Terrorist Attack on Utrecht Tram Leaves Three Dead

On Monday, March 18, 2019, a suspected Turkish-born terrorist killed three tram passengers and injured five others in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

The alleged man-of-interest has been identified by the Utrecht Police as Gokmen Tanis, 37.

Local news media quoted witnesses who said there were multiple gunmen involved in the shooting, which took place at 24 October Square, but the police did not comment on the number of attackers.

The attack took place in the Kanaleneiland neighborhood, which is home to a large Muslim community, largely Moroccan and Turkish. It was not clear whether that influenced the decision of the gunman to open fire when and where he did.

The historical significant of "October 24" in Utrecht does relate to the fact the United Nations was established on October 24, 1945. Theo Paijmans mentions that one of the streets leading to the square is named Weg der Verenigde Naties (Street of the United Nations).

The story of this being a terrorist is falling apart, or at least convoluted.

Some news accounts are mentioning that Gokmen Tanis has a long history of previous charges, including recent ones of rape and manslaughter. This specific incident involved his targeting a relative (his sister-in-law?) and then shooting three nearby individuals dead.

One Turkish BBC journalist claims that Tanis fought in Chechnya, and another said he shouted "Allah is great!"

Other reports continue to indicate there may have been more than one gunman.

Late in the day, Tanis was arrested.

Christchurch Mosque Attacks: 50 Dead

Friday is the Muslim holy day, a day of worship at mosques.

The naming of Christchurch, New Zealand, the capital city of the Canterbury region, occurred in 1848, when the founders who had attended Christ Church College in Oxford, named it after their Alma Mater.

At around 1:40 pm, attacks at two mosques, perhaps more, have left fifty people deceased and another fifty injured, on Friday, March 15, 2019, in Christchurch, New Zealand. (The death toll was updated to 50 when another body was found on March 16, 2019.)

First reports were that four individuals had been arrested, one woman and three men. But only one person was tied to the actual shooting. One male has been identified as an Australian Caucasian.

This Christchurch shooter self-identified himself as "Brenton Tarrant." He posted this photo of himself. (He was charged with murder on March 16, 2019.

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Brenton is an English place name and surname. The surname Brenton indicates that one's ancestors came from a place called Brenton near Exminster, England, the original meaning of which was "Bryni's homestead." Bryni was an Old English given name based on the word bryne, "flame."

Tarrant is a Welsh name meaning "thunder."

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After going back outside and shooting a woman there, he gets back in his car, where the song 'Fire' by the English rock band The Crazy World of Arthur Brown can be heard blasting. The singer bellows, 'I am the god of hellfire!' and the gunman drives away. Source.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison confirmed that at least one of the individuals taken into custody is an Australian born citizen. He called the shooting as being at the hands of a "extremist right wing, violent terrorist," at a press conference Friday.

The attacks appear to have unfolded at the Al Door Mosque, Deans Avenue, next to Hagley Park, and at the Linwood Mosque in the suburban location of Linwood.  One shooter live-streamed his attack on social media, gruesomely displaying how he entered the mosque and shot innocents. New Zealand Police have requested this video be taken down from any social media site.

In a social media post just before the attack, an account that is believed to belong to one of the attackers posted a link to an 87-page manifesto that was filled with anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim ideas and explanations for an attack. The manifesto was not signed.

The shooter's weapons were marked with white supremacist symbols and the names of historical figures who fought against the Ottoman Empire, the Islamic superpower of its day.

Besides automatic weapons employed, multiple improvised explosive devices were attached to vehicles as part of the attack.

All schools, for a time being, and all mosques were closed. Christchurch experienced a massive lockdown. A worldwide alert went out, and mosques in many locations - New York City, Los Angeles, London, Minneapolis and other cities - were closed or security forces were sent to guard them.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said, "This is one of New Zealand's darkest days."

Journalist Chris Lynch, a radio host on New Zealand station ZB Radio, told CNN that one of the shootings had occurred at "the biggest mosque in all of Christchurch."

