Afghanistan : Enough Is Enough, Especially If We're Sacrificing to Keep Europe "Safe"

TODAY, THERE IS SAD NEWS FOR THREE AMERICAN FAMILIES. It makes me wonder -- why ARE we there?? • • • THREE US SERVICEMEN KILLED IN AFGHANISTAN. Fox News told the story on Tuesday, reporting that 3 US service members have been killed in an Afghanistan roadside bomb blast. Three others, including an American contractor, were wounded in the blast. Fox News called it "likely the deadliest incident this year for US forces in the country....The wounded victims were evacuated and receiving medical attention, officials said. Those killed and injured weren’t immediately identified." It is DOD policy to withhold the names of service members killed in action until 24 hours after notification of next of kin is complete.” • The latest deaths come just days after a US soldier was killed in a firefight with al-Qaida forces Saturday, Defense officials told Fox News, which reported : "US Army Ranger Sergeant Leandro Jasso, 25, from Leavenworth, Washington, was wounded by small arms fire while conducting an operation to eliminate al-Qaida militants in Nimruz Province, located in the southwest part of Afghanistan. Jasso was evacuated to Helmand province, where he was pronounced dead, officials said. The Pentagon said the incident remains under investigation. Jasso was the ninth American killed in action in the country this year, and the second this month after a former mayor from Utah who served in the state’s National Guard since 2013 was slain in an 'insider attack' in Kabul on November 3. Brent Taylor, a married father of seven children who was deployed to Afghanistan in January, was a former mayor of North Ogden, a city of about 17,000 people located about 46 miles north of Salt Lake City." • Fox News says : "The killings of the American service members on Tuesday came as ISIS, in a statement posted by its Amaq propaganda arm, claimed responsibility for the suicide attack on Friday inside an Afghan Army base in eastern Khost province that killed at least 27 soldiers. That attack came a few days after a suicide bomber killed 55 religious scholars gathered in the Afghan capital, Kabul, to celebrate the holiday marking the birth of Islam's prophet, Muhammad. The Taliban denied involvement in that bombing, which also wounded 94 people." • The US and NATO formally concluded their combat mission in 2014, but still provide support to Afghan security forces, who have been struggling in recent years to combat a resurgent Taliban and ISIS. Approximately 15,000 US soldiers are currently serving in Afghanistan. International forces have also suffered from so-called insider attacks in recent months, in which Afghan soldiers or police have opened fire on them. • The deaths of young Americans in a country that by any standard is far from improving or even standing still against the Taliban onslaught is particularly sad and galling. • • • DEATH COMES FOR ALL. By accident, I also read on Tuesday a column in The Catholic Thing newsletter about Death. Professor Michael Pakaluk was writing about the assassination of President Kennedy -- whose commemoration got lost in the Thanksgiving celebration that fell on the day he was shot -- November 22. • Michael Pakaluk wrote : "Fifty-five years ago last Thursday, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, at 12:30 pm Central Time. The anniversary passed, for me, while I was working through St. Alphonsus Liguori’s great spiritual work, The Preparation for Death. And a puzzle formed in my mind. On the saint’s terms, JFK’s death ought to have been a great matter for reflection on the meaning of death. After all, “the death of the great prince” has traditionally served such a purpose. For example, the saint quotes Horace : 'Death brings down the scepter to the level of the spade.' He tells the story of how Diogenes was seen by Alexander the Great looking intently for something among the bones of the dead. When the conqueror asked him what he was searching for, Diogenes replied, 'I am looking for the head of Philip your father. I am not able to distinguish it. If you can find it, show it to me.' The winding parade through Dallas is just about at its end. In five minutes, exiting the Plaza and entering the highway, they would arrive at the Trade Mart center, for a luncheon of business leaders....Kennedy was reasonably starting to plan a second term. He did not think he would die then, nor that day. He had no warning. Absolutely nothing about his career, prospects, plans, worries, annoyances, suggested that he would never arrive at the Trade Mart luncheon, only five minutes away. He was the most powerful man in the world, and one of the most admired -- so intelligent, handsome, wealthy, and blessed by fortune in every way." • But, JFK was shot. That day. In Dallas. Pakaluk quotes Liguori : “My brother, God has already fixed the year, the month, the day, the hour, and the moment, when I and you are to leave this earth and go into eternity, but the time is unknown to us. To exhort us to be always prepared, Jesus Christ tells us that death will come unawares, and like a thief in the