Garland Terror Attack.

About an hour after I really should have gone to bed last night two gunmen opened fire on guards at the entrance of the Curtis Culwell Center in Garland, Texas, US injuring one. Being Texas the guards immediately returned fire killing the two attackers.

At the time the Culwell centre was hosting an event by the American Freedom Defence Initiative/Stop Islamization Of America (AFDI/SIOA) called the "Muhammad Art Exhibit and Cartoon Contest" the climax of which was supposed to be the awarding of a USD10,000 prize for the best drawing of the Muslim Prophet Mohammad. Prior to the attack one of the gunmen Tweeted a message tagged "#TexasAttack" in which he expressed a hope that Allah (God) would accept the pair as a mujahideen (holy warrior) for carrying out the attack. As such I have absolutely no problem referring to the incident as a terrorist attack.

The AFDI's annual draw Mohammad competition and the associated "Everybody Draw Mohammad Day" have their roots in the 2005 controversy in which Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published a series of Mohammad cartoons. Unlike France's Charlie Hebdo which uses cartoons of Mohammad to make artistic points about Islam - particularly the way the religion has been hijacked by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) - the Jyllands-Posten cartoons and the AFDI cartoons they spawned are of extremely limited artistic value and instead seem intended simply to cause offence for the sake of causing offence. As such both Jyllands-Posten and the AFDI have long been on the same Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) kill-list that also contains Charlie Hebdo and Lars Vilks who was recently attacked at a similar even in Copenhagen, Denmark on February 2015.

The keynote speaker at yesterday's event was Geert Wilders  - the founder and leader of the Dutch Freedom Party. Along with comparing the Qu'ran to Hitler's "Mien Kampf," calling for the building of Mosques to be banned in Europe and releasing the truly awful anti-Islam film "Fitna" Wilders has been a vocal supporter of Mohammad cartoonists generally and Jyllands-Posten in particular. As a result he is also on AQAP's kill list. Therefore I think it is reasonable to suspect AQAP of having a hand in the attack.

AQAP are based in Yemen where the political situation is delicate to say the least. During the waves of protests in 2011 Yemen's neighbour Saudi Arabia became very worried that these demands for democracy would cause it's absolute Monarchy to be overthrown. They are particularly worried about Shia Muslims who are less susceptible to the lies the Saudi Monarchs use to control their population. So the Saudis quickly sent in the troops to crush a revolutionary movement in their other neighbour Bahrain. To the shame of the international community the Saudis were then supported in attempting to overthrow the Shia government in Syria and succeeding in overthrowing the Shia government in Yemen that was replaced by a Sunni government led by Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi.

As part of the almost universal outrage against the AQAP terror attack against Charlie Hebdo the people of Yemen overthrew the Hadi's government that had been sheltering and protecting AQAP on the Saudis behalf. With Hadi being forced to flee the country on March 26th (26/3/15) Saudi Arabia attacked Yemen in the hope of re-installing Hadi into power. Although the US has offered no resistance to this wholly illegal act of aggression and is in fact supplying weapons and flying re-fuelling missions in support of it I get the impression that the Saudis expected the US to immediately join in not only with the war against Yemen but also to start a war against Iran in an effort to kill all of the World's Shias.

This has increased the tension between the US and Saudi Arabia with the US having to dispatch an air-craft carrier to the Gulf of Aden on April 20th (20/4/15) to stop the Saudis attacking Iranian shipping in the area which would likely trigger a regional war. Last Tuesday (28/4/15) the Saudis sailed the MV-Maersk Tigris into Iranian waters in the Persian Gulf in the full knowledge that it would be seized due to an outstanding debt. The intention seemed to be to provoke the US to intervene triggering a war between the US and Iran. Just last Friday (1/5/15) the US announced that it would increasing it's naval presence in the Persian Gulf in order to, erm, better police the waterway.

Therefore it is not beyond the realms of possibility that Saudi Arabia ordered the Garland attack as a way to lash out against the US for not doing as it is told. Apart from the pressure created by a terror attack US President Barack Obama has through the Black Lives Matter protests and his nomination of Loretta Lynch very much tried to position himself as a modern day Martin Luther King (MLK) and the defender of ethnic and religious minorities against the racist Republican Party. The AFDI have been labelled a hate group similar to the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) by the Southern Poverty Law Centre which very much has it's roots in the civil rights movements of the 1960's being founded in Montgomery, Alabama where MLK began his famous Selma march.

Therefore if Obama speaks out against the Garland attack it will be viewed as him turning on his core supporters and exposing his campaign as a fake in the process. However if Obama doesn't speak out against the attack he will be attacked for not standing up for the US Constitutional protection on free speech and being too soft on Islamic terrorists. Obama actually found himself in a similar bind the day before the attack on Lars Vilks in Copenhagen when a Saudi-funded Mosque demanded that he labelled the shootings in Chapel Hill, North Carolina as a hate crime and a terror attack.

On a final note I should point out that there has been an ever so slight increase in tension recently that could suggest that a big terror attack was about to be carried out somewhere in the World. However this has been so vague there isn't even anything tangible for me to point to as an example. Therefore it seems unlikely that the attack could have been predicted and stopped. However local law enforcement are well aware of the general threats against both the AFDI and Geert Wilders and the attack was technically thwarted at the last minute.

15:40 on 4/5/15 (UK date)