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After a period of relatively quiet, as far as mass violence, it will be noted that on Wednesday, March 13, 2019, Brazil experienced a mass shooting at the state school in Suzano, near São Paulo, when students were on a snack break. Two school employees, five adolescent students, and the two former students all died. One owner of a nearby car rental shop was also killed. One of the gunmen was his nephew and they stole a car from him before the school shooting.

Seven Sisters + Champs-Elysees Attacks

The Seven Sisters in London, 1830.

One man died and 10 people were injured after a van was rammed into a crowd of worshipers on Seven Sisters Road, near a mosque in north London, in the latest terror attack to hit the UK in 2017.

Eyewitnesses reported chaotic scenes as the incident unfolded just after midnight local time, on June 19, 2017, when evening Ramadan prayers had finished.

A 48-year-old white man was wrestled to the ground by members of the public and then arrested at the scene on suspicion of attempted murder. He was yelling, "All Muslims must be killed."

The "Seven Sisters" after which the road is named were seven trees located opposite its junction with Tottenham High Road. This is made clear in the legislation authorising its construction, where the route of the road was described as running:

...from the Stamford Hill Road in the Parish of Tottenham , in the said County of Middlesex, nearly opposite to certain Trees called the Seven Sisters.

In his early seventeenth-century work, Brief Description of Tottenham, local vicar and historian William Bedwell singled out the walnut tree for particular mention. He wrote of it as a local 'arboreal wonder' which 'flourished without growing bigger'. He described it as popularly associated with the burning of an unknown Protestant. There is also speculation that the tree was ancient, possibly going back as far as Roman times, perhaps standing in a sacred grove or pagan place of worship.

The location of the seven trees can be tracked through a series of maps from 1619 on. From 1619 they are shown in a position which today corresponds with the western tip of Page Green at the junction of Broad Lane and the High Road. With urbanisation radically changing the area, the 'Seven Sisters' had been replanted by 1876, still on Page Green, but further to the east. Contemporary maps show them remaining in this new location until 1955.

The current ring of hornbeam trees was planted in 1997 in a ceremony led by five families of seven sisters.

The Seven Sisters Road is also traditionally the road between Highbury and White Hart Lane, the football grounds of Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur.
Spurs are known as the Yids, because of their supposed Jewish tendencies.
Arsenal were rumoured, and reported in the tabloid press, to have been Osama bin Laden's team during his time in England.
Arsenal purchased the ground Highbury was built on from the Church of England. The then-chairman of Arsenal, Sir Henry Norris, was also archdeacon of the Unified Grand Lodge of England.
The nearest tube station is also named "Arsenal". There is also an old film called "The Arsenal Stadium Mystery". Black and white.
Arsenal have been involved in several scandals. Norris, mentioned above, was banned from involvement in football for making illegal payments, after also allegedly conspiring to get Arsenal voted into the top flight. ~ Stephen Morgan

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Meanwhile in Paris...

An armed man who deliberately rammed his car into a police van in Paris on Monday, 19 June 2017, has been taken down by officers and is dead, French authorities said.

The incident took place on the iconic Champs-Elysees boulevard in central Paris, the latest attack this year against security forces in the French capital.

Gerard Collomb, France's interior minister, told reporters the attacker's car contained weapons and explosives.

"Enough to allow him to blow up this car," Collomb said.

No police officers or passersby were wounded, an Interior Ministry spokesman said.

The small white car caught on fire after the collision with the mobile police unit.

It's the fifth time in four months that security forces have been attacked in Paris.

Some unconfirmed reports note the man is a well-known figure in the right-wing.

