Negotiating with the Taliban, Again

by A.J. Caschetta
The Washington Examiner
June 14, 2016

http://www.meforum.org/

President Barack Obama addresses troops during a surprise visit to Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul, in Afghanistan, May 25, 2014. (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images) Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Barack Obama ran for president promising to end the "bad" war of choice in Iraq and concentrate on the "good" war of necessity in Afghanistan. True to his word, he did everything possible to remove U.S. forces from Iraq, with calamitous results.

But his approach to Afghanistan has been far less focused, vacillating between surge and withdrawal, and imposing absurdly restrictive rules of engagement on an already hamstrung military while waging an effective drone campaign to kill individuals.

Now in its final months the administration seems as perplexed as ever about how to deal with an ascendant Taliban and still surprised that the latter doesn't want to be a "peace partner." Yet in a recent speech at the Oxford Union, John Kerry cited "the efforts in Afghanistan" as one of "the proudest achievements of the Obama administration." This speech, in which our haughty secretary of state pontificated on "the art of diplomacy," coincided with news of the latest attempts to persuade the Taliban to enter a "peace process." It might also be the harbinger of another bad Obama deal.

Confusion has always prevailed in Obama's Afghanistan policy, starting with a watered-down version of the "surge" Gen. Stanley McChrystal requested when given the job of running the Afghanistan operations. Cracks in the policy appeared when Vice President Biden said that "the Taliban, per se, is not our enemy" in 2011. After McChrystal told a reporter from Rolling Stone what he thought of Biden's military wisdom, the president fired him. In 2013 the administration launched a new program of negotiations with the Taliban, and in 2014 those negotiations led to the Bowe Bergdahl trade. The years since have seen an increase in the already-steady flow of Taliban prisoners released from Guantanamo Bay returning to the jihadist battlefields.

So here we are again with another series of negotiations, as announced in the Wall Street Journal on May 23: "Secret Plan Pays Off Taliban." The story describes covert U.S. assistance to a "favored Taliban group" in its struggle against a "rival Taliban group." The favored group is variously described as a "breakaway Taliban faction" and a "Taliban splinter group." Its forces are commanded by Nangialai Khan, and Mullah Rasool is its leader.

Trying to leverage one Taliban faction against another is a fine idea, bringing to mind Henry Kissinger's comment on the Iran-Iraq war ("It's a pity both sides can't lose"). But this president has a special talent for misjudging foreign leaders and a history of overinvesting in the good faith of sworn enemies in his gullible quest for "moderates" among Islamists. He has not learned that there is no "good" Taliban, no moderate Taliban, no reasonable Taliban. He does not understand that the entire organization, every branch and splinter group right down to the miserable trunk, is the antithesis of goodness, moderation, and reason. Only those with a history of fighting the Taliban, or who have explicitly renounced the Taliban, should be eligible for consideration as genuine "peace partners" in Afghanistan.

Another thing Obama doesn't understand is that the term "Taliban" (like the term "PLO") has become little more than an umbrella, denoting a loose confederacy between many groups. In addition to the original 1994 Kandahar founders (now living semi-openly in Quetta, Pakistan) it also includes the Haqqani network, Tehrek-e-Taliban, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-e-Islami, and many others, all of them enemies. "Negotiating with the Taliban" does not mean the same thing today that it meant prior to 9/11. Navigating through the various factional, regional and tribal iterations of "Taliban" is an incredibly complicated task, one for which this administration has shown no aptitude. Obama's plan to team up with one faction of the Taliban to defeat another should be seen as analogous to FDR hatching a scheme to team up with the Nazis to defeat Imperial Japan.

Nevertheless, ever wary of its dubious legacy, the Obama administration is seeking raw material for Ben Rhodes to run through the echo chamber. A "Taliban peace agreement" will provide the opportunity to convert another real-life failure into the verisimilitude of success.

The president would do well to recall the fable, often attributed to Aesop, in which a deadly scorpion hitches a ride across a river on the back of a frog, promising not to sting him. When the inevitable sting comes, he tells his incredulous dying victim that he's a scorpion and scorpions sting.

Inviting the Taliban to negotiate is like trusting a scorpion not to sting.

The Taliban in fact murders those with whom it negotiates. It kidnaps and kills aid workers from around the world and shoots schoolgirls in the face. With perhaps the world's purest record of oppression, the Taliban is a destroyer of culture that pollutes the earth with its very existence.

Obama's response? "Let's make a deal."

