Tuesday, December 20, 2016

"As long as our brothers are not safe, none of you, the guilties, should be safe."

That's a translation (courtesy of Will Coley of Muslims4Liberty, via last night's episode of Free Talk Live) of part of this speech:

The guy hadn't stopped yelling before various governments and various news broadcasters started calling this "terrorism." Is it?
Well, it's certainly "blowback." Russia went to war in Syria against the Islamic State and other forces arrayed in rebellion against the Assad regime. This guy specifically cited Syria in general and Aleppo in particular as reasons for his assassination of Andrei Karlov, Russian ambassador to Turkey.
Karlov was a government official, not a civilian non-combatant.
Just like Aslan Mashkadov, president of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria. The Russian government paid a $10 million bounty for his killing.
And just like Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, caliph of the Islamic State. The US government recently upped its bounty on his head to $25 million (the same amount it offered for the capture or killing of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein).
The international political class is a big club whose members kill anyone they want, assuming their own immunity. But when someone who's not in the club decides that sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, all of a sudden it stops being officially sanctioned "war" and starts being criminal "terrorism."
Words mean things. "Terrorism" consists of attacks on civilian non-combatants for the purpose of creating a climate of terror that the terrorists hope will result in popular pressure on a state to act a certain way. Officials/employees of warring states are not civilian non-combatants. Even if the general goal is the same, state officials are fair game in war.

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