, "Chicago Officials Urge Calm as Police-Shooting Video Is Released":

CHICAGO—A city police officer was charged with murder Tuesday in the fatal shooting in 2014 of a black teenager, and hours later officials released a graphic video showing the white officer repeatedly firing at the 17-year-old.

The video of the shooting death of Laquan McDonald was released after a news conference held by Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy.

City leaders said they understood the footage, taken from a camera on a police car dashboard, would be disturbing, but they urged the public not to resort to violence.

“I understand that people will be upset and will want to protest when they see this video,” Mr. Emanuel said, but added that the family of Mr. McDonald had urged people to conduct any protest peacefully.

Mr. McDonald died on Oct. 20, 2014, after officers responded to reports of a man breaking into vehicles.

The video shows Mr. McDonald jogging down the middle of a street. He slows to a walk as he approaches two police cruisers that have pulled in ahead of him. He is holding a small knife at his side.

Two officers hop out of one of the vehicles and point their guns at Mr. McDonald as the teen veers away from them.

Mr. McDonald is a car-lane’s-width away when Officer Jason Van Dyke opens fire, the bullets twisting the teen’s body and sending him to the ground. Puffs of smoke can be seen rising from his body, which prosecutors say is from the officer’s continued gunfire.

None of the other officers on the scene opened fire on Mr. McDonald. Police later recovered a knife with a three-inch blade, prosecutors said.

The video doesn’t show Mr. McDonald advancing on Mr. Van Dyke. An initial police version of the shooting, contained in the medical examiner’s report, said the teenager had lunged at the officers with a knife, leading an officer to open fire. A Chicago police spokesman didn’t respond to questions about that initial account.

The video’s release came after Mr. Van Dyke turned himself in to authorities Tuesday. The first-degree murder charge carries a potential penalty of life in prison.

Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez said the decision to prosecute was made because Mr. Van Dyke hadn’t faced an immediate threat from Mr. McDonald and because he continued to fire at the teen as he lay on the ground after being shot. The youth was hit by 16 shots.

“Clearly this officer went overboard, and he abused his authority, and I don’t believe the force was necessary,” she said at a separate Tuesday news conference.

Mr. Van Dyke’s lawyer, Daniel Herbert, said he expects to prevail at trial. He has said the officer was protecting himself and others.

“This is a case that needs to be tried in a courtroom,” said Mr. Herbert. “This is a case that can’t be tried on the streets. It can’t be tried in the media. It can’t be tried on Facebook.”

Ms. Alvarez said that while she had made the decision to charge the officer internally in recent weeks, the announcement was moved up because of the imminent release of the video.

Mr. Van Dyke, who is 37-years-old, appeared in court Tuesday wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. A judge denied him bail, saying he wanted to view the video before setting bond.

Jeffrey Neslund, an attorney for Mr. McDonald’s family, said they were thankful that the officer had been charged and urged a peaceful response to the video’s release.

“We hope that Laquan will finally get justice,” Mr. Neslund said. “We hope that the city of Chicago will remain peaceful and any demonstrations will be nonviolent.”

The video was ordered released Wednesday by a circuit court judge who ruled last week the footage is subject to public-disclosure laws.

Mayor Emanuel, pastors and community activists have been meeting in recent days in the face of concerns the video could touch off violence in the nation’s third-largest city.

Cities such as Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore have experienced rioting, looting and vandalism in response to police shootings. But there also have been peaceful protests in many U.S. cities amid a growing call for changes in the use of police force, particularly against black men...

More.

Randall Munroe, Thing Explainer

At Amazon, Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words.

Teenage Girl from Vienna Who Ran Away to Join Islamic State Reportedly Beaten to Death After Trying to Flee

Bad things happen when you join up with bad people.

She made a big mistake.

At the Telegraph UK, "Teenage Austrian 'poster girl for the Islamic State' killed by group for trying to escape":

Sabra Kesinovic, 17, was reportedly murdered after she was caught attempting to escape from Raqqa, Syria.

An Austrian teenager who became a poster girl for the Islamic State has reportedly been beaten to death by the group after she was caught trying to leave Syria.

Sabra Kesinovic, 17, was murdered after she was caught attempting to escape from Raqqa, Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant's (Isil) de facto capital in Syria, according to reports in two Austrian newspapers.