A.J. Caschetta is a Shillman-Ginsburg fellow at the Middle East Forum and a senior lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

The Media's Apologetic Coverage of Islamic Terror

by Tarek Fatah
The Toronto Sun
June 14, 2016

http://www.meforum.org/

Western media have fawned over Muhammad Musri, president of the Islamic Society of Central Florida, and others seeking to shift blame for the mass murder away from radical Islamism.

In the wake of the Islamic terrorist attack on a Florida gay nightclub, the media's coverage has been almost apologetic. To go by the coverage, it's as if an Islamist jihadi didn't just massacre 49 Americans, and the West bombed Mecca instead.

Despite the apologetic tone of the media, the words of a spokesman for the Florida mosque attended by ISIS-inspired jihadist Omar Mateen, were inadvertently insightful. This mosque wasn't only frequented by Mateen. Another congregant blew himself up in Syria while serving ISIS.

Asked by Erin Burnett on CNN what was being preached at this mosque that would motivate two young men in the congregation to become ISIS jihadi terrorists, its spokesman was succinct: "It's like any other mosque, it's simple."

With those few words, this spokesman implicitly acknowledged what critics of North America's mosque establishment have been saying for 15 years. That is, many of them are incubators of hate and jihad.

The Orlando media circus started early Sunday morning within hours of the massacre. At the first press briefing, police presented one individual as a spokesman of Orlando's "faith communities." He wasn't a Christian, like many of the victims, but a Muslim.

In addressing reporters, Muhammad Musri, president of the Islamic Society of Central Florida, appeared to shift blame for the mass murder away from the ISIS-inspired jihadi who committed it, towards a concern about mass shootings in general and, presumably, support for gun control.

As he put it: "I would ... like to caution many in the media in rushing to judgment and sensationalizing the story. Because we do not want to shift the story from what it is ... We hope this will be one of the last mass shootings our country has been going through. As a nation, we have to look at the issue of mass shootings and we should do something to stop the mass shootings that are happening all the time."

CNN anchor Don Lemon said on-air that "the Muslim community and the gay community are very close."

Then there was CNN's Don Lemon, an openly gay television anchor who, while talking to a representative of the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said, "As a matter of fact the Muslim community and the gay community are very close."

Taking the cue, Rasha Mubarak of CAIR responded: "Absolutely. These [Gays] are part of my family. We have been working together ... My friends in the LGBTQ community told me "we are not going to let this divide us; the hugs were tighter ..."

I almost choked, considering that while this may be Mubarak's point of view, others affiliated with CAIR have complained in the past about Muslims not being able to freely express their opposition to same sex marriage and homosexuality.

As the Kurdish activist Ejder Memis commented from Australia on attempts to minimize the hatred jihadists have for homosexuals: "The LGBT community is being sold out to Islamofascists right before our eyes."

On the other side of the globe, the Chilean Palestinian broadcaster Lalo Dagach said it best: "We now live in a world where criticism of Muslim Homophobia is [considered] Islamophobia."

On Monday evening, Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne illustrated Dagach's point. She told hundreds mourning the dead of Florida: "Homophobia cannot be fought with Islamophobia."

The question left unanswered is this: Should we fear Islamophobia or Islamofascism?

In the meantime, a jihadist newspaper in Pakistan carried this as its front-page headline: "Afghan youth roasts 50 Americans."

Tarek Fatah, a founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress and columnist at theToronto Sun, is a Robert J. and Abby B. Levine Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

Why Won’t Obama Say ‘Radical Islam’?

Obama can’t bring himself to speak the phrase, but not for the reason Trump suggests.

By Ben Shapiro — June 15, 2016

http://www.nationalreview.com/

President Barack Obama pauses while speaking to reporters in the Brady Press Briefing Room in Washington, D.C. on June 12. (PETE MAROVICH/POOL/SIPA USA)

BY COLIN DAILEDA16 HOURS AGO

Early Sunday morning, a radical Muslim born in the United States murdered at least 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando. President Obama, as he always does, downplayed the terrorist attacker’s connections to Islam, instead vaguely ascribing the attacker’s radicalization to “various extremist information.”

The next day, Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, went on Fox and Friends to discuss President Obama’s statement. And there, as he always does, Trump stuck his foot all the way down his throat. “Look,” said Trump, “we’re led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he’s got something else in mind.” He could have left it there — but once Trump has his teeth in something, he must continue chomping:

And the something else in mind — you know, people can’t believe it. People cannot, they cannot believe that President Obama is acting the way he acts and can’t even mention the words “radical Islamic terrorism.” There’s something going on. It’s inconceivable. There’s something going on. He doesn’t get it or he gets it better than anybody understands — it’s one or the other and either one is unacceptable.

