Sunday, November 15, 2015

"Paris suicide vests mark change of tactics and new threat."

The suicide vests used Friday by attackers in Paris -- a first in France -- were made by a highly-skilled professional who could still be at large in Europe, intelligence and security experts say. . . "Suicide vests require a munitions specialist. To make a reliable and effective explosive is not something anyone can do," a former French intelligence chief told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity. "A munitions specialist is someone who is used to handling explosives, who knows how to make them, to arrange them in a way that the belt or vest is not so unwieldy that the person can't move," he added.
"All seven of the assailants who died in attacks wore identical explosive vests and did not hesitate to blow themselves up -- a worrying change of tactic for jihadists targeting France. . . French authorities say the vests appeared to have been made with TATP, or acetone peroxide, that is easy for amateurs to make at home but is highly unstable. . . Making a vest cannot be simply learned over the Internet. . . "It can't be done in a couple of days," said the former intelligence chief. "It takes weeks of training, and you have to work under the watch of a 'master'. It's meticulous work."

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Geller: The West Has Lost the Will to Live

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/11/15/geller-the-west-has-lost-the-will-to-live/

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder Halts Acceptance of Syrian Refugees After Muslims’ Massacre in Paris

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/11/15/michigan-gov-rick-snyder-halts-acceptance-of-syrian-refugees-after-muslims-massacre-in-paris/

Chiu ChunLing said...

"They were maybe not too smart and even though they weren't in the right position, they blew themselves up at the agreed time."

At the risk of verging on a decidedly indiscriminate value judgment of "all Muslims", I think that it is important to understand that Islam does have components of its value system and morality which combine to produce a decidedly unfavorable proportion of sub-par intelligence, and this feeds into the cultural acceptance and prevalence of dishonesty and a low-respect for the value of life.

Some similar cultural attitudes can be produced by wildly different factors, Japan comes to mind. In Japan, it was limits on the possible cultivation of arable land (and the Japanese really stretch that way past how other societies defined it) combined with maximized population and a rigid feudalism based on highly trained martial arts which pushed a culture of compliance and submission to leaders without regard to their honesty or integrity while demeaning the value of most commoners lives.

While the Japanese culture made suicide bombers a serious weapon of war, they weren't relying on imbeciles to actually do the suicide bombing. And partly as a consequence of those same differences, when annihilation was a serious danger to the leadership, they were able to surrender despite 2400 years of never having done so...and honor that surrender to a degree which almost defies comprehension.

I am not confident that Muslims can do the same. On the other hand, it hardly seems necessary. The deeply rooted cultural pride of the Japanese is founded on real national merits, if they had turned their energy and talents to subverting or evading the terms of their surrender (as many Americans seemed to fear during certain periods of the post-war relationship), defeating them would have proved a very limited gain (Beijing is persistently troubled by how little the Japanese surrender to the Americans affects their basic attitude towards China). Islam, on the other hand, has a sort of easily inflamed but also easily quenched pride characteristic of nations which really have nothing worth boasting about. We simply need to accept that, after every loss, they will keep trying to avoid living up to the terms of surrender and never trust them to behave out of range of our weapons.

We don't need to persecute Islam beyond refusing to give them any special legal privileges based on their religion, and backing that with a ready and rapid enforcement of our laws without respect for their cultural "sensitivities". "Ready and rapid" means in hand and in seconds when seconds count, not a 911 call and minutes away. If a Jihadi walks up to an American and demands the Jizya or any other form of compliance with Sharia or submission of the Infidel, then it's a few quick pulls of a well-controlled handgun and an open-and-shut determination of lawful self-defense, one less Jihadi, and a message to thousands of would-be Jihadis.

This is not a strategy that would work to defeat every anti-Western ideology. It wouldn't have stopped the Japanese, and it's not going to stop the Chinese Communist Party, and generally can't be the only defense we have of our nation. But it's enough to stop Koranic Islam in its tracks, if we're willing to do the American thing rather than the collectivist thing.

It's too bad that so many people decided that it was a good idea to "fundamentally transform America", but that's going to end up being a worse thing for them in the end than it is for Americans in the now.

A lot worse. And I'm not understating how bad it is for Americans now.

Anonymous said...

Not a new tactic and not a new threat. It's the natural progression that even Stevie Wonder could have seen this. I was shocked that people were shocked. What else did they expect? Peace? Love? Really?