She appeared extensively in Isil propaganda material after leaving her native Vienna to join the group together with Sabina Selimovic, a 16-year-old friend.

The two teenagers were shown wearing Islamic headbands and brandishing Kalashnikov rifles, surrounded by masked male jihadists.
They were also shown wearing full Islamic veils and pointing towards heaven.

The Austrian government refused to comment on reports in Österreich and Kronen Zeitung newspapers that Kesinovic had been beaten to death.

“We cannot comment on individual cases,” Thomas Schnöll, a spokesman for the foreign ministry said.

Both Austrian women are now believed to be dead, after reports Selimovic was killed in fighting in Syria last year.

Krone Zeitung newspaper quoted an unnamed Tunisian woman who lived with the two Austrians in Raqqa as saying Kesinovic was murdered.

The Tunisian, who was also an Isil volunteer for a woman, later escaped.

Kesinovic and Selimovic were both children of Bosnian refugees who fled to Austria from the war in their country during the nineties.

Their families reported them missing after they disappeared from their homes in Vienna last year.

They reportedly left a note for their families which read: “Don’t look for us. We will serve Allah and we will die for him.”
They were traced as taking a flight to the Turkish capital of Ankara, and travelling on to the region of Adana, close to the border with Syria.

It emerged they had joined Isil after Kesinovic telephoned her sister from Syria to let her know she was alright.

She reportedly wrote home late last year telling family she wanted to return and that she has had enough of the extreme violence she witnessed every day.

It is believed they both married Isil jihadists in Syria. Selimovic later denied reports she was pregnant in an exchange of SMSes to the magazine Paris Match, and claimed she was happy in Syria.

“Here I can really be free. I can practise my religion. I couldn’t do that in Vienna,” she told the magazine.

Reports of her death first emerged last year from David Scharia, an expert at the UN security council’s counter-terrorism committee...

More.

Syrians are a Nation of Terrorist Supporters

From Daniel Greenfield, at FrontPage Magazine, "10,000 Syrian refugees mean 1,300 ISIS supporters":

Syria is a terror state. It didn’t become that way overnight because of the Arab Spring or the Iraq War.

Its people are not the victims of American foreign policy, Islamic militancy or any of the other fashionable excuses. They supported Islamic terrorism. Millions of them still do.

They are not the Jews fleeing a Nazi Holocaust. They are the Nazis trying to relocate from a bombed out Berlin.

These are the cold hard facts.

ISIS took over parts of Syria because its government willingly allied with it to help its terrorists kill Americans in Iraq. That support for Al Qaeda helped lead to the civil war tearing the country apart.

The Syrians were not helpless, apathetic pawns in this fight. They supported Islamic terrorism.

A 2007 poll showed that 77% of Syrians supported financing Islamic terrorists including Hamas and the Iraqi fighters who evolved into ISIS. Less than 10% of Syrians opposed their terrorism.

Why did Syrians support Islamic terrorism? Because they hated America.

Sixty-three percent wanted to refuse medical and humanitarian assistance from the United States. An equal number didn’t want any American help caring for Iraqi refugees in Syria.

The vast majority of Syrians turned down any form of assistance from the United States because they hated us. They still do. Just because they’re willing to accept it now, doesn’t mean they like us.

If we bring Syrian Muslims to America, we will be importing a population that hates us.

The terrorism poll numbers are still ugly. A poll this summer found that 1 in 5 Syrians supports ISIS.  A third of Syrians support the Al Nusra Front, which is affiliated with Al Qaeda. Since Sunnis are 3/4rs of the population and Shiites and Christians aren’t likely to support either group, this really means that Sunni Muslim support for both terror groups is even higher than these numbers make it seem.

And even though Christians and Yazidis are the ones who actually face ISIS genocide, Obama has chosen to take in few Christians and Yazidis. Instead 98.6% of Obama’s Syrian refugees are Sunni Muslims.

This is also the population most likely to support ISIS and Al Qaeda.

But these numbers are even worse than they look. Syrian men are more likely to view ISIS positively than women. This isn’t surprising as the Islamic State not only practices sex slavery, but has some ruthless restrictions for women that exceed even those of Saudi Arabia.  (Al Qaeda’s Al Nusra Front, however, mostly closes the gender gap getting equal support from Syrian men and women.)

ISIS, however, gets its highest level of support from young men. This is the Syrian refugee demographic.

