James Foley, an American journalist who went missing in Syria more than a year ago, has reportedly been executed by the Islamic State, a militant group formerly known as ISIS.
A YouTube video and photos purportedly of Foley emerged on Tuesday. The video — entitled “A Message to #America (from the #IslamicState)” — identified a man on his knees as “James Wright Foley,” and showed his beheading.
“This is James Wright Foley, an American citizen of your country,” an Islamic State militant says in the video, which has since been removed by YouTube. “As a government, you have been at the forefront of the aggression towards the Islamic State. You have plotted against us and have gone far out of your way to find reasons to interfere in our affairs. Today, your military air force is attacking us daily in Iraq, your strikes have caused casualties among Muslims.”
The video also shows another man on his knees who is identified as American journalist Steven Sotloff. The Islamic State member says that Sotloff’s future “depends” on President Obama’s “next decision.” Sotloff, a freelance journalist, went missing in Syria in August 2013.
A post on the “Free James Foley” Facebook page addressed the reports on Tuesday, saying, “We know that many of you are looking for confirmation or answers. Please be patient until we all have more information, and keep the Foleys in your thoughts and prayers.”
Geez, Barry, how’s that inclusive politics of no victor/no vanquished workin’ for ya?
Since the ClownCatastrophe won’t do the job of bombing Ar-Raqqah, Assad will do it for him.
A live leak version of the video is available for the time being on Youtube. I watched it. I like to remind myself who these monsters are.
I feel like beating the shit out of an Obama supporter right now.
I can never scrub my brain of the video of Nick Berg’s murder — the audio of his screaming has made the whole experience in one in which my hatred of these sub-human demons never wane.
I’d settle for bombing Mecca. From orbit, of course. To give that glassy rock they worship plenty of company.
A long time ago at a hunter safety class I remember a father saying that we should nuke Gaddafi because otherwise we’re just encouraging the savages.
’86 maybe.
At some point in the interim even using the word “crusade” to describe something merely analogous moved outside polite conversation.
We’re moving in two different directions at once. On one axis we’re moving away from the ability to even speak intelligently about existential threats and on the other axis those existential threats grow towards the threshold.
How many journalists have been beheaded by the religion of peace? Is this the third one? Second one? (Daniel Pearl is the one I remember, but, I seem to recall there might have been another)
At JawaReport we can see Kurdish counter-propaganda to the ISIS propaganda, now beginning to arrive as the Kurds make some headway at the Mosul Dam. An interesting note about that: the Kurds have chosen as their video-logo the image of the famous photo of the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima (the Marine Memorial), replacing the American flag with their own.
um
James Foley isn’t a 19-year-old black kid I googled
so why is this news?
If public education was worth a damn we’d possibly consider showing high school seniors videos like this in their Civ classes.
Of course, we’d have to reinstitute Civ classes and then make sure Marxists weren’t teaching them but… still.
That’s what bugs the shit out me with these conventional pieties and co-exist bumper stickers.
Buddhists don’t go around beheading people. Neither do the others. One of these things is not like the others.
It’s one reason I can’t take your average atheist seriously. If you honestly think that all organized religion is the same then you’re too ridiculously stupid to talk to.
Once upon a time pantheists were moved to extinguish other groups of people because it was understood that they would throw children into a fire for Ba’al. These were people who had no problem allowing any random household god or animism into the fold. It wasn’t motivated by monotheism.
It was motivated by a repulsion from barbaric behavior. And the proper response they agreed upon was annihilation.
The beheading business is an act for show, and in this it can marginally be differentiated from the back 0f the head shootings in the basement of the Lubyanka. But on the sort of crippled human certainties which propel either act? These appear to be pretty much one and the same.
Illiberality. That’s another word for it.
Something we have to say we cannot tolerate.
The Saudis are funding ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah and any number of minor hellish tribes and nations, all the while publicly denouncing their existence. George Bush chose the wrong dictator and State to invade and conquer.
By that we mean killing until the desire to continue with such actions no longer exists.
To be sure we intend much more than mere disapproval. On the other hand, we don’t intend, I think, arousing in ourselves such a desire to kill that we kill and kill and kill until our own desire to be killing no longer exists or ceases to be apart from the justice of the thing.
And there’s the problem, if I’m not wrong. We have to take our bearings from something — something limiting. That limiting seems to be the beginning of liberality, or toleration.
But it also appears that for many of our fellows, the limit has quite disappeared, not to be found. It has even been said not to exist. Frequently said, all too frequently said, as if this were a simple thing sufficiently solved, ended. There could hardly be a more troubling assertion for true liberals, I think.
To me this sort of thing is simple to the extent that there is a goal in mind. The total cessation of actionable hostility from the enemy.
We might very well argue about whether or not we’ve achieved that goal — and some particulars as to the definition as we’re thinking people — after making great progress towards it but as of this moment we’re nowhere near that point.
Right now? If we say we can not tolerate such a thing — and we can’t — then there are a) actions that comport with this understanding or b) a whole lotta of hand-waving.
Radio says Foley was transferred to Syria after covering the uprising in Libya, and ironically was reporting in sympathy of the rebels’ plight against the evil Syrian government.
You brought to my attention the psychological import of the tunnels in Israel, sdferr.
That change in tone wasn’t one of circumstance, it was one of understanding.
Yes, they will behead us. Yes, they’ll rape our women. Yes, they’ll cut the clitorises off of our daughters and own them as sex slaves.
Angelo Codevilla speaks of strategic purpose — something he says we haven’t got but need without question.
In part the reason I sought to bring the opposition of liberality and illiberality up is that we have among us illiberals who we cannot tolerate too. These aren’t distant foreign monsters in desert lands beheading people. These are our fellow citizens on a march to overthrow everything liberal we hold dear. Shall we kill them? This is a problem, and no simple thing.
