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People Shocked as Seemingly Normal, Break-Dancing Star Becomes Mass Murderer

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By Times of Israel Staff. The Tunisian gunman who opened fire on tourists at a Tunisian beach resort on Friday, killing at least 39 people, most of them tourists, was reportedly a local “break-dancing star” and a fan of Real Madrid.

Footage obtained by Sky News on Saturday showed him walking calmly along the beach. Sky said the clip was filmed after the massacre, and noted that no members of the Tunisian security forces approached him. He was later shot dead in a confrontation in a side street, the report said.

Authorities identified the attacker as Seifedinne Rezgui, a 23-year-old electrical engineering student from Gaafour, in northwest Tunisia. He was a student at Kairouan University, a city just south of Sousse where the killings occurred.

His bewildered family described a quiet, not-too-religious young man who liked soccer, music and spent time with friends. They said that they last saw him a day before the attack and that nothing seemed amiss.

According to the report, a Facebook account believed to have belonged to Rezgui showed a love for Real Madrid and rap music, but also an admiration for the Islamic State. Several propaganda videos were also posted to the page. (Read more from “People Shocked as Seemingly Normal, Break-Dancing Star Becomes Mass Murderer” HERE)


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Thousands of Tourists Flee Tunisia After Beach Massacre

By AFP. Planeloads of shocked foreign tourists flew home from Tunisia Saturday after a beachside massacre claimed by the Islamic State jihadist group killed at least 38 people and prompted a major security clampdown.

The North African nation, which relies heavily on tourism, announced plans to deploy troops at vulnerable sites and shut dozens of mosques accused of inciting extremism.

Britain said that at least 15 of its citizens were killed in Friday’s gun assault in the popular resort of Port el Kantaoui and that the number “may well rise.”

The attack represents Britain’s worst loss of life in a terror incident since the 2005 London bombings.

The assailant pulled a gun hidden inside a parasol and opened fire on tourists on the sand and by a pool, in the deadliest attack in Tunisia’s recent history. (Read more from this story HERE)

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What Makes Peaceful Neighbors Become Mass Murderers?

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Photo Credit: Nature

Photo Credit: Nature

What happens in the brains of people who go from being peaceable neighbors to slaughtering each other on a mass scale? Back in 1997, neurosurgeon Itzhak Fried at the University of California, Los Angeles, conscious of the recent massacres in Bosnia and Rwanda, described this switch in behavior in terms of a medical syndrome, which he called ‘Syndrome E’ 2. Nearly 20 years later, Fried brought sociologists, historians, psychologists and neuroscientists together at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Paris to discuss the question anew. At the conference, called ‘The brains that pull the triggers’, he talked to Nature about the need to consider this type of mass murder in scientific as well as sociological terms, and about the challenge of establishing interdisciplinary dialogue in this sensitive area.

On which data did you base your hypothetical Syndrome E?

Historians had analyzed personal accounts from numerous massacres, such as of Armenians in 1915, the European Jews in the Second World War, Cambodians during the Pol Pot regime and the ethnic killings in Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s. I also gathered information from the few social-science experiments available at the time, such as the famous Milgram experiment (which studied the willingness of someone to inflict on another when obeying authority figures). I was particularly struck by Christopher Browning’s 1992 book Ordinary Men, which described the testimony of hundreds of middle-aged, non-politicized German reservists who were taken to Poland in 1942. In a short time, most became efficient killers, participating in the shooting of 38,000 Jews who had been rounded up by the Nazis, and herding 45,000 more into trains destined for the gas chambers. Their commander allowed the reservists to opt out, but only 10% or so decided not to kill. I felt that the transformation into repetitive killer had to have a biology behind it — all of our behavior is guided by brain activity.

What are the main features of the syndrome?

There was a myth that the primitive brain is held in check by our more-recently evolved prefrontal cortex, which is involved in complex analysis, and that the primitive, subcortical part takes over when we carry out brutal crimes such as repetitive murder. But I saw it the other way around. The signs and symptoms that I gathered in my research indicated that the prefrontal cortex, not the primitive brain, was responsible, because it was no longer heeding the normal controls from subcortical areas. I called it ‘cognitive fracture’ — the normal gut aversions to harming others, the emotional abhorrence of such acts, were disconnected from a hyper-aroused prefrontal cortex. I also proposed a neural circuitry in the brain that could perhaps account for this. In brief, specific parts of the prefrontal cortex become hyperactive and dampen the activity of the amygdala, which regulates emotion. (Read more from “What Makes Peaceful Neighbours Become Mass Murderers” HERE)

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Hero Who Stopped Domestic Terrorist at FRC: God Prevented Me from Killing Him

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Photo Credit: CNS News

Photo Credit: CNS News

Leo Johnson, building operations manager at the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C, was filling in for unarmed security personnel at the organization’s front desk on Aug. 15, 2012 when Floyd Lee Corkins, 29, entered the building, brandishing a gun, and planning to commit mass murder.

Johnson was shot in the arm while subduing Corkins, taking away his gun, and preventing him from harming anyone else.

“I would give credit to my faith for everything that has happened from that point up until now,” Johnson said in an interview today with CNSNews.com. “I had an opportunity during that altercation when I got the gun from Mr. Corkins to take his life, and it was God who spoke to me and told me to not take his life, to spare his life. And, you know, I’ve never regretted that decision.

Corkins was sentenced today to 25 years in prison by the U.S. District Court for D.C. He had been convicted of three felony charges, including terrorism, for his attack on the FRC.

