It’s Wednesday, June 15th, 2016…but before we begin, The Left’s reaction to the Orlando massacre truly tells you all you need to know about their priorities. And, as with any other scaly creature, this particular fish rots from the head.
Barack Hussein Obama’s initial comments on radical Islam’s latest assault on the West was nothing short of shamefully repugnant, and quite literally beneath contempt…which makes it no different from his reaction to any other Islamic attack:
But even when offered yet another opportunity to call this particular tool of Islam an extremist spade, as the WSJ records, the Islamo-Manchurian Candidate balked:
“Sunday’s massacre in Orlando contradicts President Obama’s many attempts to downplay the risks that Islamic State poses to the U.S. homeland, so it’s no wonder he wants to change the subject to something more congenial. To wit, his disdain for Donald Trump and Republicans.
“For a while now the main contribution of some of my friends on the other side of the aisle have made in the fight against ISIL is to criticize this Administration and me for not using the phrase ‘radical Islam,’” Mr. Obama said Tuesday, using his preferred acronym for Islamic State. “That’s the key, they tell us. We cannot beat ISIL unless we call them ‘radical Islamists.’ What exactly would using this label accomplish? What exactly would it change?”
Since the President asked, allow us to answer. We’re unaware of any previous American war fought against an enemy it was considered indecorous or counterproductive to name.
…Mr. Obama’s refusal to speak of “radical Islam” also betrays his failure to understand the sources of Islamic State’s legitimacy and thus its allure to young Muslim men. The threat is religious and ideological…”
Or it betrays…
…his complete understanding!
Either way, we wouldn’t piss on this lying piece of human excrement…
…were he fully engulfed in flames.
Meanwhile, as this forward from Jeff Foutch details, just outside of Paris…
Jean-Baptiste Salvaing and Jessica Schneider: the two latest victims of the West’s criminal indulgence of Islamic extremism.
A Frenchman who pledged allegiance to Islamic State stabbed a police commander to death outside his home and killed his partner, who also worked for the police, in an attack the government denounced as “an abject act of terrorism“. Larossi Abballa, 25, also took the couple’s three-year-old son hostage in Monday night’s attack. The boy was found unharmed but in a state of shock after police commandos stormed the house and killed the attacker.
Born in France of Moroccan origin, Abballa was jailed in 2013 for helping Islamist militants go to Pakistan and had been under security service surveillance, including wiretaps, at the time of the attack, Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said.
The attacker told police negotiators during the siege he had answered an appeal by Iraq-based Islamic State chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi “to kill infidels at home with their families“, Molins told a news conference. “The killer said he was a practicing Muslim, was observing Ramadan and, that three weeks ago, he had pledged allegiance to … Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi,” Molins said…”
Anyone with a lick of common sense should find the parallels to San Bernardino, Orlando, Ft. Hood, Boston, ad infinitum/ad nauseam extremely disturbing.
Though we know one clown in the Offal Office who won’t.
At least Barry will sleep better tonight knowing the couple was stabbed to death rather than shot with a “powerful assault weapon”.
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, writing at Townhall.com, Katie Pavlich informs us of one group that refuses to let a single aspect of their lives rob them of their common sense on other issues:
LGBTQ Gun Rights Group on Orlando: ‘Guns Didn’t Do This, A Human Who Hated Gays Did‘
The Pink Pistols, an LBGTQ group dedicated to protecting the gun rights of gay and transgendered individuals, has issued a response to the Orlando terror attack and to calls for gun bans. The group is urging the public not to jump to conclusions and to focus on the violent acts carried out by ISIS follower Omar Mateen, not on the tool he used.
“The Pink Pistols gives condolences to all family and friends of those killed and injured at Pulse,” First Speaker of the Pink Pistols Gwendolyn Patton said in a statement. “This is exactly the kind of heinous act that justifies our existence. At such a time of tragedy, let us not reach for the low-hanging fruit of blaming the killer’s guns. Let us stay focused on the fact that someone hated gay people so much they were ready to kill or injure so many. A human being did this. The human being’s tools are unimportant when compared to the bleakness of that person’s soul. I say again, GUNS did not do this. A human being did this, a dead human being. Our job now is not to demonize the man’s tools, but to condemn his acts and work to prevent such acts in the future.”