The implication, given Trump’s context, is that Obama is a covert Muslim.

This would not be the first time Trump has made such a suggestion. In 2011, as Trump called for Obama’s birth certificate (he said Obama was probably ineligible and born in Kenya), he stated, “Maybe [his birth certificate] says he is a Muslim.” In 2012, Trump tweeted, “Does Madonna know something we all don’t about Barack? At a concert she said, ‘we have a black Muslim in the White House.’” A significant number of Republicans agree with this theory by polling data.

On Tuesday, President Obama retaliated. Obama, who appeared visibly upset — far more upset than he was in his original statement discussing the murder of 49 Americans by a radical Muslim terrorist in Orlando — went after Trump directly. He explained that there was no need to use the term “radical Islam” — that would simply make things worse:

That’s the key, they tell us. We can’t get ISIL unless we call them “radical Islamists”’ What exactly would using this label accomplish? What exactly would it change? Would it make ISIL less committed to trying to kill Americans? Would it bring in more allies? Is there a military strategy that is served by this? The answer is, none of the above. Calling a threat by a different name does not make it go away. This is a political distraction. There is no magic to the phrase “radical Islam.” It’s a political talking point; it’s not a strategy.

Ironically, this argument — “Would not terrorism by any other name smell as sweet?” — is itself a political talking point, not a strategy. Nevertheless, Obama’s not reticent to talk about radical Islam because he’s Muslim. He’s reticent to talk about radical Islam because he’s a leftist.

Obama believes, as doctrinaire leftists do, that human beings do not derive meaning from ancient religious superstitions and deep-seated ideas about how the universe ought to operate. Given relief from material want and prevention of emotional distress, Obama believes, all human beings would get along just fine — and would then be free to cultivate themselves as they see fit.

Karl Marx wrote that “life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing, and many other things.” In this view, unhappiness derives from scarcity in these resources or from social relationships created to guarantee these primary needs for some at the expense of others. Religion, meanwhile, exists only to misdirect such unhappiness toward the cosmic rather than toward one’s fellow man. Hence Marx’s belief that abolition of religion is “the demand for their real happiness.”

If that’s the case, then there’s no reason for Obama to mention “radical Islam.” It’s an opiate of the masses, just like Christianity (“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years . . . it’s not surprising then they get bitter”). To get beyond the threat of “radical Islam” requires a real strategy, in the Obama view — a strategy of material redistribution, of power equalization. Take away the guns, centralize all the power in Washington, D.C., and then turn human beings into materialist widgets in thrall to that centralized power — and you’ll have peace. Don’t, and you’ll have chaos. That’s why Obama attributes terrorism in Jakarta to shootings in Chicago: “I have seen the desperation and disorder of the powerless . . . how narrow the path is for them between humiliation and untrammeled fury; how easily they slip into violence and despair.”

Of course, this is all wrong. Terrorists in Indonesia aren’t just angry because they’re poor. Neither are kids in Chicago. Poverty and violence do not correlate. But poverty of ideology and violence do correlate.

Trump understands that, which is why he blames radical Islam for the Orlando terrorist attack. But meanwhile, Trump is blind to the fact that American leftism is a religion all its own. 

Ironically, Trump — supposed scourge of the Left — believes that leftism can’t be the rationale for Obama’s soft-on-radical-Islam perspective. He believes, instead, that Obama must be a secret Muslim. That’s because he fundamentally misunderstands modern leftism, and the alliance between the modern Left and radical Islam to tear down the gates of Western civilization to make way for the new. Once the gates are down, of course, the Left will find out soon enough that radical Muslims do exist, and that they can’t be bought off with a few material concessions — the Europeans are finding that out daily.

But until then, Obama will call for gun control. He’ll suggest that the real problem is hurt feelings and lack of opportunity. And Trump, puzzled as ever, will continue to misdiagnose leftism as radical Islam.

— Ben Shapiro is the editor-in-chief of the DailyWire.com.

OBAMA’S QUESTION: WHAT’S IN A NAME?

David Horowitz

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

June 15, 2016

President Barack Obama delivers an address on the nightclub attack in Orlando early Sunday.