night.” • • • WHEN IS ENOUGH, ENOUGH?? Pakaluk wrote about his friends who were taken by Death suddenly -- "a young mother, thirty years old, felled by a hemorrhage leaving her house....An aunt, middle-aged, making breakfast, never made it walking from the table to the stove. A friend’s father collapsed while on a dock, fishing, during a family vacation: he passed away while this friend, a physician, applied CPR." We all can tell of similar cases. It’s close to a certainty, says Pakaluk, "that at least one reader of this essay will die this very week." He was speaking of his essay, Dear Readers, not our Blog, I pray. • But, when it is young soldiers sent to forsaken regions to be used in some giant political game of chess, when is enough death, enough? • St. Alphonsus gives us this in one of his prayers for a holy death : “My Lord Jesus Christ, by that bitterness which Thou didst endure on the cross, when Thy blessed soul was separated from Thy most sacred body, have pity on my sinful soul, when it leaves my miserable body to enter into eternity....obtain for me a good death, that loving Jesus and thee, my Mother, in this life, I may attain heaven, where I shall love thee for all eternity. Amen." Did St. Alphonsus ever have an "Enough is Enough" moment. Did he ever question of untimely or youthful deaths, 'what is the use of this'? Not likely because he is a saint -- but then, we all are saints if we stake our life and eternity on Jesus being the Son of God. Alphonsus is just one on the named saints. That's why, as we discussed on Halloween, there is an All Saints Day -- it is for all of us who are unnamed saints. But, that does not prevent our feeling that there is little use in the deaths of young Americans in Afghanistan, perhaps no use at all. None of the “istan” countries will be free and fairly functioning countries in our lifetimes. Our elected officials should be required to walk up those walkways and knock on the door with the bad news. OR, perhaps we should each take our turn -- as in jury duty, for after all, we elect the leaders who send these young Americans to their deaths -- telling the mothers, fathers, wives, and children of these young people that they died -- and then trying to explain why, and for what. • • • IT IS EUROPE IN THE PATH OF THE TERRORIST HORDES. And Europe seems to be oblivious to the threat. Perhaps because it is young Americans who come home in body bags in order to protect Europe, far more than ot protect the US. • FRANCE. Consider France. Last week, the Gatestone Institute's Giulio Meotti called it "The Fracturing of France." The entire erticle is available at < https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13335/fracturing-france >. Meotti states : "In a new program, Macron's government is offering Arabic lessons in France's public schools to children as young as six years old, purportedly to facilitate integration. French authorities seem to ignore that the vast majority of terrorists from France have been French citizens, who spoke a perfect French and, unlike their parents, were born in France. They were perfectly 'integrated.' They rejected it. US President Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron engaged in a public diplomatic clash just days before Trump visited France this month. The spat began when, in a radio interview, Macron suggested that Europe needed an army to protect itself from the US. 'We have to protect ourselves with respect to China, Russia and even the United States of America,' said Macron. Protecting France from the United States? In a November 11 speech commemorating World War I, Macron in a diplomatic welcome to his guest, attacked 'nationalism.' President Trump had proudly called himself a 'nationalist' less than three weeks before. Macron, it seems, was using the armistice signed in 1918 to forget what is going on in France in 2018. Gérard Collomb, France's Interior Minister until last month and currently Mayor of Lyon, is apparently pessimistic about the situation in his country, according to comments reported by Valeurs Actuelles. 'People do not want to live together,' Collomb lamented, continuing that the responsibility for security during the recent immigration has been 'huge.' Collomb also warned that there is only a 'little time' to improve the situation. 'It's difficult to estimate but I would say that in five years the situation could become irreversible. Yes, we have five, six years to avoid the worst,' he added. And the worst will be a "secession", or as Gilles Kepel, the French specialist on Islam, called it: 'La fracture.' " • BELGIUM. Consider Belgium. French President Macron went to Brussels' Molenbeek district, which he defined "a territory marked by the image of the terrorist drama and also a place of initiatives, sharing and integration." Meotti is shocked : "Sharing and integration? Eight people were arrested in a March 2018 counter-terror raid in Molenbeek. A confidential report revealed last year that police in the same Brussels district uncovered 51 organizations with suspected ties to jihadist terrorism. Many of the suspects involved in the Paris and Brussels terror attacks either lived in, or operated, from Molenbeek. As Julia Lynch wrote in The Washington Post regarding Molenbeek : 'One of 19 'communes' in the Brussels metro area, the neighborhood was home to one of the attackers in the 2004 commuter train bombings in Madrid and to the Frenchman who shot four people at the Jewish Museum in Brussels in August 2014. The Moroccan shooter on the Brussels-Paris Thalys train in August 2015 stayed with his sister there. If there is a place where Collomb's explanation about 'secession' is not only a warning but already a reality, that place is Molenbeek. Roger Cohen, in The New York Times, called it 'the Islamic State of Molenbeek.' " • FRANCE AGAIN. Such districts are not only a Belgian phenomenon. 