The group is also urging local lawmakers to reconsider allowing sober drivers to carry firearms into bars and clubs in the future for self-defense purposes.
“Some bars and other establishments that serve alcohol are difficult to protect because many states forbid the carrying of weapons where alcohol is served, but that just as one might have a designated driver who stays sober, one might have a designated carrier with a concealed-carry permit who goes armed and does not drink,” the group posted on it’s website.
“It’s sad that we must consider such things, but when there are persons out there who mean us harm, we must find ways to protect ourselves within the law,” Patton added.
We don’t find “considering” such things sad at all, only the acts that force us to do so. Besides, existing prohibitions against carrying firearms in establishments which serve alcohol certainly didn’t stop Omar Mateen!
And though even Conservatives like cartoonist Ken Catalino fail to identify the true source of the problem…
“Islamic” intolerance and extremism would be far more accurate, n’est-ce pas?
…in his latest piece at NRO, which deserves presentation and perusal in full, Kevin Williamson is ready, willing and able not only to call Islamic terrorism what it is, the greatest threat to Western culture and freedom we currently face, but highlight the dismal failure of our own government to even minimally deal with it:
No, We Are Not ‘Doing Everything We Can’
The lie at the heart of our national-security argument
One of the great problems we face in our ongoing confrontation with Islamic fundamentalism is that our enemies are rational and we are not.
It is a mistake — one that we (“We” being the Progressive power structure) insist on repeating — to tell ourselves that the jihadists and ISIS groupies who perpetuate terrorist spectaculars such as the attack on the Pulse nightclub outside Orlando are irrational, that they are mentally disorganized lunatics of the familiar-enough sort exemplified by Jared Lee Loughner and John Salvi, who may or may not believe themselves to be acting in the service of a particular cause. (Salvi was an abortion opponent who believed that a Vatican-based currency-manipulation scheme was shaping world affairs, and who believed himself to have been targeted by, among others, the Cosa Nostra and the Freemasons. Loughner, too, was obsessed with a currency-manipulation conspiracy.) Lunacy is not what we are seeing with domestic jihadists. What we see instead is the pursuit of specific cultural and political ends through acts of violence directed at symbolically important soft targets.
We speak of “lone wolf” jihadists (or, to use The Obamao’s favorite red herring, “home grown”!) as though this phenomenon were somehow independent of the wider Islamist project. It is not. The model of “leaderless resistance” in the service of terrorist projects is not new, and it has not been employed by the Islamists at random. Leaderless resistance has long been a part of the thinking of neo-Nazi groups such as Brüder Schweigen, and the Islamists have had a great deal of opportunity to develop that approach in various insurgencies around the world. Equally important, the emergence of the Internet as a worldwide medium for political communication and cultural expression has provided 21st-century terrorists with opportunities that were far out of the reach of their mimeograph- and fax-dependent predecessors a generation ago. If Omar Mateen turns out, as expected, to have had little or no substantive contact with organized Islamist groups, that fact will demonstrate the success of their communication strategy rather than the limitations of their reach.
We must be honest with ourselves about the enemy and his characteristics. He is not crazy. He has goals, and we know what they are and how he goes about pursuing them.
None of this is exactly new: Neither the methods nor the targets are unique to our time. It is worth remembering that the worst massacre at a U.S. school did not happen in the Columbine era but in 1927, and that it involved no firearms at all — a failed political candidate in Bath, Mich., murdered 38 schoolchildren and six adults (and injured 58 more) with explosives as an act of revenge against the community that had rejected his candidacy. There has never been a time at which people in the United States did not have the means and the opportunity to commit these kinds of atrocities. What has changed is that the world now has a substantial population of willing terrorists: a small but by no means trivial share of the world’s Muslim population.
The world’s Muslim population is not the United States’ Muslim population — and it need not be. As I have been arguing since well before Donald Trump brought his reliably beef-witted approach to the question, preventing Islamic terrorism should be a main focus of U.S. immigration and visa policy. That need not mean a blanket ban on immigration and visas from Islamic populations, but it will mean substantial restrictions and extraordinary scrutiny. We should forthrightly acknowledge that the plain conclusion to be drawn from the European experience is that if a Western country does not already have a large, poorly assimilated Muslim minority population, it would do well not to acquire one. To pretend that Islam is, at this moment in history, just another faith to be absorbed into the general American ethic, as though Muslim distinctiveness were no different from Amish distinctiveness, is culpably sentimental. Mateen was a U.S.-born American citizen with Afghan immigrant parents, and the reality is that this is a different proposition from being a U.S.-born citizen of Irish Catholic background, inasmuch as even at its height IRA terrorism was a minor concern for the United States, though it was a major concern for our closest ally. There are Hindu radicals in the world and violent Buddhists, but the United States is not immediately concerned with them as a question of national self-interest.