In the places where the Syrian refugees come from, support for Al Qaeda groups climbs as high as 70% in Idlib, 66% in Quneitra, 66% in Raqqa, 47% in Derzor, 47% in Hasakeh, 41% in Daraa and 41% in Aleppo.

Seventy percent support for ISIS in Raqqa has been dismissed as the result of fear. But if Syrians in the ISIS capital were just afraid of the Islamic State, why would the Al Nusra Front, which ISIS is fighting, get nearly as high a score from the people in Raqqa? The answer is that their support for Al Qaeda is real.

Apologists will claim that these numbers don’t apply to the Syrian refugees. It’s hard to say how true that is. Only 13% of Syrian refugees will admit to supporting ISIS, though that number still means that of Obama’s first 10,000 refugees, 1,300 will support ISIS. But the poll doesn’t delve into their views of other Al Qaeda groups, such as the Al Nusra Front, which usually gets more Sunni Muslim support.

And there’s no sign that they have learned to reject Islamic terrorism and their hatred for America...

Still more.

Obama's New Terror Plan: 'Travel at your own risk...'

Ed Driscoll has the New York Daily News cover story, at Instapundit, "NEW YORK DAILY NEWS HEADLINE: “BAM’S NEW TERROR PLAN: BE AFRAID:”

Today's NY Daily News front page... not the best news for people traveling for the holiday pic.twitter.com/3WWhUcw6Z7

— New York Daily News (@NYDailyNews) November 24, 2015

KIND — Nuts & Spices, Dark Chocolate Nuts & Sea Salt, 1.4 Ounce, 12 Count

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Plus, 12 Days of Deals - Office Products.

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On sale, 40% Off - Brother SE400 Combination Computerized Sewing and 4x4 Embroidery Machine With 67 Built-in Stitches, 70 Built-in Designs, 5 Lettering Fonts.

And for under the tree, from Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South.

College 'Crybullies'

From the letters, at the Los Angeles Times, "Readers React: Telling college 'crybullies' to grow thicker skin":

Protesting students are exercising their rights of free speech. However, these same students do not recognize the rights of those who disagree with them. Polls have suggested that roughly half of students in many universities favor speech codes and “trigger warnings” alerting them to issues that might offend their sensibilities.

Increasingly there is a totalitarian bent on university campuses, which have become a breeding ground for victimhood. Administrators lack the will to stand up to these tactics.

The real world is not so sanitized and safe. We are doing these young people no service to coddle them. They need to learn to stand up for themselves in debate, not shut down the opposition with demonization.

Lisa Niedenthal
Los Angeles

RELATED: From Roger Kimball, at WSJ, "The Rise of the College Crybullies."

The Rape of Sweden

Condell seems to produce one vlog per per month, so it's probably still a week or two until he comes out with his next one, no doubt on the Paris attacks.

But we'll see. We'll see.

This one's perhaps hard-hitting enough, man.

ICYMI, The German War

From Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939–1945.

What the 'Hunger Games' Movies Say About Feminism — and War

At the Los Angeles Times, "The Katniss Factor":

Throughout the new "Hunger Games" movie, the fourth and final in the dystopian series, heroine Katniss Everdeen's name is intoned with grave sincerity. The manipulative President Snow whispers it, as one does of a worthy rival; her battle partner and occasional romantic interest Gale Hawthorne utters it to suggest a noble comrade.

But the most telling invocation comes early in the film. "It's Katniss," belts out Peeta Mellark, her other battle partner and romantic interest, compromised and angry as he lies in a hospital bed. "It's [all] because of Katniss."

Much has indeed happened thanks to Katniss, a name you couldn't dream up if you tried and now can't imagine not existing. The character has become a kind of cultural shorthand — an archetype, someone who has deepened our understanding of armed conflicts and paved the way for a political movement. And that's just off the screen.

As the Lionsgate franchise winds down with this week's release of "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2," the film and its lead character reside in a far different world than the one in which they began. And many of those differences came because of "The Hunger Games" films.

There is, of course, the money. The franchise that started with novelist Suzanne Collins and was largely directed by Francis Lawrence has taken in $2.3 billion globally, with more on the way. Every year since 2012, at least 35 million tickets have been bought in the United States to a new "Hunger Games" movie. More Americans on average have come out to see Katniss in a given film than they have Harry Potter.

