The ‘organization’ beheaded Japanese journalist Kenji Goto a few days previously. It had already beheaded another Japanese hostage, Haruna Yukawa, a week before.

The deliberate combination of indiscriminate and exorbitant violence is remarkable. It looks like a purposeful escalation beyond terror, aimed calmly at the entire world.

If there’s anyone who hasn’t watched Apocalypse Now recently, this might be the time to correct that. A reminder:

Kurtz: I’ve seen horrors … horrors that you’ve seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that … but you have no right to judge me. It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror … Horror has a face … and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies! I remember when I was with Special Forces … seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember … I … I … I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out; I didn’t know what I wanted to do! And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it … I never want to forget. And then I realized … like I was shot … like I was shot with a diamond … a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, my God … the genius of that! The genius! The will to do that! Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we, because they could stand that these were not monsters, these were men … trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love … but they had the strength … the strength … to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral … and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling … without passion … without judgment … without judgment! Because it’s judgment that defeats us.

ADDED: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning …”

I will not hold valid what has been done because of fear

(via (via @waynecolvin))

“My question is whether I am permitted to allow one of the mujahideen access to my anus, if my intentions are honorable, and the purpose is to train for Jihad by widening my anus.”

The sheik praised Allah and said: “In principle, sodomy is forbidden. However, Jihad is more important. It is the pinnacle of Islam. If sodomy is the only way to reach this pinnacle of Islam, then there is no harm in it.

Allahpundit estimates:

Odds that this is a prank played on the credulous host by some viewer, possibly the MEMRI guys themselves, who simply couldn’t resist: 40 percent. Odds that it’s a legit query, proof that the mujahedeen’s willingness to sacrifice for jihad has taken on painful new dimensions: 40 percent. Odds that the guy posing the question is the world’s dumbest would-be terrorist, whose “recruiter” is really, really eager to start “training” him: 20 percent.

The reason Obama doesn’t want the truth of the Benghazi-to-Syrian Rebels gun-running operation to come out is that all of a sudden the “al Qaeda attacked Benghazi” narrative doesn’t make any sense.  For, why on earth would al Qaeda attack a gun-running operation to the Syria rebels when the Syria rebels themselves are al Qaeda?  Al Qaeda wouldn’t be attacking their own al Qaeda weapons pipeline.

So, Obama’s real fear is not that he ran guns to al Qaeda, but that if this were know[n], al Qaeda would be removed as the possible suspect in the murder of Ambassador Stevens and three Americans.

First Steyn:

The same bureaucracy that takes the terror threat so seriously that it needs the phone and Internet records of hundreds of millions of law-abiding persons would never dream of doing a little more pre-screening in its immigration system … Because the formal, visible state has been neutered by political correctness, the dark, furtive shadow state has to expand massively to make, in secret, the judgment calls that can no longer be made in public.

Then WRM:

PRISM and similar programs aren’t a ghastly misstep or an avoidable accident. They are the essence of Obama’s grand strategy: public peace and secret war. To cool down the public face of the war, he must intensify the secret struggle.

Richard Fernandez comments.

There’s some kind of conservation law at work there, and they always have the potential to trip people up. Bad outcomes are conserved might be too harsh, but it gets close to something.

This partisan skew is reinforced by technical considerations. Even more than guerrilla warfare, terrorism is a tactic suited to relatively disorganized non-state actors. When even guerrilla warfare is impractical, terrorism is the mode of violent ‘resistance’ that remains. In the sentimental language of the Left, it is the warfare of the weak.

If these factors are recognized, a realistic definition of terrorism can be constructed that coldly acknowledges both aspects of its positioning, as an ideologically motivated atrocity without state legitimation. Terrorism is violent partisan criminality. It is aggressive violation of the law in the service of a political cause.

In a post written prior to the identification of the Boston Marathon bombers, Richard Fernandez makes a point that is far from original, but all the more important for being clearly true, and widely accepted as being true:

The ascription of guilt in public attacks has become highly politicized. Each ideological side is rooting for its own set of villains to be identified as guilty. The Left desperately want the perpetrators to come [from] the Tea Party, White Supremacist Groups or at least Christians while the conservatives want the perps to be Muslims or drug addled lions of the Left.

Acts of terror taint a cause, its supporters, and its demographic base with violent partisan criminality. Who benefits? In the case of American domestic terrorism, at least, the answer is almost insultingly obvious. Those identified with the target of terror are strengthened by it, those pre-positioned as enemies of the terrorists even more so. After the atrocity occurs, the cry immediately arises: please let it not be ours.

This is distinctly odd. An act that is inherently political has a valency that directly and explicitly contradicts its superficial partisan motivation. Terrorism is not only something the other side does, it is something that — when reptilian partisan considerations are all that count — one wants the other side to do. How utterly delightful (if unavowable) to be blessed with spectacular public confirmation that one’s enemies are violent partisan criminals.

An inevitable consequence of this oddity is the proliferation of conspiracy theories. If the guiding question is cui bono?, the inescapable implication is that the target — ultimately, the State — is the only agent with a rational interest in terror taking place. ‘False flags’ make much more sense than raw terror ever could. This way lies madness, and perhaps an ineluctable mass insanity.

The alternative to conspiracy theory can only be common sense, but it finds itself surprisingly stressed. Is terror rationally explicable at all? Are its proponents simply deranged? Or do they perceive subtle advantage in sheer escalation — feeding their enemies, as a way to feed the war? With the world becoming ever more Black Swan-compatible, this is a story that has scarcely begun.

ADDED: Driven to kill by brutalist architecture.

ADDED: ‘George Washington’ on False Flag Terror.

‘Arguably’?

(Nydwracu digs deeper)

ADDED: Some crunchy commentary and links from Foseti. Common sense from VDH. Steve Sailer owns the topic, as exemplified by this (immediately classic) comment: “There are only about 200 Chechens in the United States, so 1% of all Chechens here have turned out to be spectacular terrorists.”