The usual miscreants are making the usual dumb claims about U.S. gun law and the need for gun control, with such Hollywood luminaries as Kirstie Alley demanding that government “ban sales of fully automatic assault rifles to the general public,” which is more or less what the federal government did in 1934, and which is immaterial to the question at hand, inasmuch as no fully automatic weapon was used in Florida. The question of background checks inevitably has come up. But consider this: Not only did Mateen twice pass the standard federal background check (he had no criminal convictions or any other prohibitory factor) but he was twice interviewed by the FBI as a potential Islamic terrorist. Whatever it is that Hillary Rodham Clinton or Barack Obama imagines in the way of background checks for members of the general public purchasing ordinary firearms such as the ones Mateen used, it is sure to be something quite a bit less involved than an active FBI investigation of a suspected terrorist.
Which brings us to another consideration: As with the case of the perpetrators of the homicidal violence that plagues so many American cities, many terrorists and other perpetrators of mass killings are people who are hardly unknown to our law-enforcement authorities. Mateen was on the federal radar. Adam Lanza’s mental-health problems were no secret in his community. More than 90 percent of those who commit murders in New York City have prior criminal histories. The Fort Hood shooter was in contact with Anwar al-Awlaki, and that fact was known to the FBI. These killers do not come out of nowhere.
The habitual Democratic response to these episodes is to demand that we restrict the legal rights of people who have not been charged with, much less convicted of, a crime, which is constitutionally, legally, morally, and politically impossible. Beyond that, we get speeches that sound like they come from party functionaries in some cartoon version of a 1930s totalitarian state: Mrs. Clinton promises that we shall “redouble our efforts!” against terrorism, while President Obama vows that we shall “spare no effort!” in our investigation of this atrocity. One half expects them to promise that the wheat harvest will double under the five-year plan unless the wreckers and hoarders sabotage our program.
The fact is that we are not redoubling any efforts, not where it could really count: screening people who enter the country legally and preventing illegal entries. Nor is it the case that we are not sparing any effort: We have a national-security apparatus perfectly comfortable monitoring basically all electronic communication, but we can’t put a tail on a guy the FBI twice had reason to suspect of being involved in terrorism?
The fact is, the federal government does not take this sort of thing very seriously at all. Consider the case of “default proceed” firearms sales. Sometimes, the FBI cannot immediately clear or rule out a would-be buyer going through a standard background check, and if the FBI can’t make a decision within three days, the sale can proceed by default. In many cases — 45,000 of them in 2000 — the government decides that the sale should have been prohibited, in which case the ATF is responsible for recovering the gun. In practice, that almost never happens: In the study of the 2000 data (the most recent available), the ATF pursued recovery of only one in nine improperly sold firearms.
This is of a piece with the priorities exemplified by the federal prosecutor’s office responsible for Chicago, which has the opportunity to prosecute hundreds of straw-buyer cases every year but as a general rule — and as a matter of policy — refuses to do so. Why? Because that’s a lot of work, and no ambitious prosecutor is going to make a name for himself locking up the kid brothers and girlfriends of Chicago gang members, just as nobody at ATF is going to get a promotion for doing rote work, even if it’s the agency’s job to do it.
We will endure endless sanctimonious speeches about what happened in Orlando, and the Obama administration will swear to us that it is doing everything it can. That is a lie. It isn’t doing everything it can — not by a long shot — and neither are the law-enforcement agencies in our cities and states.
The Islamists aren’t crazy. They understand and exploit our weaknesses, which include the inevitable vulnerabilities of an open, liberal, and democratic society. They know what they want, and they pursue those ends with the tools they have at their disposal. We cannot say as much about those we entrust with protecting us from them.
