Are Tennessee Church Shootings Jihad? Frontpage Mag - Friday October 7, 2016 by Matthew Vadum The suspect arrested on suspicion of shooting up three Christian churches in Shelbyville, Tennessee appears to be a convert to Islam, a critically important detail that the incurious mainstream media has not been reporting. Wendell Tobias Buchanan, who turned 36 in August, is being held in the local county jail on $500,000 bond. Buchanan was taken into custody last Saturday (October 1), Pamela Geller reports, …shortly after he was seen driving by Horse Mountain Church of Christ on Horse Mountain Road, which was hit on at least three separate occasions by gunfire. Buchanan allegedly fired into two other churches — Philippi Methodist Church and Singleton United Methodist Church — the University of Tennessee Extension office and shot out several Charter Communications cable boxes during overnight hours Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. As part of its ongoing terrorist protection program, Facebook has scrubbed Buchanan’s page of all information except his name. Geller managed to take screen shots while the information on the page was available. A Facebook post from September 8 indicates Buchanan professed belief in the Islamic deity and seems to radiate the zeal of a convert. “Friends and family of Facebook I’ve been granted knowledge of the unseen world as a mercy from my Lord Allah.” The social media entry contains several other references to Allah. Buchanan writes that Allah’s “will and word are the ultimate truth,” and “I owe absolutely everything to Allah because he has set me free from my spiritual cage and I feel so much better physically and mentally than I have in months.” He ended the post with, “Read the Qu’ran because it is the true word of God and seek guidance for a better understanding. Shalom.” In the comments section underneath the post a Facebook friend wrote “I didn’t know you believed in Islamic book?” Buchanan replied, “I do because I was compelled to do so.” According to the Times-Gazette of Shelbyville, Buchanan was charged with desecration of a venerated object, vandalism under $10,000, vandalism under $500, 18 counts of vandalism under $1,000, and four counts of destroying/interference with utility lines. Additional charges may be laid against Buchanan, Bedford County Sheriff Austin Swing (D) has said. Buchanan doesn’t have much of a criminal record. He entered a conditional plea to a marijuana possession charge in 2000, pled guilty in 2004 to driving with a suspended license, and was convicted of two driving-related misdemeanors, according to publicly available court records. In 2009 Geller reported on alleged child abuse at the al-Farooq mosque in Nashville, 50-odd miles away from Shelbyville. She also reported the same year that a Tyson Foods meat-packing plant in Shelbyville gave in to pressure from a local union and dropped the paid holiday of Labor Day in favor of the Muslim holiday Eid al-Fitr. Tyson reversed the policy change after a public backlash. This wasn’t the first terrorist attack in Tennessee. A naturalized Kuwaiti-born Muslim named Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez killed five U.S. servicemen at military recruiting centers in Chattanooga on July 16, 2015. The following December 16 FBI Director James Comey concluded the shootings were “motivated by foreign terrorist organization propaganda.” Comey said in February 2015 that the tentacles of Islamic State (a.k.a. ISIS, ISIL, Daesh) in the U.S. extend to all parts of the country. Islamic State is a “chaotic spider web” that utilizes social media to radicalize people across America, he said. “We have investigations of people in various stages of radicalizing in all 50 states,” said Comey, adding, “This isn’t a New York phenomenon or a Washington phenomenon. This is all 50 states and in ways that are very hard to see.” Islamic State has called on Muslims to murder American military personnel in the U.S. In February last year, Islamic State urged its supporters to assassinate American-born Yasir Qadhi, a professor in the religious studies department at Rhodes College in Memphis. He is also dean of academic affairs at the Al-Maghrib Institute in Houston, Texas. Tennessee is a frequent destination for Muslim immigrants. The state’s education system has been targeted by the terrorist front group, Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Throughout the U.S. there are hidden and not-so-hidden enclaves in which anti-American Muslims plot and foment civil unrest and worse. Many mosques and Islamic community centers throughout the nation focus very little on strictly religious matters. Instead, they are hotbeds of jihadism where hatred of the United States, its form of government, religious pluralism, history, and culture are taught and reinforced. Making matters worse, the Obama administration has been concealing the staggering breadth of terrorist activity in the United States. A recent government report indicated that law enforcement had 7,712 “encounters” with terrorists from July 20, 2015 through July 20, 2016. There have been at least 93 Muslim terrorist plots in the U.S. since Sept. 11, 2001. The overwhelming majority of those plots took place during Barack Obama’s presidency. Here is where the figure of 93 comes from: the Heritage Foundation hasn’t updated its list of all the post-9/11 Muslim terrorist plots in the U.S. since a July 2 terrorist event but as of that date the figure was 89. Of those 89, only 27 took place during George W. Bush’s presidency. Number 90 since Sept. 11, 2001 would be the Sept. 17 bombing in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood allegedly carried out by Ahmad Khan Rahami. Number 91 took place the same day at Crossroads Mall, in St. Cloud, Minnesota when Dahir Adan stabbed nine people. Number 92 was the Sept. 23 Cascade Mall shooting spree in Burlington, Washington allegedly carried out by Arcan Cetin. Number 93 was the church shooting rampage. Meanwhile, Islamic State is now urging supporters to go low-tech when engaging in terrorist attacks. Its new monthly magazine, Rumiyah, encourages entrepreneurial jihadists to get over being “squeamish” and stab their victims with knives. It recommends attackers use a baseball bat to daze victims before stabbing them. Bridget Johnson reports at the Observer that the magazine “explicitly described what organs the attacker should aim for, how hitting a skull risks a broken knife blade and how pausing to ‘fully detach the head’ isn’t advised for the novice beheader.” Johnson continues: The suggested targets were especially unnerving: head for random people, ISIS directed, walking on the beach, in a park, coming home from the night shift, leaving a nightclub, enjoying a rippling creek. Forget the large crowds, the terror group said, and hit quiet neighborhoods in multiple-attack sprees with “widely available” knives. “One need not be a military expert or a martial arts master, or even own a gun or rifle in order to carry out a massacre or to kill and injure several disbelievers and terrorize an entire nation,” the ISIS article said. Islamic State wants “medieval, simplistic attacks” on the theory that “[s]pontaneity not only spreads terror to the most unlikely corners of the country, but creates an even bigger nightmare for our efforts to intercept terrorists in the planning stages,” Johnson writes. Wendell Tobias Buchanan may have answered Islamic State’s call to attack Americans Read More Here

