"The sect leaders make a very conscious effort to impregnate the women. Some of them, I was told, even pray before mating, offering supplications for God..."

"... to make the products of what they are doing become children that will inherit their ideology."

"When Avijit Roy was murdered, the police were standing nearby and watching the spectacle. The murderers left unscathed after their act..."

"When the murderers were escaping after killing Oyasiqur Rahman Babu, the police had been standing by then too... The police were paper tigers when women were being molested one by one before an audience of thousands at the new year celebrations. They were engaged primarily in not neglecting their duty. They were busy clearing the way for the sexual offenders to escape...."

From the last blog posts of Ananta Bijoy Das, who was hacked to death by masked men with machetes in Sylhet, Bangladesh.

"One of the two gunmen in a Garland, Texas, attack on a cartoon contest featuring images of the Muslim Prophet Mohammed has been identified as Elton Simpson..."

"... a federal law enforcement source told CNN. The source said Simpson is thought to have sent a tweet before the attack with the hashtag #texasattack. 'May Allah accept us as mujahideen,' the tweet read in part."

Elton Simpson � sounds like the name of a character in a cartoon. I picture him looking like this:


But he looked like this.

"If PEN as a free-speech organisation can�t defend and celebrate people who have been murdered for drawing pictures, then frankly the organisation is not worth the name."

"What I would say to both Peter [Carey] and Michael [Ondaatje] and the others is, I hope nobody ever comes after them."

Said Salman Rushdie (after whom somebody has come).

"The Yazidi woman watched as her name was drawn out of a hat."

"Then a man she had never met told her to go into the bathroom and clean herself. But she knew better. As a Yazidi woman captured by the Islamic State, she knew that a bath was often prelude to rape. So she swallowed some poison and hoped to die."

From "Islamic State�s �war crimes� against Yazidi women documented," in the Washington Post.

Also:

Islamic State makes no secret about its enslavement of Yazidi women. In October, the group boasted about the practice in its English-language magazine, Dabiq.

�After capture, the Yazidi women and children were then divided according to the Shariah amongst the fighters of the Islamic State who participated in the Sinjar operations,� the magazine said, arguing that unlike Christians and Jews, Yazidis, as polytheists, could be treated as property. �The enslaved Yazidi families are now sold by the Islamic State soldiers.�

"If you want to survive, come out! If you want to die, stay inside!"

"I knew those guys were lying," said Elosy Karimi, 23, one of the survivors, who stayed inside � inside the ceiling � for more than a day.

"A letter found in a waste bin in Andreas Lubitz's apartment indicated he 'was declared by a medical doctor unfit to work'..."

"... Dusseldorf prosecutor Christoph Kumpa said."

And here's a NYT op-ed, written by a former pilot titled "Inside a Pilot�s Mind/After Germanwings Plane Crash, Pondering Pilot Psychology":

I flew many times with a born-again Christian who talked constantly about Adam and Eve and other Bible stories. Could his religious beliefs have caused us to handle an in-flight emergency differently? It never happened, so I can�t say. Another pilot would tell me about his crazy sex life on the road. He�d kiss his wife and kids goodbye and then become a totally different person for seven days.

But these are ordinary varieties of human behavior � nothing that would predict some catastrophic course of action....

Click for more �

"The German investigators said they had not found a suicide note or 'any indication of a political or religious' nature among the documents secured in Mr. Lubitz�s apartment."

"'However, documents were secured containing medical information that indicates an illness and corresponding treatment by doctors,' prosecutors said in a statement...."

Carsten Spohr, the chief executive of Lufthansa, the parent company of Germanwings, said on Thursday that Mr. Lubitz had passed the company�s health checks with �flying colors.�

�He was 100 percent flightworthy without any limitations,� Mr. Spohr said.

Click for more �

"There was a 'deliberate attempt to destroy the aircraft'..."

"... Marseille prosecutor Brice Robin said Thursday about the Germanwings crash."

The co-pilot of the doomed Germanwings flight �accelerated the descent� of the plane when he was alone in the cockpit, Marseille prosecutor Brice Robin said Thursday. That can only be done deliberately, he said. The co-pilot was alive until impact, Robin said, citing the sound of breathing in the cockpit.

The most plausible explanation of the crash is that the copilot, �through deliberate abstention, refused to open the cabin door � to the chief pilot, and used the button� to cause the plane to lose altitude....

ADDED: Here's a much more substantial report in the NYT report:

[Brice Robin] said it appeared that the intention of the co-pilot, identified as Andreas Lubitz, had been �to destroy the aircraft.�... He said there was no indication that this was a terrorist attack, and that Mr. Lubitz was not known to law enforcement officials...

The prosecutor said that the authorities had a full transcript of the final 30 minutes of the voice recorder. �During the first 20 minutes, the pilots talk normally,� he said, saying they spoke in a �cheerful� and �courteous� way. �There is nothing abnormal happening,� he said...

�You can hear the commanding pilot ask for access to the cockpit several times,� the prosecutor said. �He identifies himself, but the co-pilot does not provide any answer. You can hear human breathing in the cockpit up until the moment of impact,� he said.

"Gunmen in military uniforms attacked a museum in downtown Tunis around noon on Wednesday, killing 19 people" � including Polish, Italian, Spanish and German tourists.

"The identity and motivation of the attackers were not immediately clear."

Tunisia was the country where the Arab Spring revolts against autocratic rule began four years ago.

Of all the countries affected, Tunisia has made the most successful transition toward democracy, recently completing presidential and parliamentary elections and a peaceful rotation of political power. Security forces have struggled against occasional attacks by Islamic extremists, but they have usually occurred in mountainous areas far from the capital.

"Many were shocked that the apparent executioner in videos made by the Islamic State, or ISIS, was an educated, middle-class metropolitan."

"In fact, academic institutions in Britain have been infiltrated for years by dangerous theocratic fantasists. I should know: I was one of them," writes Maajid Nawaz, in a NYT op-ed.

Islamist �entryism� � the term originally described tactics adopted by Leon Trotsky to take over a rival Communist organization in France in the early 1930s � continues to be a problem within British universities and schools. Twenty years ago, I played my part as an Islamist entryist at college....

I had a mind inquiring enough to question world events, as well as the passion fostered by my background to care, but I lacked the emotional maturity to process these things. That made me ripe for Islamist recruitment. Into this ferment came my recruiter, himself straight out of a London medical college.

Here's Nawaz's book: "Radical: My Journey Out of Islamist Extremism."