Reprinted from Breitbart.com.

Obama is angry. Not at the terrorists, mind you, but at Donald Trump and those who criticize him for calling our enemies “extremists” (like the Sandy Hook and Aurora shooters) instead of “radical Islamic terrorists,” which is what they are. “Radical Islamic terrorist” is not a strategy, says the president. But it is the necessary step in creating one. Obama wants to treat our enemies as individual criminals, lone wolves and nut jobs. Since he is the commander-in-chief he defines the policy parameters under which our military and intelligence agencies operate. The Orlando murderer was interviewed by the FBI, which discovered his associations with radical Islamic terrorists, and jihadist sympathies, but dropped him off the radar, because the FBI was looking for crimes which he hadn’t (yet) committed. If, on the other hand, the FBI had been looking for soldiers in a war conducted by radical Islamic terrorists, they would have kept him on the radar and extended their investigation until maybe they would have saved 50 innocent lives.

The Achilles heel of democratic societies is also their foundation – the principle of tolerance we extend even to those who want to destroy us.[1] It is therefore also a central strategy of the Islamists to take advantage of this vulnerability. Using defamatory expressions like “bigotry” and “Islamophobia,” they and what Lenin called the “useful idiots” on our side stigmatize those who attempt to draw attention to the political nature of their movement, its imperialistic ambitions, its terroristic methods, its oppression of women, its hostility to other creeds, and its virulent Jew-hatred. To point out these elements of Islamism is to persecute Muslims. By casting themselves as victims, the Islamists have succeeded to a remarkable extent in censoring and marginalizing their critics. Until Donald Trump came along.

But until now, the Islamists’ success has been impressive. It is most striking in the self-censorship that agencies of the American government have imposed on themselves, and on the institutional guides for America’s first responders to the threat they pose. The 9/11 Commission Report on the Islamic attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001 referred to “Islam” 322 times, used the word “Muslim” 145 times, and “jihad” (holy war) 126 times. But even after those attacks, and even though Osama bin Laden had declared his mission to be a religious war against “the Jews and Crusaders,” the Bush administration designated its response merely as a “War on Terror” without any reference to Islam. This omission was designed to avoid offending Muslims who did not support the jihad or giving ammunition to Democrats who insisted on treating acts of Islamic terror as crimes by individual “extremists.” By using the neutered term “terror” to describe the Islamist threat, the administration obscured not only the religious nature of the war that had been declared on us, but the fact that the Islamists did not confine their tactics to military strikes and also pursued their goals through sophisticated political movements specifically designed to infiltrate societies they regarded as “infidel,” and subvert them.[2]

At the end of more than a decade of pressure from the left, the religious nature of the war had become practically invisible, even to American counter-terrorism organizations. In the words of a Rep. Louis Gohmert, a congressional critic of this self-censorship, “The current FBI counterterrorism lexicon, [which describes] the language they can use, does not include ‘jihad,’ does not include ‘Muslim,’ does not include ‘Islam.’ It includes ‘violent extremism’ many times, but it does not include ‘sharia’ [the Islamic law jihadists are seeking to impose globally]. It does not even include ‘Al-Qaeda,’ ‘Hezbollah,’ or ‘Hamas.’ Even the National Intelligence Strategy 2009 does not include references to ‘jihad,’ ‘Muslim,’ or ‘Islam.’”[3]

When the Obama took office in 2009, he instituted even more changes to shield not only the public but also the Department of Homeland Security and counter-intelligence agencies from the fact that the war against us was based on an ideology shared by millions (and probably hundreds of millions) of devout Muslims and sponsored by Islamic regimes (there are 10 Muslim countries where the punishment for homosexuality, for example, is death). Or from the fact that it was a war at all. Under Obama even the denatured term “War on Terror” was dropped from official pronouncements and replaced by a meaningless Orwellian subterfuge: “overseas contingency operations.” The Obama administration designated the largest post-9/11 attack on American soil, the 2009 massacre of 13 American soldiers by a jihadist screaming “Allahu Akbar,” as “workplace violence.” And to this day Obama has to be dragged kicking and screaming to the podium before he will recognize that a terrorist act has been committed, and even then he has to deny that it has anything whatsoever to do with Islam, and anybody who says it does is a bigot.

People wonder why terrorist attacks by Islamists have escalated on Obama’s watch globally, and finally come home. They need look no further than the ostrich-like denials by the commander-in-chief, or his swift pivots when talking about heinous Muslim acts against innocents to worrying about the persecution of those who share their faith.