Agreed.
> Shall we kill them?<
do something worse: mock them.
Okay, good talkin’ with ya, sdferr.
Later, man.
sdferr, bh, I do believe what will happen is the illiberals will get wrapped up in their self-rightousness to the point of killing a couple of our own, for no reason other than disagreement, and then quickly finding out their intended victims will not go quietly into the night. Once the illiberals start dying, they’ll decide they need to keep themselves in check.
The illiberals truly believe they’re right and they will, once they think they are sanctioned by the State, start carting off and executing those who dare to speak against them.
See ya later: and just remember, I’m rootin’ for a Brewer’s Corvidae destruction tonight — which is off to a good start.
It may have happened Blake, that the crucial error of self-destruction necessary to the removal of this plague of illiberality has already been accomplished . . . it’s just that no one recognizes it as yet, which doesn’t imply that the destruction will be any the less certain. The name of this thing is over-spending, or astronomical deficit spending — the bill coming due one of these days. And with that bill payment, collapse of their pretense to knowledge, at least in the eyes of the dupes who have greedily enabled their march thus far. Whether violence too will enter in, I cannot say. It may do, it may even be likely. Or it may not. Just can’t know.
Hitler seems the popular exemplar in the Islamist world. i would expect that soon they will move onto the examples of the true masters of the evil art who are after all moving into positions of influence in the region again and are willing to teach.
Well, one good thing about the impending economic implosion: we’ll no longer have to listen to the insane drivel of the credentialed professional underwater basket weaver set. The basket weaver set will be too busy with their own survival which means they’ll be to busy to worry about what the rest of us are doing.
Somewhere recently I heard an expression of the thing that is lost and can’t be got back: time. But oh what a loss. Whole lives ruined in that little word.
Nah, entirely too impersonal.
I’m thinking something entirely more Shermanesque – Call it the March to Mecca, flattening everything along the way. Once there, load the Black Stone up on an Atlas booster and blast it out of the solar system.
Only question is where to start from. Tehran, perhaps?
This feels like a relevant time to once again mention how the LA Times decided that the Rashid Kahlidi/Obama tapes were too damaging to release.
teh joos, the latimes worried about teh joos
turns out they actually had very little to worry about
We need some of Charles James Napier’s attitude when dealing with this level of barbarism. Gibbets. Lots of them.
Crap, bh, I forgot about that nonsense.
Imagine where President Barely There would be in the polls if MBM actually, you know, reported stuff.
Yep, Blake.
Btw, via Twitchy, we find this fun photo. I didn’t recognize the name of Ali Abunimah. Turns out he’s the founder of The Electronic Intifada.
It’d make for a decent “caption this” contest.
OT: Just posted to Instapundit:
REPORT: Officer Darren Wilson Suffered “Orbital Blowout Fracture to Eye Socket” During Mike Brown Attack. That would certainly challenge the media narrative, wouldn’t it?
Related: Report: More than a dozen witnesses say Brown attacked officer.
Coincidentally I just mentioned Abunimah yesterday bh.
In answer to Glenn Reynolds’s question, the new media narrative will be white Cop guns down African-American youth over black eye.
boycot the the nfl. let the ratings fall. hi “redskin”
me: good bye college/nfl football
gee, and here I was rather hoping the Vikings would be forced to forfeit if the U 0f M doesn’t get off it’s high horse.
to be an outlaw is to say eff you ruining class. mr rooney eff u and your aristocratically dweebs
Ernst
You’re not far off … the narrative is already being pushed that all that matters is that Brown was unarmed, so Wilson had no business using his gun at all.
I stand by my previous remark Darleen,
White Cop Murders Black Boy is the new Black Boy Rapes White Woman.
Nope, doesn’t meet journalistic standards.
for isis and a jdam
Casting Crowns – Love You With the Truth
re: journalistic standards
I take that to mean she has a single source reporting that the police have “dozens” of witness corroborations.
I seem to recall that the white police officers in the Rodney King case made that same mistake.
Not going for their guns, I mean.
I bring that up because I distinctly remember thinking those cops would have been better off if they’d have just shot the sonofabitch.
I doubt I’m the only one who drew that conclusion.
For whatever it’s worth. From 100.7 fm’s facebook page.
Plus speculation on Jay Nixon then bringing in a special prosecutor like Florida did.
>[A]ll that matters is that Brown was unarmed, so Wilson had no business using his gun at all.<
Ronald Reagan TV Ad: “The Bear”
Three pieces on ISIS.
“Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and the Theory and Practice of Jihad” h/t sdferr
” What is Wrong with ISIS, is What is Wrong with Islam”
Robert Spencer, “Why Is the Islamic State Behaving This Way?“
Better that Warren be cleared now and the rioters slapped down until they decide to go home than to drag this shit out for twelve to eighteen months only to have worse riots erupt when Warren is found not guilty.
Not that the grievance mongers will see it that way. After all, there’s money to be made. To say nothing of votes to be had.
Warren, Wilson, white names all look the same.
I read that speculation GeoffB linked above.
Looks like the Show Me State is getting ready to lynch an uppity white cop.
Gee, d’ya think the two developments might be related?
[…]
Nahhhhhhh!
Not that the grievance mongers will see it that way. After all, there’s money to be made. To say nothing of votes to be had –
They have set up a voter registration table on the sidewalk near the crime scene.
The Civil Rights Meal Ticket strikes again.
Only one thing I’d disagree with here: This is the Varsity team now; and the demand for spots on that team is increasing.
Darleen, that comment encapsulates comedy and tragedy perfectly in this day and age.