FOX:
The suspect in the New York attack has been identified as Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, two law enforcement sources familiar with the investigation told CNN. Law enforcement sources earlier had described him as a 29-year-old Uzbek national who came to the United States in 2010.
Yes, the likes of Breitbart are going to (justifiably) ask what exactly Sayfullo Saipov was doing on a diversity visa in the United States.
But at least there’s some kind of visa involved, even though America is on the other side of the world from Central Asia.
Russia doesn’t even bother with a visa regime.
Central Asia used to have a reputation for moderate Islam, but this is becoming less true by the year. 2017 has been especially bad for it. First the ethnic Uzbek from Kyrgyzstan who blew up the Saint-Petersburg metro; then the band of Kazakh Islamist cop killers in Astrakhan; then the Uzbek terrorist in Sweden, out of an Uzbek diaspora of 1,890 people; and now the Uzbek spree killer in Manhattan.
What the hell is going on?
Soufan Center: Beyond the Caliphate (October 2017).
The 70 million strong population of Central Asia now contributes around 5,000 fighters to Islamic State, about as much as the Muslims of Western Europe, which are known for their radicalization. It is also only modesly below the 7,000 contributed by the entire Middle East outside Iraq and Syria.
And Russia with its 10 million Muslims now has the dubious distinction of providing more troops for the Caliphate than runner up Saudi Arabia. Impressive export diversification.
Here’s the problem. I have often compared Communism to a freezer. Eastern European social values were essentially “frozen” for half a century, so when they thawed out after the collapse of the Iron Curtain, they ended up more retrogressive/”based” (cross out as per your ideological preferences) than the Eurovision-MTV West. But they are catching up. Now much the same process is happening with respect to the region’s Muslims. But in their case, what they are “converging” to is not always so much Shakira as sharia.
And this is going to get worse, not better, in the future as the last remnants of the Soviet carapace fall away.
But no worries. Just as in the West you have your Sadiq Khans to tell you that terrorism is part and parcel of life in a big city, so their multiculturalist colleagues in Russia, such as the “fascist” Alexander Dugin, will blame it on the liberal “sixth column” i.e. Navalny’s schoolchildren fans (no, seriously). And life will go on, just a bit more disruptively than before.
Totally OT:
I just got a Navalny ad on Youtube, I’m in China and using a VPN to Hong Kong, so that makes it even weirder.
Ad was in Russian too, which I don’t speak, so I have no idea what was said.
What’s going on at Youtube that they’re giving unsuspecting viewers in Hong Kong Navalny ads in Russian? If I didn’t read this blog I would have had no idea who the guy even was.
‘what they are “converging” to is not always so much Shakira as sharia.’
Nice!
(Wouldn’t be surprised if the dude in the back tries sharia, since Shakira ain’t giving cr*p.)
Yeah something is seriously going wrong in that region for it to be producing so many of these guys. I guess time will tell if the traditional ulema-guided Islam ends up ascendant or the do-it-yourself kind.
Either way, it’d be much better if the majority of the Daesh fighters didn’t come from these regions – they are way better disciplined and effective than the ones coming out of the other regions. What you want most is a bunch of these nerdy desk-job guys from the West with delusions of grandeur taking a one way ticket to the meat grinder in the Middle East and not coming back. A bunch of tough-talking Barney Fife’s walking around with rifles in a concentrated area is probably not the worst thing in the world.
Peace.
Are you using Chrome? If yes, All Your Browsing History Are Belong to Google, which is why you might get weird ads if you’re a frequent reader of Mr. Karlin’s.
In much of Kyrgyzstan, the only new, shiny building in a village is built by the Saudis. I’m thinking of one recently-built monument on the shore of Issyk-Kul that really sticks out among all the older, Soviet architecrure. More importantly, a lot of Kyrgyz mullahs are trained by the Saudis. I guess that goes with being the pro-Western, beacon of freedom that some in the West say it is!