Case in point: FBI Director James Comey, the supposed voice of independent integrity overseeing the investigation of Hillary’s email “indiscretions”, has no trouble covering for his Inspector Clouseau clones who blew the call on Mateen:
“…In May of 2013, he became an interest of the FBI while working as a contract security guard for a local courthouse. He made inflammatory remarks that alerted his co-workers, including claims of family ties to al-Qaeda—and said he was a member of the Lebanese Hezbollah terrorist organization. An 11-month investigation followed that ended with no conclusive results.
In 2014, the killer appeared on the FBI’s radar again while investigating Abu-Salha. He allegedly attended the same mosque as Abu-Salha and allegedly was watching videos of former al-Qaeda recruiter Anwar al-Awlaki, who we killed in a drone strike in 2011. Again, nothing conclusive was found to warrant further inquiry into the killer, there were no connections between the two men, and the focus was re-focused onto the Abu-Salha.
Comey said that during the first investigation into Mateen, he said, “He hoped that law enforcement would raid his apartment and assault his wife and child so that he could martyr himself.” Mateen later said such inflammatory remarks were said in anger, and thought that his co-workers were discriminating against him due to his Muslim faith.
The FBI director said the federal law enforcement agency will look hard at our own work to see if there was anything we could’ve done differently. At this time, Comey says he doesn’t think there was anything the FBI could have done differently in the wake of this shooting.
“Our work is very challenging, we’re looking for needles in a nation wide hay stack,” he said. Comey added that the FBI would be transparent with new findings going forward. He closed by saying that he knows this attack is upsetting to all of America. He hopes that fellow Americans won’t let fear become a disabling factor in their lives…”
Except in this case, James, it appears your boys stepped directly on the needle…with their bare feet! But no worries; he’ll ensure Hillary answers for her crimes!
As reader Bill Meisen so insightfully noted, with all that’s been uncovered in the last 48 hours, with the FBI, by their own admission, having interviewed Mateen thrice in the last three years without either detaining or continuing to surveil him…not to mention passing him on his criminal background check when he purchased his weapons…we’re to believe the federal government is capable of vetting radical Islamists posing as peaceful Muslim refugees?!? Yeah…but only when they start bunking them with the Obamas and Comeys!
To borrow a phrase from Sergeant Al Powell:
Which brings us two related items from Jim Geraghty: First, a summary of…
When the Unforeseen Doesn’t Seem So Unforeseen
“Like Sergeant Shultz, “I See Nothiiinng!!!”
|
The gunman, who was killed in a shootout with police about 5 a.m., was identified by the FBI as Omar Mateen of St. Lucie County. The agency interviewed Mateen, 29, three times in 2013 and 2014 for expressing ties to terrorist organizations and contacting a suicide bomber, but they determined he wasn’t a threat.
I keep hearing from experts who insist three interviews by the FBI in connection to Islamist terrorism don’t prove any connection to terrorism or any potential threat. But to the average American, who’s never been interviewed by the FBI ever for anything, three interviews sounds like a lot. How many times can you just coincidentally happen know a suicide bomber, or just happen to be overheard expressing ties to terrorist organizations?
The ex-wife of the slain Orlando nightclub shooter described him late Sunday as a mentally and emotionally unstable — and possibly bipolar — spouse who physically abused her during their brief marriage.
Speaking to reporters from her home in Boulder, Colo., Sitora Yusufiy said the couple were together just four months before she fled their Florida home and filed for divorce. She described Mateen as “very short-tempered” and said he would often get into arguments with his parents. “But because, I guess, I was the only one in his life, most of the violence was towards me at that time.”
He soon “started abusing me physically, very often, and not allowing me to speak to my family, keeping me hostage from them,” she said.
Two Florida corporations created by [the shooter’s father] Seddique Mateen, the Provisional Government of Afghanistan Corp. and The Durand Jirga Inc., are related to that border dispute. And Seddique Mateen announced his candidacy for president of Afghanistan in 2015, one of several YouTube videos posted by Mateen related to the issue.
A Washington Post translation of one video has the elder Mateen praising the Taliban: “Our brothers in Waziristan, our warrior brothers in (the) Taliban movement and national Afghan Taliban are rising up,” he said.
A former co-worker of Omar Mateen said Sunday that the man identified as the mass shooter in the Orlando nightclub massacre often used slurs against African Americans, gay people and women.