Notes:

---

[1] Cf. Leszek Kolakowski, “The Self-Poisoning of the Open Society,” in Modernity On Endless Trial, 1990, pp.162-174

[2] Rep. Louie Gohmert, remarks to the David Horowitz Freedom Center, May 4, 2013; http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/congressman-louie-gohmert-the-islamist-enemy-within/;Robert Spencer, The Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam Is Subverting America Without Guns or Bombs, 2008; Andrew C. McCarthy, The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, 2010; cf. David Horowitz and Robert Spencer, “Islamophobia,” in this volume

[3] Rep. Louie Gohmert, op. cit.

 Tags: Islam, Jihad, Obama

Islam’s Jihad Against Homosexuals

The rise of modern Islamic extremism has worsened an institutionalized Muslim homophobia.

By Ayann Hirsi Ali

http://www.wsj.com/

June 13, 2016

Police officials investigate the back of the Pulse nightclub after a shooting involving multiple fatalities at the nightclub in Orlando, Fla., Sunday, June 12, 2016. Phelan M. Ebenhack AP

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article83370167.html#storylink=cpy

The Orlando massacre is a hideous reminder to Americans that homophobia is an integral part of Islamic extremism. That isn’t to say that some people of other faiths and ideologies aren’t hostile to members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, or LGBT, community. Nor is to say that Islamic extremists don’t target other minorities, in addition to engaging in wholly indiscriminate violence. But it is important to establish why a man like Omar Mateen could be motivated to murder 49 people in a gay nightclub, interrupting the slaughter, as law-enforcement officials reported, to dial 911, proclaim his support for Islamic State and then pray to Allah.

I offer an explanation in the form of four propositions.

1. Muslim homophobia is institutionalized. Islamic law as derived from scripture, and as evolved over several centuries, not only condemns but prescribes cruel and unusual punishments for homosexuality.

2. Many Muslim-majority countries have laws that criminalize and punish homosexuals in line with Islamic law.

3. It is thus not surprising that the attitudes of Muslims in Muslim-majority countries are homophobic and that many people from those countries take those attitudes with them when they migrate to the West.

4. The rise of modern Islamic extremism has worsened the intolerance toward homosexuality. Extremists don’t just commit violence against LGBT people. They also spread the prejudice globally by preaching that homosexuality is a disease and a crime.

RELATED ARTICLES

• Jihad in Orlando
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• Why Islam Needs a Reformation

Not all Muslims are homophobic. Many are gay or lesbian themselves. Some even have the courage to venture into the gender fluidity that the 21st century West has come to recognize. But these LGBT Muslims are running directly counter to their religion.

In his 2006 book “Crime and Punishment in Islamic Law,” the Dutch scholar Rudolph Peters notes that most schools of Islamic law proscribe homosexuality. They differ only on the mode of punishment. “The Malikites, the Shiites and some Shafi’ites and Hanbalites are of the opinion that the penalty is death, either by stoning (Malikites), the sword (some Shafi’ites and Hanbalites) or, at the discretion of the court, by killing the culprit in the usual manner with a sword, stoning him, throwing him from a (high) wall or burning him (Shiites).”

Under Shariah—Islamic law—those engaging in same-sex sexual acts can be sentenced to death in nearly a dozen countries or in large areas of them: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Sudan, the northern states of Nigeria, southern parts of Somalia, two provinces in Indonesia, Mauritania, Afghanistan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates. Death is also the penalty in the territories in northern Iraq and Syria controlled by ISIS.

Iran is notorious for hanging men accused of homosexual behavior. The Associated Press reports that since 2014 ISIS has executed at least 30 people in Syria and Iraq for being homosexual, including three men who were dropped from the top of a 100-foot building in Mosul in June 2015.

No fewer than 40 out of 57 Muslim-majority countries or territories have laws that criminalize homosexuality, prescribing punishments ranging from fines and short jail sentences to whippings and more than 10 years in prison or death.

These countries’ laws against homosexuality align with the attitudes of the overwhelming majority of their populations. In 2013 the Pew Research Center surveyedthe beliefs of Muslims in 36 countries with a significant Muslim population or majority, including asking about their views of homosexuality. In 33 out of the 36 countries, more than 75% of those surveyed answered that homosexuality was “morally wrong,” and in only three did more than 10% of those surveyed believe that homosexuality was “morally acceptable.”

