

07 January 2015




Col. Lang

No. Don't poke stick in a hornets nest and not think that several may sting you. They made targets if themselves.
Btw...this is the first time in my life that I agree with Catholic William Donohue. The world MUST be coming to an end. Hell freezing over. Summin'

Babak Makkinejad

I was only trying to share my understandings about France.

France has had much intercourse and interaction with Muslim people and states over the last 3 centuries than any other European country.

French scholars studied Islam - religion, languages, cultures, histories, etc. - for far longer than any other country in Europe - to my knowledge.

And they did that because they found something interesting and worthwhile in Islam - and not because some Arab potentate had given millions of dollars to one of their universities to do so.

A recent poll indicated that French view Islam favorably by 60%.

different clue


Well bless your heart.



Lies, damned lies, and statistics. These are the same people who refuse to name it "Islamic" terrorism, so pardon me if I,doibt the veracity of random polls.

No one is saying nothing good at all has come out of,Islam ever. The current state of affairs cannot stand though.



Jesus. That is me. I am freaked out swimming in ocean, in a lake or even a pool if I see a shadow. I still do it but dayum!!

William R. Cumming

Thanks Dr. Silverman! I remain doubtful, however, that the exposure of radicalism including so-called BLACK MUSLIMS at Ft. Lewis was fully disclosed.

Has the fragger been hung who killed several after MENA deployment before the 2003 invasion of Iraq?

And did so-called FRAGGERS end the Viet Nam war for US troops or was it drug use? Or neither! P.L. has stated that it was a failure of support by the US population> Perhaps so.



One person was fired from Charlie Hebdo for antisemitism.
None for the rest of the filth that was supposed to amuse.



Thank you for the clarification. I am in agreement with you.

Adam L Silverman

Mr. Cumming,

I've pulled the various data sets and am trying to figure out how to do the write up without it turning into a rant... I've not forgotten, but if I ever get my hands on the knucklehead who decided that all the AQ and Taliban attacks in Afghanistan during OEF and all the AQI and other anti-coalition and other acts in Iraq during OIF are terrorism instead of acts of war/warfare, it's going to get ugly! So I've got legit datasets ranging from between 300-500 discreet acts of global terrorism by year to the more official US via the State Department and the DHS funded university baed center that handles the data that's in the thousands. And this latter stuff, of course, isn't counting acts in the US. I used to research this stuff before I went to work for the Army and gave up on an academic career, I've built my own databases out of chronologies and timelines, and I was a huge and early proponent of the need to finally quantify this stuff, but 1) data operations have to make sense, 2) actions taken by the enemy in wartime are wartime operations - having DOD count them that way and DOS count them as terrorism is not helpful, and 3) the whole data coding schema ignore the differences that lead to these differences. Anyhow, I've not forgot, just trying to process this meshugas, if I may use a technical term.


I agree jonst, not verbatim, but a peculiar list, was there an earlier encounter, were you enraged him????

I have to agree that the Iraq war shocked me too at the time. But in hindsight, including it's peculiar green and black media visuals, it was legitimate.

Maybe not quite considering the US as world police, from the Arab point of view.

And there may well have been US circles that didn't consider it quite finished.

William R. Cumming

Does the Southern Poverty Law Center still track extremism of all types in the USA?

William R. Cumming

IMO you can ignore any combat zone where US armed forces involved except perhaps attacks on the hosting nation [if there is one]!

William R. Cumming

OK! Who or whom did it?



"Does the Southern Poverty Law Center still track extremism of all types in the USA?" No, they only investigate Southern white people. pl

Adam L Silverman

Mr. Cumming,

They do. They track domestic, as in events occurring within the US, that fit their defined parameters. Most of these are listed as hate crimes, but some as acts of domestic terrorism. They do not track just Southern people, they also track Northern, Western, Midwestern, and Pacific Northwestern white people too...

Actually, they track anyone that fits their research parameters. Every year there are a number of African American, Jewish American, and other individual actors and groups that they track and report on. They have become controversial in some circles because they've come out against the NRA, and other groups. My understanding of the case of the NRA is that it has less to do with the NRA's positions themselves and more to do with having folks like LTG (ret) Boykin, who very publicly make very bigoted statements and take very bigoted positions, on their board or endorsing them by inviting them to speak to their national meetings.

Back to their research parameters for a minute: you've got the same issues here, though they're more transparent than most, as you do with the other chronologies. Specifically, what are we including/counting, how should it actually be categorized, and have we counted it somewhere else or in some other way somewhere else. For instance, how best to categorize what the couple who had gone to be part of the Bundy Ranch standoff did when they shot the two cops and several other people. It was definitely a spree killing and multiple homicide/mass murder. It was also, because they clearly stated their intentions was governmental overthrow, an act of terrorism, though not a very effective one. This is similar to the father and son that killed four cops several years ago. They were known white supremacists and members of various extremist groups, they clearly had political and social motivations, it's clearly a mass murder, but it should also be an act of terrorism. We've had over forty of these types of things since 2008. They range from targeting law enforcement to the attack at the Sikh temple (mistaken for a mosque) to arsons at a number of actual mosques to attacks on individual Muslims and those, like Sikhs, who are mistaken for Muslims. The issue becomes are they hate crimes or acts of terrorism. Could or should they be understood as both?

Part of the problem is how the media covers them, as well as how elected, and appointed officials, pundits, and the experts on TV and radio describe them. We seem to have adopted a consensus that terrorism is done by Muslims, so these forty plus incidents over the past seven years don't get reported as terrorism or part of a larger pattern. This is similar to other media coverage issues. For instance, a week after the demonstrations, protests, and riots in Ferguson, students in NH rioted and caused significant property damage in connection with a pumpkin festival. It was a two day story, with a bit of navel gazing about how as these were almost all white, upwardly mobile, students at a top college the coverage was much different than of the Ferguson events, which despite having devolved into rioting, were about something more important than the local pumpkin festival.

I used to use a different example when I taught criminology: a month before Lacy Peterson's body was found in San Francisco another torso had washed ashore. The torso was of a twenty something woman who had also been pregnant at the time she was abducted and murdered - her dead body, like Ms Peterson's had expressed the dead fetus out while being submerged and the head had become detached from the torso. The woman's mother had been frantic for any publicity and only got a couple of days once Peterson's body was found. Given that two murders, with similar victims logins, within the same municipal area - the greater San Fransisco area - had occurred this close together screamed "look for a serial killer". What it got was next to nothing. The first victims killer has, as far as I know, never been identified. The difference in the two cases: Lacy Peterson was a cute, white suburban, soon to be mom in what seemed to be a long and prosperous family. The first victim was a dark skinned Latina living in San Francisco proper, unwed and pregnant, with a lower working class job, who was barely scraping to get by. The demographic differences drove both the coverage and the investigations.

All of these things go into how we classify these acts: hate crime, terrorism, spree killing, etc. In trying to draft a post about it, the hard part is not turning it into a rant and/or getting lost in the weeds.

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