King Abdullah II vowed Jordan will take tough action after hanging two convicted militants Wednesday in response to the burning alive of one of its pilots by the Islamic State group.
The gruesome murder of airman Muaz Kasasbeh triggered international condemnation and prompted Jordan to execute two Iraqis on death row — female would-be suicide bomber Sajida al-Rishawi and Al-Qaeda operative Ziad al-Karboli.
Abdullah consulted with military chiefs Wednesday to formulate a response after cutting short a US trip.
In a statement, the king said Jordan is waging a war of principles against the militants. He said that Jordan’s response to the killing of the pilot “will be harsh because this terrorist organization is not only fighting us, but also fighting Islam and its pure values.”
Abdullah pledged to hit the militants “hard in the very center of their strongholds.”
Jordanian officials have not presented details of their response, but said they would be working closely with their allies in the anti-IS coalition.
Abdullah was greeted by large crowds at the airport in Amman Wednesday before meeting with his security chiefs.
“The blood of martyr Muaz Kasasbeh will not be in vain and the response of Jordan and its army after what happened to our dear son will be severe,” he said afterwards.
“He said there is going to be retribution like ISIS [Islamic State] hasn’t seen,” according to Republican Duncan Hunter Jr., who was in the meeting, the Washington Examiner reported Wednesday. “He mentioned ‘Unforgiven’ and he mentioned Clint Eastwood, and he actually quoted a part of the movie.”
Although Hunter wouldn’t reveal exactly what Abdullah quoted, he indicated it was from a scene when the character William Munny, played by Eastwood, explains how he intends to take revenge.
“Any man I see out there, I’m gonna kill him,” Munny says. “Any son of a bitch takes a shot at me, I’m not only going to kill him, I’m going to kill his wife and all his friends and burn his damn house down.”
“He’s angry,” Hunter said of the king and likened the Jordanian monarch’s attitude to the feeling in America after the 9/11 attacks. He recalled that Abdullah told the lawmakers, “The only problem we’re going to have is running out of fuel and bullets.”
The statements came after Jordan said it hanged Rishawi and Karboli before dawn at a prison south of the capital.
North Korea threatened Wednesday a nuclear strike against the United States using advanced atomic weapons in an official message to Washington issued by the country’s highest decision-making body headed by its leader Kim Jong-un.
The National Defense Commission released a statement through the North’s state-run Korean Central News Agency to declare that it is no longer interested in having talks with the Barack Obama administration.
The statement, issued at the “authorization” of the regime’s young ruler Kim, was the latest in a series of threats issued by Pyongyang against Washington.
Complaining that the Obama administration is trying to induce the North’s collapse, the North threatened “retaliatory action of justice” including a strike on the U.S. mainland.
Americans “should be mindful that the time of nightmares is coming nearer when they will meet the most disastrous, final doom on the U.S. mainland,” the commission warned.
It promised an eye-for-an-eye retaliation campaign against the United States using all possible means, including “smaller, precision and diversified” nuclear weapons. The North said it will operate all its ground, maritime, underground, air and cyberwarfare capabilities strategically to defeat the United States.
The National Defense Commission released a statement through the North’s state-run Korean Central News Agency to declare that it is no longer interested in having talks with the Barack Obama administration.
The statement, issued at the “authorization” of the regime’s young ruler Kim, was the latest in a series of threats issued by Pyongyang against Washington.
Complaining that the Obama administration is trying to induce the North’s collapse, the North threatened “retaliatory action of justice” including a strike on the U.S. mainland.
Americans “should be mindful that the time of nightmares is coming nearer when they will meet the most disastrous, final doom on the U.S. mainland,” the commission warned.
It promised an eye-for-an-eye retaliation campaign against the United States using all possible means, including “smaller, precision and diversified” nuclear weapons. The North said it will operate all its ground, maritime, underground, air and cyberwarfare capabilities strategically to defeat the United States.
A top Iranian military leader claims that U.S. officials have been “begging us” to sign a nuclear deal during closed door negotiations with Tehran over its contested nuclear program, according to recent comments made to the Iranian state-controlled media.
Mohammad Reza Naghdi, the commander of the Basij, a paramilitary group operating under the wing of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC), recently claimed that the “Americans are begging us for a deal on the negotiation table,” according to comments published in Persian and independently translated for the Washington Free Beacon.
Naghdi added that American officials routinely “plea” with Iran in talks and that the United States is negotiating from a position of weakness, according to his comments, which follow earlier reports claiming that Iran’s leading negotiator “frequently shouts” at U.S. officials.
The military leader’s remarks appear to jibe with new reports that the United States is conceding ground to Iran in talks and will now allow it to “keep much of its uranium-enriching technology,” according to the Associated Press.
Iran, the AP reported, “refuses to meet U.S.-led demands for deep cuts in the number of centrifuges it uses to enrich uranium, a process that can create material for anything from chemotherapy to the core of an atomic bomb.”
In a morally coherent world, the chilling statement “Hamas & Sharia law have taken over UC Davis” would not have been spoken publicly, and certainly not by an elected student leader at an American public university.
But in California, the veritable epicenter of academic anti-Israelism and its attendant stealth jihad, this statement, spoken last week by student leader Azka Fayyaz during a divestment resolution debate at the University of California, Davis, is par for the course, and indicative of how debased the conversation about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict has actually become.