'Today, we know that there are 100 neighbourhoods in France that have potential similarities with what happened in Molenbeek,' said France's then Minister of Youth Affairs and Sports, Patrick Kanner, in 2016. The town of Trappes is infamous for the number of jihadists from there who went to fight in Syria or Iraq. Meotti reminds us : "In France, six planned terror attacks have been foiled this year, the Secretary of State to the Minister of the Interior, Laurent Nunez, disclosed. 'Since November 2013, 55 planned Islamist attacks were foiled thanks to the action of the intelligence services, including six this year,' Nunez said. In the last few months, the current French scenario has not been dominated by new big terror attacks, but by a daily rain of intimidation. A Frenchman in his 60s was walking down a Paris street with wrapped Christmas gifts last week, when a stranger knocked off his eyeglasses before slapping him. 'That's what we do to the infidels,' the attacker said to the man. A few days before that, a French Jewish citizen was also attacked in the street by three men." The Wall Street Journal says : "Now President Emmanuel Macron's government is considering giving parents a secular alternative to that intertwining of Arabic and Islam by prodding more of France's public schools to offer children as young as age 6 Arabic lessons..." The confirmation of the Islamist wave came last September in a sobering report from Institut Montaigne titled, "The Islamist Factory." It details the extreme level of radicalization of French Moslem society. According to its director, Hakim El Kharoui, extremist Moslems in France are "creating an alternative society, parallel, separate. With a key concept : halal." Meotti says : "Macron has done almost nothing to stop this expansion." Marine Le Pen recently said : "Two or three Salafist mosques were closed in 18 months, [but] foreign funding of mosques was not banned." Meotti states : "The goal of foreign funding has been detailed by the former chairman of the Christian Democratic Party, Jean-Frédéric Poisson, in his new book, 'Islam, Conquering the West.' 'The expansion of Islam in the West is part of a strategic plan developed by the 57 states that make up [the Organisation of] Islamic Cooperation -- a sort of Moslem United Nations -- which theorized the spread of Sharia law in Europe,' Poisson said in an interview this month. 'They openly declared the ambition to install a 'substitution civilization' in the West.' " • The islamization of France is having another obvious effect -- French Jews are leaving the country. This summer, the New York Times gave details of the Jewish exodus from the multicultural Paris suburbs : "More than 50,000 have moved to Israel since 2000, compared with about 25,000 French Jews who left between 1982 and 2000." There is also an internal exodus, says the WSJ : "In Aulnay-sous-Bois, the number of Jewish families dropped to 100 in 2015 from 600 in 2000; in Le Blanc-Mesnil, to 100 families from 300; in Clichy-sous-Bois, there are now 80 Jewish families, down from 400; and in La Courneuve, there are 80 families, down from 300." • "We may be living the end of a civilization -- ours," says Philippe de Villiers, a French politician and novelist, whose brother was the head of the French military before a funding spat with Macron ended his career. De Villiers says : "There are two points in common between the decay of the Roman Empire and our own decay. The Roman senatorial nobility, who thinks only of adding a layer of porphyry to their bathtubs, no longer considers the limes, the border of the Empire, as an emergency to secure." • GERMANY. Consider Germany. In Germany, the same case can be made, but its details are being suppressed ad hoc by the government of Chancellor, Merkel, who added immensely to the problem with her open borders catastrophe in 2015. The Voice of Europe wrote on November 23 : "Headmaster Astrid-Sabine Busse (61) of a Berlin school is sounding the alarm, saying : 'We are Arabised!' Of the 103 first graders that came to her school in Berlin’s Neukölln suburb, only one speaks German at home. It is a result of working class Germans leaving the area, migrant family reunifications and tax measures. 