But the effects go beyond sheer popularity. As played by Jennifer Lawrence, Katniss, with her bow and arrow, has inspired a generation to lift up their weapons, both literally (the surge in archery lessons) and otherwise. She is often unsmiling, efficient and "male-like," by the chestnutty Hollywood definition, in which female characters are rarely foremost and even less frequently autonomous.

Before "Hunger Games," Hollywood somehow couldn't conceive of a fully formed, villain-thwacking heroine in a top-tier franchise. Sure, some swings had been taken. But they were exceptions — pre-made stars in one-offs (Angelina Jolie in "Salt" or "Wanted") or one-dimensional types in B-movie serials (Milla Jovovich's "Resident Evil" or Kate Beckinsale's "Underworld").

Katniss, on the other hand, was, almost from the start, confident but complicated, bold but human. "She's just so relatable and she's not a superhero — she feels real, she feels lost, she feels reluctant," said director Francis Lawrence. "She doesn't want to be a leader, she doesn't want to be part of a rebellion."

If the character was sometimes caught in a love triangle, a Bridget Jones touch that doesn't exactly scream postfeminist consciousness, she spent much of the rest of the time knocking away at glass ceilings, the Hollywood lady hero whose power comes from thoughts and actions more than sexuality...

Still more.

CNN, Fox, and Other TV Networks Met to Discuss How to Respond to Donald Trump's Attempts to Restrict Press at Events, Including Blacklisting Reporters

They're not used to this kind of treatment. They've been feted as royalty for so long under the Democrats.

At Politico, "TV networks hold conference call to discuss Trump treatment":

Representatives from ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and CNN discussed how embeds and reporters from outlets are being treated, including being pushed into media "pens." The Washington Post was first to report on the conference call.

It's unlikely a formal unified message will be sent to the Trump campaign unless all the networks agree on a response.
The plan, according to one network news executive familiar with the discussions, is to have a call with Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and work through their issues.

The issues being discussed, the executive said, involve access to attendees at Trump events. Often reporters are able to speak with attendees before an event is set to begin, but lately reporters have found themselves confined to media-only areas by Trump staffers.

"The effort in the Trump campaign is to limit any kind of interaction between our reporters and the people attending the Trump events. So we'd like to have some access to folks," the executive said.

But the executive cautioned that the talks were being handled by the networks' political units and were not rising to high executive levels. Though media has complained about access with other campaigns, the executive said this was the first coordinated effort of its kind thus far this cycle...

Just think: a candidate who doesn't need these flacks.

Can the Democrats Keep Us Safe?

At Instapundit, "NO. NEXT QUESTION? New RNC ad: Can these Democratic weaklings be trusted to keep America safe?"

Click through for the new RNC ad.

France Can't Keep Tabs on 10,000 Radicalized Young Muslims (VIDEO)

From last night's CBS Evening News:

Magical Thinking About #ISIS

A far left-wing take on the attacks, from Adam Shatz, at the London Review of Books:

Before the Lebanese civil war, Beirut was known as the Paris of the Middle East. Today, Paris looks more and more like the Beirut of Western Europe, a city of incendiary ethnic tension, hostage-taking and suicide bombs. Parisians have returned to the streets, and to their cafés, with the same commitment to normality that the Lebanese have almost miraculously exhibited since the mid-1970s. Même pas peur, they have declared with admirable defiance on posters, and on the walls of the place de la République. But the fear is pervasive, and it’s not confined to France. In the last few weeks alone, Islamic State has carried out massacres in Baghdad, Ankara and south Beirut, and downed a Russian plane with 224 passengers. It has taunted survivors with threats of future attacks, as if its deepest wish were to provoke violent retaliation.

Already traumatised by the massacres in January, France appears to be granting that wish. ‘Nous sommes dans la guerre,’ François Hollande declared, and he is now trying to extend the current state of emergency by amending the constitution. Less than 48 hours after the event, a new round of airstrikes was launched against Raqqa, in concert with Russia. With a single night’s co-ordinated attacks, IS – a cultish militia perhaps 35,000 strong, ruling a self-declared ‘caliphate’ that no one recognises as a state – achieved something France denied the Algerian FLN until 1999, nearly four decades after independence: acknowledgment that it had been fighting a war, rather than a campaign against ‘outlaws’. In the unlikely event that France sends ground troops to Syria, it will have handed IS an opportunity it longs for: face to face combat with ‘crusader’ soldiers on its own soil.