But on the other hand, Karimov’s Uzbekistan really cracked down hard on that sort of thing, and is a lot less open to Wahhabiism than Kyrgyzstan is, and yet it produced Mr. Saipov, so who knows?
The big threat to the ‘based’ Eastern Europeans is American mass media and shekels.
You start to care about money more than your land, and replace your folk reference points for those of the scum who run Hollywood.
One hopes that ever quickening pace of ‘progress’ in the Western West and the immigration crisis will permanently bump these people off the developmental path prescribed by liberal ideology. The shift of Austria to the right is encouraging in this regard.
“But on the other hand, Karimov’s Uzbekistan really cracked down hard on that sort of thing, and is a lot less open to Wahhabiism than Kyrgyzstan is, and yet it produced Mr. Saipov, so who knows?”
He is one of those who would have been “really cracked down hard on” if he were in Uzbekistan and trying anything. That’s why he was enriching the U.S. on a “diversity visa” (note that he fled to the U.S. in 2010).
Bullshit much? Anyone can throw numbers around, for others to ‘prove’ their politicized points.
A Diversity Visa.
At least Russia can justify it with Soviet legacy.
What is America’s excuse for promoting the immigration of total foreigners like Saipov?
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2017-10-27/lives-foreign-fighters-who-left-isis
This has left Ukraine the destination of choice for many Russian-speaking ex-ISIS members.
Oy, I meant to write Islam Kadyrov
lots of hand-wringing and oyyyyyyyyy-veyyyyying, also, it’s Putin’s fault:
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/11/uzbekistan-terrorism-new-york-sayfullo-saipov/544649/
which is bad for .uz how exactly?
so are they or aren’t they? which is it?
ha! I posted that before I had looked at what the author was. I just assumed.
Ioffe, Eh?
Anyhow. I’m surprised, frankly. Is there really a lot of ‘Islamist extremism in Uzbekistan’? Tajikistan — sure. But I’ve never thought of Uzbekistan as a part of the world ripe with Islamic extremism.
Haven’t followed Uzbek politics recently, though. The old boss died, the new one is the same as the old one. Stable place.
There are quite a few “powerful takes” along these lines:
https://twitter.com/OMGno2trump/status/925494135221641216
https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/925577277857026048
https://twitter.com/rulajebreal/status/925507581136826374
https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/925770971553943552
unreal…
sometimes I think what libs really mean when they say “tyranny”. It’s clear they don’t have a problem with tyranny as such – 1789, 1848 and 1917 all were getting rid (or trying to) of some kind of “tyrant” or other (and Sovietization was, in a way (and in some, it wasn’t), C.-A.’s secular revolution that put them on a path of secularism, modernism and industrial society)
America needs punitive psychiatry.
Uzbek Islamic militancy goes back some ways, unlike, say, the Kazakh variety. U.S. forces ran into a bunch of them in Paktia, Afghanistan in the Operation Anaconda back in 2002. They were mis-identified as “Chechens” by some locals at the time and fought well, unlike the local Pashtuns (on the other hand, those cowardly Pashtuns survived and lived to fight another day while the tough Uzbeks who stayed and fought… died). For some time, “the Chechens are coming, the Chechens are coming over the mountains!” was the hannibal ad portas American veterans of that operation used to tease the new-arrivals in the region.
Here is a decent summary of their activities in the Af-Pak region: http://www.understandingwar.org/sites/default/files/BackgrounderIMU_28Jan.pdf
Hey Twinkie,
Axiom of guerrilla warfare: be brave enough to fight, be smart enough to survive to fight again and again and…
Being brave against overwhelming odds* is awesome and makes for great poems and hymns and memorials, but hasn’t worked for a while in certain parts of the world for a long, long time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Pyramids
Peace.
*Which is what I consider against actors that can call in A-10 strikes and thermobaric ordinance.
Have you heard of a place called Chechnya?