In many Muslim-majority countries—including Afghanistan, where Omar Mateen’s parents came from—LGBT people face as much danger from their families or vigilantes as they do from the authorities.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Islamic extremists condemn homosexuality in the strongest possible terms. The Middle East Media Research Institute reported in 2006 that whenSheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, one of the world’s leading Sunni clerics and chairman of the European Council for Fatwa and Research, was asked how gay people should be punished, he replied: “Some say we should throw them from a high place, like God did with the people of Sodom. Some say we should burn them, and so on. There is disagreement. . . . The important thing is to treat this act as a crime.”

Such ideas travel. In 2009 Anjem Choudary, an infamous London imam and self-proclaimed “judge of the Shariah Court of the U.K.,” stated in a press conference that all homosexuals should be stoned to death. Here in the U.S., Muzammil Siddiqi, former president of the Islamic Society of North America, has written: “Homosexuality is a moral disorder. It is a moral disease, a sin and corruption . . . No person is born homosexual, just like no one is born a thief, a liar or murderer. People acquire these evil habits due to a lack of proper guidance and education.”

Farrokh Sekaleshfar, a Shiite cleric educated in London, declared of homosexuality in 2013: “Death is the sentence. We know there’s nothing to be embarrassed about this. Death is the sentence.” He was speaking at the Husseini Islamic Center outside Orlando. Yes, Orlando. He spoke there again in April.

These men express their hostility toward the LGBT community only verbally, but the Orlando attack was hardly the first manifestation in the U.S. of Islamist antigay violence. During a New Year’s Eve celebration in the first hours of 2014, Musab Masmari tried to set fire to a gay nightclub in Seattle; he is serving 10 years in prison on federal arson charges. Law-enforcement officials say that Ali Muhammad Brown, an ISIS supporter who is now in prison for armed robbery, also faces charges for terrorism and four murders, including the 2014 execution of two men in Seattle outside of a gay nightclub.

Following the horrific attack in Orlando, people as usual have been rushing to judgment. President Obama blames lax gun laws. Donald Trump blames immigration. Neither is right. There has been comparable carnage in countries with strict gun laws. The perpetrator in this case was born in the United States. This is not primarily about guns or immigration. It is about a deeply dangerous ideology that is infiltrating American society in the guise of religion. Homophobia comes in many forms. But none is more dangerous in our time than the Islamic version.

Ms. Hirsi Ali, a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, is the author of “Infidel” (Free Press, 2007) and “Heretic: The Case for a Muslim Reformation” (HarperCollins, 2015).

FINALLY: A REALISTIC PLAN FOR FIGHTING THE JIHAD AND PROTECTING AMERICANS

Courtesy of Donald Trump


Robert Spencer
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
June 14, 2016



Donald Trump in Manchester, New Hampshire (Reuters)

We’ve gotten so used to politically correct obfuscation about Islam being a religion of peace that preaches tolerance and non-violence that Donald Trump’s words in his address Monday were startling: “Many of the principles of radical Islam are incompatible with Western values and institutions. Remember this, radical Islam is anti-woman, anti-gay and anti-American. I refuse to allow America to become a place where gay people, Christian people, Jewish people are targets of persecution and intimation by radical Islamic preachers of hate and violence.”

Trump continued: “This is not just a national security issue. It’s a quality of life issue. If we want to protect the quality of life for all Americans — women and children, gay and straight, Jews and Christians and all people then we need to tell the truth about radical Islam and we need to do it now.”

One may quibble about whether jihad violence and Sharia oppression in Islam are really “radical,” but the fact is that Donald Trump has become the first nominee of either party since 9/11 to reject the usual nonsense about how jihadis believe in and preach a twisted, hijacked version of the religion of peace. Even more importantly, Trump is now the first presidential candidate since maybe John Quincy Adams to recognize that the problem posed by Islam is not just restricted to the specter of violent jihad attacks, but is, given Sharia oppression of women, gays, and non-Muslims, very much, as Trump put it, a “quality of life issue.”

Trump declared his determination to prevent more jihad attacks such as the one in Orlando Saturday night above all by reiterating his proposal temporarily to “suspend immigration from areas of the world where there’s a proven history of terrorism against the United States, Europe or our allies until we fully understand how to end these threats.” CNN huffed: “Critics of Trump's policies, however, have pointed out that the perpetrator of the Orlando massacre was born in the U.S.” 