'We are here at the front,' says headmaster Busse : 'Because of a third migrant generation who import their brides from their former home country. Another parent who cannot speak German...' " • And, Chancellor Merkel just appointed Sinan Selen, a 46-year-old Istanbul-born counter-terrorism expert, as the first Moslem to fill a top leadership position within Germany's intelligence community. Gatestone Institute's Soeren Kern wrote last week : "Throughout his government career, Selen has been resolute in confronting Islamic fundamentalists in Germany. He also led efforts at the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) to monitor the Turkish nationalist Milli Görüs, an influential Islamist movement strongly opposed to Moslem integration into European society. The leadership changes at the BfV were spurred by a cellphone video that purportedly showed right-wing mobs attacking migrants over the murder of a German citizen in Chemnitz by two failed asylum seekers. According to the respected blog Tichys Einblick, the video actually documented migrants attacking Germans, not Germans 'hunting' migrants. Selen, a Turkish immigrant, will fill the second-highest position in Germany's domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV). Kern says : "The appointment comes just weeks after Merkel fired BfV President Hans-Georg Maaßen for publicly defending the anti-mass-migration party Alternative for Germany (AfD) against attacks from Merkel and her junior coalition partner, the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD). By choosing Selen, Merkel appears to be trying to achieve several objectives. First, she seems to be attempting to save her floundering government by placating the [socialist] SPD, which has demanded that the domestic intelligence agency begin monitoring the AfD party, and which has called for more people with a 'migration background' in leadership positions at federal agencies. Selen's appointment also seems to be a symbolic move aimed at reaching out to Germany's Turkish community, which has long complained of 'institutionalized racism' within the German security apparatus. Finally, by appointing an ethnic Turk, Merkel appears to be trying to mollify Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has repeatedly pressed for her to crack down on anti-Turkish Kurdish elements in Germany." In May 2016, according to Kern : "Die Welt reported that Merkel had appointed Selen to lead -- apparently at Erdogan's behest -- a special counter-terrorism task force at the German Interior Ministry. The concession was part of the March 2016 EU-Turkey migrant deal, which was designed to halt the flow of migrants from Turkey to Greece. In a lengthy article that examined Erdogan's growing leverage over Merkel, Die Welt wrote : 'The Federal Government is going so far as to reorganize its internal organizational structure in order to adapt it to Turkish wishes. The Turks have agreed to a 'new common mechanism' in the fight against terrorism, with Sinan Selen, of Turkish origin, appointed as the responsible authority at the Federal Interior Ministry....the fact that such a high-profile position is being created for him has only one explanation : the Turks are to believe that when discussing counter-terrorism with Berlin, they will be speaking with one of their own.' " Maaßen's successor, Thomas Haldenwang, has already announced that under his leadership, the BfV will focus on "right-wing extremism." Speaking to the Parliamentary Control Board of the German Bundestag on November 16, Haldenwang -- who previously was the BfV's second-in-command, and whose position will now be filled by Selen -- said that although Islamist terrorism poses the greatest threat to German security, the BfV will keep "the possible development of right-wing terrorist structures firmly on the radar." He also promised to make a "professional assessment of how to deal with the AfD party." As in France -- AND the US if the Democrat PArty has its way -- it is always the "right wing" that needs extra government attention and suppression. The radicals causing the trouble are safe to work their terror because they are the "friends" of socialist leaders. • • • FREE SPEECH IS DYING IN EUROPE.The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) just established a precedent for Sharia-compliant adherence to Islamic blasphemy laws, based on fears of "disturbing the religious peace." The ECHR recently ruled that to state that the Islamic prophet Muhammad "liked to do it with children" and "A 56-year-old and a six-year-old?... What do we call it, if it is not paedophilia?" goes "beyond the permissible limits of an objective debate," and could be classified as "an abusive attack on the Prophet of Islam which could stir up prejudice and threaten religious peace." Those words were spoken by free speech and anti-jihad activist, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, who was convicted by an Austrian court of "denigrating religious symbols of a recognized religious group" after she gave a series of small seminars: "Introduction to the basics of Islam", "The Islamization of Europe", and "The impact of Islam." The court case against her came about only because a magazine, NEWS, filed a complaint against her after secretly planting a journalist at her seminars to record them. The Vienna