Successful guerillas don’t fight. They ambush, kidnap, murder, and terrorize… mostly civilians. The idea is to convince the non-combatants to become the vast ocean that harbor the fish (the guerillas) while making them less helpful to the outsiders.
Counter-insurgency is tricky, because you have to be more feared than the insurgents on one hand, yet somehow also less loathed. It’s a nearly impossible feat to achieve if you are an alien force… so cultivating a reliable local proxy force is vital for success.
Yes. I also read this a few days ago:
http://angryarab.blogspot.hu/2017/10/by-way-have-you-read-that-russia.html
Jack Hanson appears to have been a Marine in Afghanistan for a couple of tours. He thinks the Pashtuns were the best fighters, whether pro- or anti-government. What’s your take? Are they really better fighters than the Hazaras, Uzbeks or Tajiks? Or were there just more Pashtuns, which is why they’ve generally run the place for the past few centuries? If the Hazaras are actually descended from Mongols, it’s a bit of a historical twist to see them at the bottom of the Afghan hierarchy.
First, let me make a distinction. The Uzbeks of the IMU were “foreign” fighters generally, that is, they were from former Soviet Central Asia (and quite a few with Soviet military training), and not native Afghan Uzbeks.
Generally, the assessment is correct – among the Afghans, the Pashtuns were the most fierce fighters, but that may be a function of the particular demographics of the Pashtuns (rugged mountain dwellers), as opposed to, say, the Tajik merchant class in the cities.
Of course, when “the Lion of the Panjshir Valley,” Ahmad Shah Massoud, was alive, his Tajiks had a good reputation as fighters, so leadership plays a role too (but that was long before my time).
The toughest opponents in Afghanistan, by far, WERE foreign fighters – Uzbeks, Chechens, and Arabs. But, again, that’s probably because these were veterans with the most experience and training. And, of course, they couldn’t melt into the population as easily as the native Afghans, so they had an incentive to stand and fight (although plenty did run and were harbored by Afghans and Pakistanis in FATA).
Whatever their fighting ability, here are a couple of interesting stories on several Tajiks I was acquainted with a while back, who went back to the old country for a time:
http://articles.latimes.com/2002/feb/15/news/mn-28149
http://www.foxnews.com/story/2007/01/02/reporter-notebook-fonz-kabul-found-dea-636346788.html
I think they gave it up after the Taliban came back to life. They expected post-war South Korea or West Germany. They got a thin slice of 1960’s South Vietnam.
Apropos of nothing, a gem from the DPRK News Service:
https://twitter.com/dprk_news/status/923187808830967809?lang=en
That’s very cute.
Evidently ((( Sen. Chuck Schumer ))) wanted diversity visas because, as we know, diversity is good. He was one of 31 co-sponsors of the 1990 bill as well as one of its authors.
The purpose of the bill is to identify those countries where people are not immigrating to the United States and, to make amends, arbitrarily award immigration visas to its citizens on a lottery basis. This ensures that the United States will truly become the melting pot of the world. We’ll have a little bit of everything — cultures, religions, social mores — as testimony that the United States welcomes the world with open arms regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, color, national origin, sexual orientation, disability, sex, height, weight, marital status, or gender identity. After they arrive, their relatives are also welcome to join them regardless of who they are because it would not be kind to leave any of their relatives behind. Grandparents are especially welcome in spite of whatever age-related physical infirmities they might have.
Of course, the lottery winners and their relatives arrive in the United States as verifiable minorities. That’s the purpose of the bill … to import more minority populations. Again, to show our kindness, the new arrivals and their relatives immediately qualify for welfare to see them through an adjustment period, after which they move into affirmative action programs in education and job placement to quickly raise their standard of living to that of the native population. When enough of their relatives arrive to form a community, additional programs come into play to alleviate disparate impacts between the new immigrant communities and those of their neighbors.
Taken together, the above gives new meaning to the phrase, “Guess what! I won the lottery”.