Those critics are not being honest. What Trump actually said was that the Orlando jihad mass murderer was born “of Afghan parents, who immigrated to the United States.” He noted, quite correctly, that “the bottom line is that the only reason the killer was in America in the first place, was because we allowed his family to come here,” and pointed out, quite rightly, that “we have a dysfunctional immigration system, which does not permit us to know who we let into our country, and it does not permit us to protect our citizens properly….We’re importing radical Islamic terrorism into the West through a failed immigration system and through an intelligence community held back by our president. Even our own FBI director has admitted that we cannot effectively check the backgrounds of people we’re letting into America. ”

Can any truthful person seriously dispute that? Tashfeen Malik, who, along with her husband Syed Rizwan Farook murdered fourteen people at a Christmas party in San Bernardino last December 2, had passed five separate background checks from five different U.S. government agencies. If the U.S. did not have a “dysfunctional immigration system,” she would never have been in the country in the first place. And neither would her husband, about whom Trump noted that he was “the child of immigrants from Pakistan and he brought his wife, the other terrorist from Saudi Arabia through another one of our easily exploited visa programs.”

Trump skewered Hillary Clinton for having “repeatedly refused to even say the words radical Islam until I challenged her yesterday.” He quoted her fatuous words: “Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people, and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism” and opined “she’s in total denial, and her continuing reluctance to ever name the enemy broadcasts weakness across the entire world — true weakness.” Clinton wants, he said, “to take away American’s guns and then admit the very people who want to slaughter us. Let them come into the country, we don’t have guns. Let them come in, let them have all the fun they want….The bottom line is that Hillary supports policies that bring the threat of radical Islam into American and allow it to grow overseas, and it is growing.”

Trump’s point was sound. In what way was it not? Combining unrestricted immigration and a massive influx of Muslim migrants, among whom the Islamic State has promised to embed jihadis, with a disarmed American population is simply an invitation to jihad massacres on a frequency never hitherto imagined. Could there be an Orlando-style attack every day? Why not, in the America of the near future that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are busy preparing for us? 

Trump declared: “The burden is on Hillary Clinton to tell us why she believes immigration from these dangerous countries should be increased without any effective system to really to screen.” Again, his point his sound: all those, including Hillary, who are busy excoriating Trump for the “racism” and “bigotry” of his immigration proposal have not bothered to suggest any alternative plan for preventing jihadis from entering the country. The bottom line, to borrow one of Trump’s pet phrases, is that Hillary and the rest of the political and media elites would rather see Americans subjected to jihad mass murder on a huge scale than do anything that is politically incorrect.

Another foray into political incorrectness in Trump’s speech was his insistence that the Muslim community in the U.S. has “to work with us. They have to cooperate with law enforcement and turn in the people who they know are bad. They know it. And they have to do it, and they have to do it forthwith….The Muslims have to work with us. They have to work with us. They know what’s going on. They know that he was bad. They knew the people in San Bernardino were bad. But you know what? They didn’t turn them in. And you know what? We had death, and destruction.”

The Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was furious. CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooperclaimed that “law enforcement authorities have repeatedly stated that they have tremendous cooperation from the Muslim community.” CAIR’s hypocrisy is astounding, as it has more than once advised Muslims not to cooperate with law enforcement. In January 2011, its San Francisco chapter featured on its website a poster that read, “Build A Wall of Resistance / Don’t Talk to the FBI.” In November 2014, CAIR-Florida’s “14th Annual Banquet Rooted in Faith” in Tampa distributed pamphlets entitled “What to do if the FBI comes for you” and featuring a graphic of a person holding a finger to his lips in the “shhh” signal. 

Another CAIR pamphlet, entitled “Know Your Rights: Defending Rights, Defeating Intolerance” featured a graphic of the Statue of Liberty likewise making the “shhh” symbol. Cyrus McGoldrick, a former official of Hamas-linked CAIR’s New York chapter, even threatened informants, tweeting with brutal succinctness: “Snitches get stitches.” Zahra Billoo of CAIR-San Francisco regularly tweets that Muslims have no obligation to talk to the FBI, and should contact Hamas-linked CAIR if the FBI asks to talk to them.

This is the group criticizing Trump for noting that Muslim communities have not been any significant help in rooting out jihadis from among them?

