Glenn brings us this sordid tale. Two men were recently arrested for plotting to perform terrorist attacks in Denmark.
It seems that they are still upset about that whole Muhammad cartoon flap that happened way back in 2005. Makes sense, as Muslim terrorists have a very long memory. They still cite the Crusades as a major reason for hating the West. If something done and gone for close to ten centuries still motivates them to attack people who had nothing whatsoever to do with those long ago events, then I suppose it seems logical that half a decade will seem like a mere tick of the clock. Maybe there will still be terrorists who have a yen to blow up cartoonists in the year 2300 CE or so, simply because of what those long dead scribblers dashed off in the opening years of the 21st Century.
But that is merely tangential to what I really want to discuss.
Click on that last link one more time, and read the news report. According to prosecutors, a US citizen and a native of Canada met while living in Chicago. They coordinated with at least one terrorist group that is based in Pakistan, and at least one representative of al Queda. Targets in two different cities in Denmark were personally visited by one of the conspirators, before he returned home to The Windy City to plot some more.
And what, exactly, were they planning on doing when they finally got all their ducks in a row? The alleged attack was going to involve “hand weapons and explosives,” which sounds to me like a suicide-by-police play with some small arms and grenades. That seems to be a rather excessive amount of flitting about the globe for something so localized.
But the point is that they did travel all over the place in an effort to put this together. What does Chicago, Canada, Pakistan and Denmark all have in common? A single terrorist plot that seems to have been foiled by a lack of a couple of AK-47’s and a pineapple grenade or two.
Makes you wonder what else is going on, right underneath the surface of our daily lives.
These are very serious crimes. The FBI is to be congratulated for connecting the dots in a case where the perps have left only a few cleverly disguised dots. It is amazing what skilled questioners can uncover.
I have given up on “love thy neighbor” because it may just get you killed.
I know that bit was tangential but I do think we need to take it into account that they do not still cite the Crusades as a good reason for attacking the West. They have started doing so very recently. For centuries those largely unsuccessful attempts to roll back Islamic expansion were ignored by Muslim historians as being of no interest or importance. However, recent Muslim writers have realized that mentioning the Crusades brings on fits of guilt in the West, especially among people who know nothing about the history, so they do it. This is a war of propaganda as well as bullets and explosives, so these things matter.
Oh dear. Don’t know what went wrong there. I wanted the word still in italics, not the rest of the text. Ah well.
[Fixed. Jonathan]