How Poll Bias Obscures Trump’s Likely Election

American Spectator - Friday October 7, 2016

by Wlady Pleszczynski

“Put not your trust in princes” as Psalm 146 advises… nor put such trust in princesses or polls. For “princess,” awaiting a queenly coronation, read Hillary C and for “polls” include any of those focused on the current presidential race.

In point of fact, as the Brits would say, the proper way to read the current presidential polls may be with a modicum of cryptographic decoding and guided by a few essential considerations.

The first is the obvious fact that a respondent answering the pollster may not rank toward the top of the ingenuousness scale. That is to say, he (she) may be directly lying about, or incorrectly predicting, his (her) ultimate vote… and that includes, as well, the possibility of not voting at all.

The second pertinent fact is that such inauthentic self-reports are not randomly distributed so as to generate mere statistical “noise” of the sort reflected in the reported “error limits” of the particular poll. To the contrary, the majority of those who misinform the interviewer may go in one direction rather than the other, whether the choice is between classical or country music or between Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.

From what precedes there follows this crucial assertion: considerably more pro-Clinton respondents in the current polls will, in ultimate fact, vote for Trump than will “Trumpers” vote for Clinton. A much smaller number of others will vote for the Libertarian candidate or won’t vote at all. Does this prediction have a basis in any reality known to pollsters, sociologues, and social psychologists or is it mere wishful conjecture? It does indeed have a very potent basis. To use the jargon of the social psychologist, that basis is now called “Evaluation Apprehension.”

Simply put, EA is the respondent’s concern that he be positively evaluated by the interviewer who is on the phone or at the other end of the social media link. This inner pressure toward positive self-presentation is, of course, stronger in some people and weaker in others. But if there are cues available suggesting what the asker privately favors, those among the asked who are prone to EA arousal will tend to shape their answers in the direction that they think likely to win the asker’s approval or at least to fend off his displeasure.

And are such cues actually available? Of course they are and in vast supply. The media and digital spheres are full of them, as we know to the point of surfeit, and the redundant prevailing message is that Trump is crude, ignorant, brutal, sexist, probably criminal, and incapable of sustained thought. In effect, his possible election looms as a national disaster that must be prevented.

Amplified through the now omnipresent media blitz this view of Trump is available to all, influencing many, fostering rejection by others, and undisclosed rejection by yet a few others. It is the last group, the secret rejecters, who are most prone to enact the EA sequence: say Clinton to the pollster, but vote against her or don’t vote at all at the “moment of truth.”

It follows that the slight Clinton majorities coming from the “closely contested” and electorally crucial states such as Pennsylvania, Florida, and North Carolina may be illusory. If there is a small silent majority for Trump out there it will show from the privacy of the voting booth rather than in the polls.

But to this realistically optimistic assurance, a worried postscript must be added. Namely, that so much depends on whether Trump can, for the next month, render irrelevant the dour view from another biblical source, Ecclesiastes who tells us that “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”

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