Regional Criminal Court -- according to the summary in the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) -- found that "these statements implied that Muhammad had had paedophilic tendencies," and convicted Sabaditsch-Wolff "for disparaging religious doctrines" under §188 of the Austrian penal code, which states : "Anyone publicly denigrating or mocking any person or thing that is the object of worship of a domestically existing church or religious society...among whom his conduct is liable to cause legitimate annoyance, is punishable by imprisonment of up to six months or a fine of up to 360 daily rates." Sabaditsch-Wolff was ordered to pay a fine of 480 Euros and the costs of the proceedings. The Vienna Court of Appeal upheld the decision in December 2011. Sabaditsch-Wolff then appealed the Austrian court decisions to the European Court of Human Rights. She stated that her right to freedom of expression, safeguarded in Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, had been violated. On October 25, the ECHR reached the conclusion that there had been "no violation of Article 10 (freedom of expression) of the European Convention on Human Rights." In its ruling, the ECHR stated : "The Court found in particular that the domestic courts comprehensively assessed the wider context of the applicant's statements and carefully balanced her right to freedom of expression with the right of others to have their religious feelings protected, and served the legitimate aim of preserving religious peace in Austria. It held that by considering the impugned statements as going beyond the permissible limits of an objective debate, and by classifying them as an abusive attack on the Prophet of Islam which could stir up prejudice and threaten religious peace, the domestic courts put forward relevant and sufficient reasons." • Are these countries, with their kowtowing to Islamization, worth the blood of young Americans? • • • AND, EUROPEANS THINK JEWS HOLD TOO MUCH POWER. Newsmax reported on Tuesday about a CNN Poll that found that 1 in 5 Europeans (20%) say Jews hold "Too Much Influence." A recent CNN and ComRes poll of more than 7,000 people in multiple countries across Europe found that more than 25% think Jews hold too much influence in finance and business, and almost 25% think they are too influential in conflicts around the world. 20% said Jews have too much influence on the media and in politics. Respondents also tended to overestimate the number of Jews in the world. A quarter of Hungarians and a fifth of Brits and Poles thought that more than 20% of people in the world are Jewish. The Pew Research Center found in a worldwide study that about 0.2% of the global population is Jewish. 40% of Europeans thought that their countries were between 3% and 10% Jewish, but no country other than Israel is more than 2% Jewish. One third of Europeans polled said they knew little to nothing about the Holocaust, in which roughly six million Jews were killed -- in Europe. 5% said they had never heard of the Holocaust, including 20% of people between the ages of 18 and 34. CNN and ComRes polled 7,092 adults in seven European countries, Great Britain, France, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Sweden and Austria, on September 7 - 20, 2018. • Is this level of anti-Semitism in Europe worth "saving"? • • • DEAR READERS, when is enough, enough? When is the death of one more American soldier one death too many?? Perhaps the answer lies in the reasons American youngsters are in Afghanistan. Why should America spill its young peoples' blood and spend its taxpayers' money on the protection of Europe? Why should the United States try to "save" Europe from illegal terrorist inundation and collapse into a feudal status under Islamic overlords when Europe is, by its own acts, showing that it does not want to be "saved." • If there are other reasons for America to stay in Afghanistan, those reasons have faded with time. There have been 17 years of occupation, housecleaning, keeping governments afloat, deaths of American soldiers, Afghan soldiers and civilians, and brutal civil war with America on one side -- but on a side that keeps shifting. If the US is acting out of the altruistic desire to help Afghanistan stabilize into a democratic nation, we are wasting our time -- as with drug dependence, only the dependent can save themselves. If we are there as a shield for Israel, then we and Israel need to find another place to plant the shield -- say, Iran, or Iraq, or Syria, or all three. • Iran seems to want Afghanistan. Let the Ayatollahs have it. Let them try to mollify the Taliban, al-Qaida, and the tribes. Let their young soldiers die in the streets of Kabul and on the roads of Nimruz and Helmand provinces. America has done more than its share of dying for nothing -- for the Afghans who are happy to let Americans fight for the freedom they should want enough to fight for themselves (as we did), and for the Europeans who seem to be satisfied with being run over and subdued by Islam while blaming conservatives and Jews. Not one more drop of American blood in Afghanistan. Enough is finally Enough.