Croissants & August 5th

August 5, 2016 is the 300th anniversary of the Battle of Petrovaradin or Peterwardein, a decisive victory for Austrian forces in the war between Habsburg Monarchy of Austria and the Ottoman Empire of August 5, 1716, at Petrovaradin (then part of Military Frontier, Habsburg Monarchy; today part of Novi Sad, Vojvodina, Serbia). This was the beginning of the end of the Ottomans. After the war, a church commemorating this event was built on Tekije, on the hill over battlefield, and is dedicated to Our Lady of Tekije, also known as Our Lady of the Snows. The church is special, because it has both Catholic and Orthodox altars and both Christian denominations use it. The site is a place of pilgrimage on every August 5.

After the battles that defeated the Ottomans, they had lost most of their European domains 300 years ago. "Viennese bakers celebrated their deliverance with what came to be called the croissant, a pastry in the shape of the Muslim crescent. Take a bite out of Islam?" notes one anti-jihadist site. 

The other date linked to this story is - September 11, 1638.

The earliest story dates to 1683, during the Ottoman Turks siege of Vienna. Legend has it that a baker working late at night heard the Turks tunneling under the walls of the city and alerted the military.
The military collapsed the tunnel in on the Turks and eliminated the threat, saving the city. The baker baked a crescent shaped pastry in the shape of the Turk’s Islamic emblem, the crescent moon, so that when his fellow Austrians bit into the croissant, they would be symbolically devouring the Turks. Source.

Many people have heard that the croissant was created in 1686 in Budapest, Hungary by a courageous and watchful baker, at a time when the city was being attacked by the Turks. Working late one night, he heard odd rumbling noises and alerted the city's military leaders. They found that the Turks were trying to get into the city by tunnelling under the city's walls. The tunnel was destroyed and the baker was a hero, but a humble hero — all he wanted in reward was the sole right to bake a special pastry commemorating the fight. The pastry was shaped like a crescent, the symbol of Islam, and presumably meant that the Hungarians had eaten the Turks for lunch.

This merely demonstrates the many-sourced legendary nature of the croissant origins story.

The connection between the croissant as an anti-Islamist symbol is clear, nevertheless.

The 100th anniversary of the August 5, 1916, World War I, Battle of Romani, in which the Allied forces, under the command of Archibald Murray, defeat an attacking Ottoman army under the command of Friedrich Freiherr Kress von Kressenstein, securing the Suez Canal and beginning the Ottoman retreat from the Sinai Peninsula.

Two major defeats for the Ottomans and Islam, on August 5th. The invention of the croissant tied to August 5th. In the midst of war, history must not be forgotten, overlooked, or ignored. Radical terrorists are attuned to twilight language.

Awareness is key. Keep your guard up. Be safe.

August 5, 2016, is Friday.

New Islamic Cry: "Destroy The Pyramids!"

This is getting serious. One of the objectives of the new Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt may be the destruction of the last of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

According to several reports in the Arabic media, prominent Muslim clerics have begun to call for the demolition of Egypt’s Great Pyramids—or, in the words of Saudi Sheikh Ali bin Said al-Rabi’i, those “symbols of paganism,” which Egypt’s Salafi party has long planned to cover with wax. Most recently, Bahrain’s “Sheikh of Sunni Sheikhs” and President of National Unity, Abd al-Latif al-Mahmoud, called on Egypt’s new president, Muhammad Morsi, to “destroy the Pyramids and accomplish what Amr bin al-As could not.”

This is not anti-Islamic craziness. There is a reality for the fear of the loss of the Pyramids. Currently, in what the International Criminal Court is describing as a possible “war crime,” Islamic fanatics are destroying the ancient legacy of the city of Timbuktu in Mali—all to Islam’s triumphant war cry, “Allahu Akbar!”

Contemporary Muslims have already destroyed their ancestors’ heritage in Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Malaysia, and Tunisia. Read the full details here.

The taller Buddha of Bamiyan is shown before (left picture) and after the destruction (right) of March 2001 by the Taliban. Those are people shown at the bottom.

Site of the smaller Buddha was destroyed in 2005.

The two Buddhas had measured 55 and 37 metres (180 and 121 feet) high respectively.