Recognition as a war combatant is not IS’s only strategic gain. It has also spread panic, and pushed France further along the road to civil strife. The massacre was retribution for French airstrikes against IS positions, but there were other reasons for targeting France. Paris is a symbol of the apostate civilisation IS abhors – a den of ‘prostitution and vice’, in the words of its communiqué claiming responsibility for the attacks. Not only is France a former colonial power in North Africa and the Middle East but, along with Britain, it helped establish the Sykes-Picot colonial borders that IS triumphantly bulldozed after capturing Mosul. Most important, it has – by proportion of total population – more Muslim citizens than any other country in Europe, overwhelmingly descendants of France’s colonial subjects. There is a growing Muslim middle class, and large numbers of Muslims marry outside the faith, but a substantial minority still live in grim, isolated suburbs with high levels of unemployment. With the growth rate now at 0.3 per cent, the doors to the French dream have mostly been closed to residents of the banlieue. Feelings of exclusion have been compounded by discrimination, police brutality and by the secular religion of laïcité, which many feel is code for keeping Muslims in their place. Not surprisingly, more than a thousand French Muslims have gone off in search of glory on the battlefields of Syria and Iraq. Most of these young jihadis became radicalised online not in the mosque. Some, like the perpetrators of the attacks in January and November, have histories of arrest and time spent in prison; about 25 per cent of IS’s French recruits are thought to be converts to Islam. What most of the jihadis appear to have in common is a lack of any serious religious training: according to most studies, there is an inverse relationship between Muslim piety and attraction to jihad. As Olivier Roy, the author of several books on political Islam, recently said, ‘this is not so much the radicalisation of Islam as the Islamicisation of radicalism.’

By sending a group of French – and Belgian – citizens to massacre Parisians in their places of leisure, IS aims to provoke a wave of hostility that will end up intensifying disaffection among young Muslims. Unlike the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the 13 November attacks were universally condemned. The victims were of every race, the murders were indiscriminate, and many Muslims live in Seine-Saint-Denis, where the bombing at the the Stade de France took place. In theory, this could have been a unifying tragedy. Yet it is Muslims who will overwhelmingly bear the brunt of the emergency measures and of the new rhetoric of national self-defence. Fayçal Riyad, a Frenchman of Algerian parents, who teaches at a lycée in Aubervilliers, a few hundred metres from where the 18 November raid against the fugitive attackers took place, pointed out the change in the air. ‘In his January speech,’ Riyad said, ‘Hollande clearly insisted on the distinction between Islam and terrorism. This time he not only abstained from doing so, but in a way he did the opposite by speaking of the necessity of closing the frontiers, insinuating that the attackers were foreigners, but above all in echoing the National Front’s call for stripping binational French people of their nationality if they’re found guilty of acts against the interests of the country. So that is aggravating our fear.’ Marine Le Pen, whose National Front expects to do well in the regional elections in December, is exultant. But anti-Muslim sentiment is hardly confined to the far right. There has been talk in centre-right circles of a Muslim fifth column; a leading figure in Sarkozy’s party has proposed interning 4000 suspected Islamists in ‘regroupment camps’.

IS achieved a further strategic objective by linking the massacre to the refugee crisis. The memory of Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old boy from Kobani who was found drowned on a Turkish beach, has now been eclipsed by a passport found near the corpse of one of the attackers. That this assailant made his way to France through Greece, carrying a passport in the name of a dead Syrian fighter, suggests careful planning. The purpose is not merely to punish Syrians who have fled the caliphate, but to dampen European compassion for the refugees – already strained by unemployment and the growth of right-wing, anti-immigrant parties. Marine Le Pen called for an immediate halt to the inflow of Syrian refugees; Jeb Bush suggested that only Christian Syrians be admitted into the United States. If the West turns its back on the Syrian refugees, the effect will be to deepen further their sense of abandonment, another outcome that would be highly desirable to IS.

It is hard not to feel sentimental about the neighbourhoods of the 10th and the 11th, where IS attacked Le Petit Cambodge and the Bataclan theatre. I know these neighbourhoods well; a number of my journalist friends live there. In a city that has become more gentrified, more class-stratified and exclusionary, they are still reasonably mixed, cheap and welcoming, still somehow grungy and populaire. Odes to their charms have flooded the French press, as if the attacks were primarily an assault on the bobo lifestyle. ‘They have weapons. Fuck them. We have champagne,’ the front page of Charlie Hebdo declared. But as the journalist Thomas Legrand noted on France Inter, ‘the reality is that we have champagne … and also weapons.’

