"The inescapable truth is that Islamists and the Left are at war with us. Organized or not, both of those totalitarian ideologies openly and directly inspire and demand our subjugation, surrender or death in their unending quest for absolute power and control."

J.J. Sefton writes at Ace of Spades,

late yesterday a man in a van plowed into a group of people outside the notorious Finsbury Park mosque in London. One person is dead (although it's unclear if the victim was struck by the vehicle as he evidently had collapsed from a heart attack) and at least 10 are reported injured. The attacker reportedly said "I want to kill all Muslims" and "I did my bit" as he was led away by the bobbies. And now, I have to be extremely careful in my commentary for reasons that sadly are apparent to all of us. First, there is absolutely ZERO justification for this individual's actions. Violence is to be condemned, and its perpetrators, enablers and cheerleaders shunned in the strongest possible way. Now, the potential land mine; I was going to write that I understand why this incident happened, but even that can be interpreted as an approval. What I suppose is more accurate is to say that what happened was inevitable.

We are all human beings and someone is going to take it upon himself to "retaliate" against threats, perceived or real. If one looks at what has happened to England, virtually all of Europe and what may yet happen here, the only thing that is shocking is that this sort of incident took so long to occur. And yet, despite all we have been through, this is an isolated incident and solely the actions of one person. The inescapable truth is that Islamists and the Left are at war with us. Organized or not, both of those totalitarian ideologies openly and directly inspire and demand our subjugation, surrender or death in their unending quest for absolute power and control.

Unfortunately, the reaction from the Left and organized Islam to last night's incident will be to use this as proof positive that there is a war on the followers of Mohammed and their allies by racists, bigots, haters, nationalists, and the forces of darkness, etc. etc. Sure as night follows day, this will be used as a pretext to not only crack down on free speech with even more odious censorship, but will incite acts of retribution which, in a twisted Orwellian manner, will be covered up and/or excused by the usual suspects in the MFM and elsewhere. And in this country, watch this incident bury the actual Democrat-inspired terrorist attack last week while hit jobs and smears against Steve Scalise, Republicans and others continue. Ironic, in a sickening way, that they openly boast how Scalise had it coming, yet G-d forbid anyone were to use the word "karma" to describe what happened last night in London. Brace yourselves.

Read more here.

Alliances to fight radical Islam

Tom Tancredo writes in Breitbart,

One of Donald Trump’s first acts after being sworn in as President of the United States should be to invite Russian President Vladimir Putin to meet with him to discuss a broad, coordinated campaign against ISIS.

The United States and Britain joined with Stalin to defeat our common enemy, the Third Reich. Radical Islam poses as great a threat to the United States today as Adolph Hitler did in 1941. Indeed, Hitler had not yet attacked the United States in 1941, while radical Islam has done so many times.

...Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt met with Stalin twice in World War II, at Potsdam and Yalta, because they had a common enemy. Nixon went to China to meet Mao Tse-tung to form form an alliance against a greater threat, the Soviet Union. Trump can and should meet with Putin to form an alliance against our common enemy, radical Islam.

...Yes, the alliance with Russia will be opposed by the Democrats and the foreign policy establishment that saw nothing strange about Obama making his first foreign trip to Cairo to praise the Muslim Brotherhood. But an alliance to actually defeat radical Islam rather than coddle it may well strike most Americans as a sensible departure from Obama’s failed “legacy.”

Read more here.

"I will be your greatest champion."

From Trump's speech yesterday:

In the 20th Century, the United States defeated Fascism, Nazism, and Communism. Now, a different threat challenges our world: Radical Islamic Terrorism....

We cannot let this evil continue. Nor can we let the hateful ideology of Radical Islam – its oppression of women, gays, children, and nonbelievers – be allowed to reside or spread within our own countries.

We will defeat Radical Islamic Terrorism.... Anyone who cannot condemn the hatred, oppression and violence of Radical Islam lacks the moral clarity to serve as our President....

In winning the Cold War, President Ronald Reagan repeatedly touted the superiority of freedom over communism, and called the USSR the Evil Empire. Yet, when President Obama delivered his address in Cairo [in 2009], no such moral courage could be found. Instead of condemning the oppression of women and gays in many Muslim nations, and the systematic violations of human rights, or the financing of global terrorism, President Obama tried to draw an equivalency between our human rights record and theirs....