Daniel Gilroy, 44, worked with Mateen for about a year as a security guard at PGA Village South in Port St. Lucie, Fla. “I complained multiple times that he was dangerous, that he didn’t like blacks, women, lesbians and Jews,” Gilroy told The Times on Sunday.
Mateen threatened violence in front of him, Gilroy said. Once when Mateen saw an African American man driving past, he said he wished he could kill all black people, using a racial slur, Gilroy recalled. “You meet bigots,” Gilroy said, “But he was above and beyond. He was always angry, sweating, just angry at the world.”
Gilroy, a former Fort Pierce police officer, described Mateen as “unhinged and unstable.” Gilroy said he quit his security job after Mateen began harassing him, sending as many as 20 or 30 text messages a day and more than a dozen phone messages. Gilroy said his employer, G4S, did not intervene.
“I saw this coming,” he said.
Oh!
|
Second, in a follow-up to Obama’s prevaricating plea for America to adopt his Islamofascist, anti-Constitutional values, Geraghty correctly asserts…
No, We Don’t Need to Look at Ourselves or Demonstrate Our Values
|
The “we need to look at ourselves” comments throughout social media on Sunday were insufferable. Did you go and kill 50 people in a nightclub? No? Then you’re cool.
Why are so many of us hell-bent to steer responsibility away from the person who did something abominable and direct it towards our political foes?
“We all need to look at what we could have done to prevent this.” No, we don’t! The odds are good there’s nothing you personally could have done. You probably never even met the guy.
President Obama, yesterday:
In the coming hours and days, we’ll learn about the victims of this tragedy. Their names. Their faces. Who they were. The joy that they brought to families and to friends, and the difference that they made in this world. Say a prayer for them and say a prayer for their families — that God give them the strength to bear the unbearable. And that He give us all the strength to be there for them, and the strength and courage to change. We need to demonstrate that we are defined more — as a country — by the way they lived their lives than by the hate of the man who took them from us.
Wait. We need to demonstrate we’re not defined by the hate of a man who pledged loyalty to ISIS? Americans do that every day from the moment they wake up to the moment they fall asleep at night. Some Islamist bastard goes on a killing spree, and suddenly Americans need to prove they have the right values? What the HELL?!?
John Podhoretz:
So determined is the president to avoid the subject of Islamist, ISIS-inspired or ISIS-directed terrorism that he concluded his remarks with an astonishing insistence that “we need the strength and courage to change” our attitudes toward the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community.
That’s just disgusting. There’s no other word for it.
America’s national attitude toward LGBT people didn’t shoot up the Pulse nightclub. This country’s national attitude has undergone a sea-change in the past 20 years, by the way, in case the president hasn’t noticed.
An Islamist terrorist waging war against the United States killed and injured 103 people on our soil. We Americans do not bear collective responsibility for this attack. Quite the opposite…
To suggest we must look inward to explain this is not only unseemly but practically an act of conscious misdirection on the president’ s part to direct out attention away from Omar Mateen’s phone call.
|
…shocked to learn The Dear Misleader would attempt to divert attention from the Sure-as-Hell-“IS” in “ISlamic” terror around the globe!
Meanwhile, the WSJ‘s Bret Stephens identifies the ultimate reality of the problem’s source in three short sentences:
Barack Obama discovers too late that he cannot order the tide of war to recede.
“In the spring of 2013 Barack Obama delivered the defining speech of his presidency on the subject of terrorism. Its premise was wrong, as was its thesis, as were its predictions and recommendations. We are now paying the price for this cascade of folly…”
Which makes it only appropriate we use these three memes, the first two forwarded by Balls Cotton, to sum up our thoughts on Islam and The Dear Misleader’s unremitting, unforgivable defense of the indefensible:
And his “inevitable” successor is every bit as ambiguous:
On The Lighter Side…
Then there’s this totally legitimate question from John Berry:
Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with this little bit of pointed humor from James Taranto:
Good Thing the Nominee Is a Hack, Er…
“Russian government hackers penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee and gained access to the entire database of opposition research on GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, according to committee officials and security experts who responded to the breach,” the Washington Post reports:
The intruders so thoroughly compromised the DNC’s system that they also were able to read all email and chat traffic, said DNC officials and the security experts.
Fortunately, the DNC’s inevitable presidential nominee is a computer whiz who has a reset button.
Magoo
Loading ...
You must be logged in to post a comment.