Thus, while members of the UC Davis chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and others who supported this noxious vote purport to care solely about the malevolence of Israel and punishing the Jewish state for its political misbehavior and human rights abuses, at least some part of that campaign is clearly to embrace terrorism, as well as the rigid, oppressive precepts of a seventh-century theology comprising the tenets of Islam.
What this vote, and Ms. Fayyaz’s perverse utterances, do make clear is that the cognitive war against Israel, both on campuses and in the streets of Europe and the United States, is not just a campaign targeting the Jewish state; it is, in fact, as many observers have been warning about for some time, a broader assault to dismantle Western-style values in the name of a creeping ideological jihad, a cognitive war—with Israel the primary smokescreen with which the human rights activists and others in the hate-Israel movement mask their fundamental revulsion for everything that Western democracies hold dear.
So when pro-Palestinian activists and critics of Israel repeat the claim that Palestinians somehow have an internationally-recognized legal “right” to resist occupation through violent means, Hamas’s very reason for being, they are both legitimizing that terror and helping to insure that its lethal use by Israel’s enemies will continue unabated. Those who lend their moral support to terrorism, and who continually see the existence of “grievance-based violence” as a justifiable tool of the oppressed, have helped introduce a sick moral relativism into discussions about radical Islam and Palestinianism, not to mention Israel’s right to protect its citizens from being slaughtered.
The fact that so many activists feel comfortable with openly supporting a terrorist group with the single purpose of murdering Jews, that they publicly wish for and proclaim, as Ms. Fayyaz just did, that “Israel shall fall insha’Allah,” indicates quite dramatically how acceptable genocidal Jew-hatred has become, both in the streets and on campuses in America and Europe. This is clearly not, as it is frequently and disinegenuously asserted, merely “criticism” of the Israeli government’s policies; this is what many define as a new permutation of anti-Semitism—an irrational, seething animus against the Jew of nations, Israel, the wish for Jews to be murdered as part of “resistance,” and for Israel itself to be destroyed, all muddled in a disingenuous brew of human rights rhetoric and Western self-hatred.
The fact that a student leader can proudly and publicly proclaim allegiance to and alignment with the aspirations of Hamas, a thugocracy of genocidal murderers who could care less about a distinct Palestinian state, let alone an Arab sovereign entity living “side by side in peace” with Israel, is frightening. Evidently, there has been a profound moral blindness on the part of pro-Palestinian activists in not recognizing that the foundational document by which Hamas was established—the 1988 Hamas Charter—is animated with genocidal Jew-hatred, replete with a global strategy to extirpate Israel and murder Jews, wherever they may live, based on millennial dreams of apocalyptic jihad.
The decision not to invite Russian President Vladimir Putin to last week's ceremony marking 70 years since the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp was a strategic mistake that will have harsh consequences on the US and EU's relations with Moscow, according to senior diplomats.
A number of world leaders took part in the the ceremony at the camp in Poland. However, the Polish government initiated the decision not to invite Putin. According to diplomats, the Polish decision was coordinated with the US government, which fully supported the move. European countries appear to have expressed their silent support for the Polish move as well.
Senior sources at the UN headquarters in New York said that Putin was so offended by the move that he is unlikely to let it go unpunished. "The US and Europe will strongly feel the response that Putin is preparing," a senior diplomat in New York said Tuesday.
According to sources, Putin was not as upset with other US and European moves, which had political implications, such as the decision to not invite him to the G8 summit. Putin also made a point of not attending last year's meeting of the UN General Assembly - an international event the he used as a way of proving to his opponents in the West that there presence in New york did not impress him.
However, the intentional move to exclude him form an international event meant to memorialize a central event of WWII - an event that was carried out by the Red Army, who liberated Auschwitz - was taken by Putin as an unforgivable slight that undermines the Russian narrative of the war and Fascism.
"To exclude Putin was like sticking a thumb in his eye," one diplomat said. "A stinging and painful move such as this, connected to Russia's part in defeating the Nazis, Putin will not take quietly."
However, the intentional move to exclude him form an international event meant to memorialize a central event of WWII - an event that was carried out by the Red Army, who liberated Auschwitz - was taken by Putin as an unforgivable slight that undermines the Russian narrative of the war and Fascism.
"To exclude Putin was like sticking a thumb in his eye," one diplomat said. "A stinging and painful move such as this, connected to Russia's part in defeating the Nazis, Putin will not take quietly."
At least three people died and 30 were injured in a heavy rebel rocket and mortar barrage of the capital Damascus on Thursday, the Syrian state news agency said.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 38 rockets were fired on Damascus Thursday, adding that a number of people were wounded.
The Local Coordination Committees in Syria reported that at least 15 people were killed or wounded in Damascus and its suburbs as nearly 50 rockets struck the city.
Thursday’s early morning salvo came after Army of Islam leader Zahran Alloush warned he would shower the capital with mortar shells to avenge government airstrikes on nearby rebel-held suburbs over the past week.
The group warned residents to stay indoors.
Alloush said on Twitter that Damascus would become a “security zone” as of Wednesday and until further notice.
1 comment:
"Jordanian fighter jets strike hard at ISIS, pay tribute to murdered pilot"
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2015/02/05/shocked-jordanians-rally-behind-king-against-isis-after-video-pilot-killing/
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