After he was arrested, Corkins told the FBI he selected the FRC as a target after finding it listed as an “anti-gay” group on the website of the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC included the FRC on a “hate map” on its website.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Says Vietnamese Mass Murderer Ho Chi Minh Inspired by Founding Fathers – UPDATED

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Photo Credit: Fox News By Chris Stirewalt. It may come as some unwelcome news to the families of the nearly 60,000 Americans who died in the Vietnam War that the whole thing was just a misunderstanding.

That was the impression President Obama gave on Thursday when he spoke to the press after his meeting with Vietnamese President Truong Tan Sang. Sang brought Obama a copy of a letter sent to President Harry Truman from Ho Chi Minh in which the communist dictator spoke hopefully of cooperation with the United States.

Obama, striking a wistful tone, observed that it may have taken 67 years, but the United States and Vietnam were finally enjoying the relationship that Ho once wrote of. After all, Obama said, Ho had been “inspired by the words of Thomas Jefferson.”

The message here was that if only we might have bridged our differences then – if only Ho and Truman could have done what Obama and Sang did this week, so much unpleasantness might have been avoided.

While Jefferson did get pretty fired up about “the blood of tyrants,” it’s hard to see how the Sage of Monticello inspired the murderous career of the Vietnamese dictator. Ho famously slaughtered his opponents, including the infamous butchery of peasant farmers who resisted his brutal taxation in the early days of Ho’s regime. Not particularly Jeffersonian.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Why Obama’s Comments About Ho Were Moronic

By Silvio Canto, Jr. First, it is true that we have diplomatic relations with Vietnam. We are doing business with them. We may be allies in the region. Vietnam is obviously looking for foreigners to invest and use their cheap labor. Their current leadership would rather see more “Made in Vietnam” stuff at WalMart than any discussion of Ho’s ideas!

Second, every despot in the world, including Castro in Cuba and Chavez in Venezuela, has quoted George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. They do it to enhance their arguments while they practice the exact opposite of what those wonderful men stood for.

Third, and most important, doesn’t President Obama understand that 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam?

And millions living served there? Some are disabled veterans! Some still live with the memory of watching their buddy killed in action.

Didn’t it occur to President Obama that such a remark might hit a few people the wrong way? Read more from this story HERE.

To Prevent Mass Murders, Lock up Crazy People

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller

Obama has been draping himself in families of the children murdered in Newtown.

MSNBC’s Martin Bashir suggested that Republican senators need to have a member of their families killed for them to support the Democrats’ gun proposals.

In a bizarre version of “A Christmas Carol,” CNN’s Carol Costello fantasized about “a mother who lost her child,” showing up and knocking on Sen. Rand Paul’s door, saying, “Please don’t do this!”

The victims of gun violence are the left’s latest “human shields” — a term coined by me in Godless: The Church of Liberalism — for their idiotic ideas. At least it’s not the godawful Jersey Girls this time.

The one clear thread that unites all the mass murders currently being exploited by the Democrats is that they were committed by visibly crazy people who were unaccountably not institutionalized. But Democrats refuse to do anything about crazy people. Apparently, the views of families with relatives murdered by severely disturbed individuals are no longer relevant when it comes to institutionalizing the mentally ill.

Read more from this story HERE.

“Never Let A Dead Child Go To Waste”

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Photo Credit: Rhys AsplundhBarack Obama, Dianne Feinstein, Michael Bloomberg, Andrew Cuomo, and their cohorts followed Rahm Emanuel’s advice to “never let a good crisis go to waste” when they used the Sandy Hook shooting to renew their assault on the Bill of Rights. Former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell added, in effect, that one should never let a dead child go to waste if one can exploit him or her for political gain.

“…the good thing about Newtown is, it was so horrific that I think it galvanized Americans to a point where the intensity on our side is going to match the intensity on their side.”

This is difficult, if not impossible, to explain away. Suppose instead that an armed teacher or staff member had stopped Adam Lanza after two murders the way Pearl High Assistant Principal Joel Myrick stopped would-be mass murderer Luke Woodham. A case study for The American Rifleman’s Armed Citizen feature is not what Dianne Feinstein, Ed Rendell, and their cohorts need in order to eliminate the Second Amendment a piece at a time. They need a mass murder that is “so horrific” that it will manipulate the public, and legislatures like New York’s, into acting before they have time to think. Their modus operandi is to exploit grief, shock, and outrage for political gain the way itinerant rainmakers once exploited the plight of drought-plagued farmers, and quacks and charlatans peddle miracle cures to desperate cancer patients.*

Ed Rendell is not the only anti-Second Amendment leader who has done this. As stated by Joshua Horowitz, Executive Director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence,

A historic opportunity now lies before us to curb the gun violence destroying our families and communities. For the sake of future generations, let us hope our elected officials seize it.

Read more from this story HERE.

European far right flirts with Norwegian mass murderer Breivik’s ideas

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Photo credit: Oslo politidistrikt

Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik may have failed to ignite a race war with Muslims, but he succeeded in stoking anxieties about the stability of Europe’s increasingly diverse societies.

Though his talk of an international underground of killers – latter-day Crusaders he called the Knights Templar – seemed to be mere fantasy, and while his methods place him far beyond the pale of mainstream politics, many of his beliefs are to be found within the fold of anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant populists.

“His ideological `manifesto’ is a distilled representation of a cultural crisis that pervades the European continent and finds expression in an increasingly xenophobic populism,” Kirsten Simonsen, a professor at Denmark’s Roskilde University, wrote in “Bloodlands”, a 2012 series of essays about Breivik.

Some notions – that Europe and its indigenous cultures are being weakened by immigration and multiculturalism – have been helping reshape the continent’s right-wing politics for years.

These beliefs occasionally find an echo on the margins of centre-right parties, among politicians seeking support from communities plagued by rising unemployment.

Read more from this story HERE.