Trump’s most revolutionary proposal was for an overhaul of our entire foreign policy establishment and the assumptions upon which it rests – assumptions that have led us into numerous blind alleys and failed initiatives. He said: “The decision to overthrow the regime in Libya, then pushing for the overthrow of the regime in Syria, among other things, without plans for the day after, have created space for ISIS to expand and grow like nobody has ever seen before. These actions, along with our disastrous Iran deal, have also reduced our ability to work in partnership with our Muslim allies in the region. That is why our new goal must be to defeat Islamic terrorism not nation building. No more nation building. It’s never going to work.”

Indeed. It didn’t work in Iraq. It hasn’t worked in Afghanistan. We have poured billions into Pakistan since 9/11 to help them fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and the Pakistani government has funneled a good deal of that money to al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Trump said it: “And by the way we’ve spent almost $5 trillion over the years on trying to nation build in the Middle East and it has been complete and total disaster.” Yet despite the fact that its policies have failed again and again and again, the foreign policy establishment keeps reappointing and promoting those responsible for those failures, allowing them to make more mistakes in ever-larger arenas. But no candidate has ever challenged that establishment – until now.

Trump offered one more common sense that no establishment politician has thought to or dared to make: he suggested that there needs to be a reconfiguration of our alliances, which are still based on the Cold War. “NATO,” he said, “needs to change its focus and stop terrorism....America must unite the whole civilized world in the fight against Islamic terrorism.” 

Indeed. The world is on fire courtesy of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. If America votes in November for more of the same, we will soon be engulfed in those flames as well. On Monday, Donald Trump outlined an unprecedentedly realistic plan for putting out the fire. 

 Tags: Donald Trump, Florida, Jihad, shooting

Take Off the Gloves

We’re all on ISIS’s kill list—what are we willing to do about it?

Matthew Hennessey

http://www.city-journal.org/

June 12, 2016

Medical personnel wait with stretchers outside Orlando Regional Medical Center

Fifteen years after 9/11, Islamic terror is losing its power to shock. Fourteen dead in San Bernardino at a community center. Fifty dead in Orlando at a nightclub. A 19-year-old shot dead at a traffic light in West Orange, New Jersey. Marines and sailors killed at a recruiting station in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The Boston Marathon. What’s next? A better question: what isn’tnext?

The numbness is taking hold. What once seemed as impossible and distant as a walk on the moon is taking on the air of inevitability: You and I—any of us, all of us—will wake up one day to find that it is our son, our daughter, our parents, or our neighbors who were blown away at a nightclub in the small hours, at a shopping mall at noon, on a bus in the center of town, in a stadium parking lot, or in their beds as they slept.

They are coming. ISIS publishes “kill lists” of Americans. We are all on it, every one of us.

No one yet knows whether the Orlando monster, Omar Mateen, was connected in a formal way to ISIS, al-Qaida, or any of the agents of global jihad. He may have been acting on his own. One thing’s for sure—he didn’t pull the idea of blowing away homosexuals out of his hat. Yet Mateen’s father told NBC that his son’s murder of 50 Americans at a gay nightclub had “nothing to do with religion.” It strains credulity. Most world religions have at one time or another expressed intolerance of homosexuality. Only one that I am aware of is currently putting people to death for the “crime” of being gay—and not just in ISIS-controlled areas.

You don’t have to be Bernard Lewis to know that Omar Mateen was motivated by his Islamic faith to kill gay Americans. It would be nice if we could speak openly about this. It would be even better if our major media outlets wouldn’t twist themselves into politically correct pretzels trying to avoid “speculation” about a motive. Sometimes a jihad is just a jihad.

According to reports, Mateen was a “known quantity” to the FBI. Did they do everything they could to stop him? One hopes. Further, one hopes that they weren’t hindered in their efforts by the anti-Islamophobia brigade that see bias and bigotry in seemingly every attempt to protect Americans from terror. The ACLU claims that surveillance programs like the NYPD’s now-disbanded Demographics Unit are “based on a false and unconstitutional premise: that Muslim religious belief and practices are a basis for law enforcement scrutiny.” The average citizen can be forgiven for thinking that the ACLU would be willing to sacrifice a couple dozen gay night clubbers if it meant neutering law enforcement’s ability to get inside the mosques and coffee bars where American Muslims congregate.

I have a different idea. I think it’s well past time that we took off the gloves. Let the FBI surveil the mosques. Let the NYPD surveil the mosques. Let these agencies do what needs to be done without fear of offending the ACLU, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or the self-loathing secular liberals whose first thought when they hear about attacks like this is, “Oh, no. This will help Trump.”

Matthew Hennessey is a City Journal associate editor. Twitter:@matthennessey.