France has been using those weapons more frequently, more widely, and more aggressively in recent years. The shift towards a more interventionist posture in the Muslim world began under Sarkozy, and became even more pronounced under Hollande, who has revealed himself as an heir of Guy Mollet, the Socialist prime minister who presided over Suez and the war in Algeria. It was France that first came to the aid of Libyan rebels, after Bernard-Henri Lévy’s expedition to Benghazi. That adventure, once the US got involved, freed Libya from Gaddafi, but then left it in the hands of militias – a number of them jihadist – and arms dealers whose clients include groups like IS. France has deepened its ties to Netanyahu – Hollande has made no secret of his ‘love’ for Israel – and criminalised expressions of support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement...

Still more.

The #ParisAttacks in Context

From Robin Simcox, at Foreign Affairs, "France's Perpetual Battle Against Terrorism":

ISIS spoke of France back in September 2014, when group spokesman Abu Mohammed al-Adnani proclaimed to his listeners that “if you can kill an American or European infidel, especially the spiteful and cursed French, kill them in any way possible.” The response to this call was rapid: in December 2014, Bertrand Nzohabonayo attacked three police officers with a knife in Joué-lès-Tours and was shot and killed. Nzohabonayo had uploaded an ISIS flag to his Facebook account shortly before.

Weeks later, Said and Cherif Kouachi, two brothers who had been trained by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen, murdered 12 staff members during an attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine’s headquarters in Paris. These particular strikes were not explicitly linked to ISIS, but the next ones were. Over a two-day period in January 2015, Amedy Coulibaly, one of Cherif Kouachi’s associates, killed five people in Paris. He had pledged loyalty to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

More was to follow. In April 2015, Sid Ahmed Ghlam allegedly planned to kill Parisian churchgoers and is suspected of having murdered a gym instructor during an attempt to steal her car. Ghlam’s plans were thwarted only when he accidentally shot himself in the leg and was forced to call an ambulance. Three months later, a heavily armed Ayoub el-Khazzani attacked a train heading to Paris from Amsterdam, only to be restrained by passengers and arrested. Both Ghlam and el-Khazzani are linked to the Belgian jihadist and Paris attacks mastermind Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a key figure in terror networks with ties to ISIS in Syria. Abaaoud was also linked to the ISIS cell operating in Verviers, Belgium, that was disrupted in January 2015.

MISSED SIGNALS

None of these cases were detected by French police before they began to unfold. Granted, other plots have been thwarted—such as an attack on a military base in the south of France—but in reality, other disastrous attacks were averted only through good luck and heroic citizens. France's domestic security agency, the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Intérieure, was formed in May 2014, replacing the Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur. According to the France 24 journalist Leela Jacinto, the idea was to “beef up, enlarge, and provide more funds” to the DGSI in order to—as one French official put it—turn it into a “war machine” capable of staving off the terror threat. This task has had an inauspicious start.

The state of French security is problematic enough, but equally troubling is the fact that ISIS is now pulling off complex, coordinated plots that were previously perceived as too difficult for the group to execute...

Still more.

State Department Issues Worldwide Travel Warning

At USA Today, "State Department issues 'worldwide' travel alert."

And the opening segment from tonight's CBS Evening News:

New Jersey Tailgaters Cheered Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001

Did thousands cheer?

Don't know, but WaPo's Glenn Kessler claimed that Donald Trump's statement that Muslims cheered 9/11 in New Jersey was an "outrageous" lie. Ahem, not so outrageous after all.

Here's Kessler's hit job, at WaPo via Memeorandum, "Trump's outrageous claim that ‘thousands’ of New Jersey Muslims celebrated the 9/11 attacks."

And then see Power Line, "Washington Post's Fact Checker Doesn't Read the Washington Post."

And from Elizabeth Price Foley, at Instapundit, "MUSLIMS IN N.J. CHEERING AFTER 9/11? This is what Donald Trump has asserted, and according to the Washington Post report of Sept. 18, 2001, Trump is right."

@AmPowerBlog really??? He said thousands of muslims and he saw it on TV. No TV images found, no evidence of thousands. or even dozens.

— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) November 23, 2015