Military, cyber and financial warfare will all be essential in dismantling Islamic terrorism. But we must use ideological warfare as well. Just as we won the Cold War, in part, by exposing the evils of communism and the virtues of free markets, so too must we take on the ideology of Radical Islam.

While my opponent accepted millions of dollars in Foundation donations from countries where being gay is an offense punishable by prison or death, my Administration will speak out against the oppression of women, gays and people of different faith. Our Administration will be a friend to all moderate Muslim reformers in the Middle East, and will amplify their voices.

This includes speaking out against the horrible practice of honor killings, where women are murdered by their relatives for dressing, marrying or acting in a way that violates fundamentalist teachings. Over 1,000 Pakistani girls are estimated to be the victims of honor killings by their relatives each year. Recently, a prominent Pakistani social media star was strangled to death by her brother on the charge of dishonoring the family. In his confession, the brother took pride in the murder and said: “Girls are born to stay home and follow traditions.”

Shockingly, this is a practice that has reached our own shores. One such case involves an Iraqi immigrant who was sentenced to 34 years in jail for running over his own daughter claiming she had become “too Westernized.” To defeat Islamic terrorism, we must also speak out forcefully against a hateful ideology that provides the breeding ground for violence and terrorism to grow....

A Trump Administration will establish a clear principle that will govern all decisions pertaining to immigration: we should only admit into this country those who share our values and respect our people. In the Cold War, we had an ideological screening test. The time is overdue to develop a new screening test for the threats we face today.

In addition to screening out all members or sympathizers of terrorist groups, we must also screen out any who have hostile attitudes towards our country or its principles – or who believe that Sharia law should supplant American law. Those who do not believe in our Constitution, or who support bigotry and hatred, will not be admitted for immigration into the country. Only those who we expect to flourish in our country – and to embrace a tolerant American society – should be issued visas....

The Ft. Hood Shooter... proclaimed that “we love death more than you love life!” These warnings signs were ignored because political correctness has replaced common sense in our society.

That is why one of my first acts as President will be to establish a Commission on Radical Islam – which will include reformist voices in the Muslim community who will hopefully work with us. We want to build bridges and erase divisions. The goal of the commission will be to identify and explain to the American public the core convictions and beliefs of Radical Islam, to identify the warning signs of radicalization, and to expose the networks in our society that support radicalization. This commission will be used to develop new protocols for local police officers, federal investigators, and immigration screeners....

But just like we couldn’t defeat communism without acknowledging that communism exists – or explaining its evils – we can’t defeat Radical Islamic Terrorism unless we do the same.

This also means we have to promote the exceptional virtues of our own way of life – and expecting that newcomers to our society do the same. Pride in our institutions, our history and our values should be taught by parents and teachers, and impressed upon all who join our society. Assimilation is not an act of hostility, but an expression of compassion. Our system of government, and our American culture, is the best in the world and will produce the best outcomes for all who adopt it.
This approach will not only make us safer, but bring us closer together as a country.

Renewing this spirit of Americanism will help heal the divisions in our country. It will do so by emphasizing what we have in common – not what pulls us apart.

This is my pledge to the American people: as your President I will be your greatest champion. I will fight to ensure that every American is treated equally, protected equally, and honored equally. We will reject bigotry and oppression in all its forms, and seek a new future built on our common culture and values as one American people.

h/t Ann Althouse

Can the president of the United states prescribe what is orthodox in religion, politics, nationalism, or other matters of opinion?

Ann Althouse notes that President Obama, in avoiding using the term "radical Islamists,"

he wants to convey the message that the form of Islam used by the terrorists is an incorrect interpretation of Islam.

This puts the President of the United States in the position of saying what is orthodox in religion. (I'm reminded — and this is Flag Day — of the Supreme Court's Pledge of Allegiance case with the great line: "If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion...".) But that's his approach and he's sticking to it.

...There are some people who think you're confused about what our enemies are. They think you might be denying that these people do believe in their religion, recruit through religious belief, and act because of religious belief.

Read more here.

The problem isn't radical Islam, it's American values?

President Obama said yesterday about the Orlando massacre,

"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."

Jim Geraghty at National Review responds to Obama:

"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?

The Left's tactical alliance with radical Islam

John Hayward writes at Breitbart about the

Left’s tactical alliance with radical Islam, a way of letting them know American liberals were fully on board with their quest to restrict the free-speech rights of U.S. citizens. A transaction was offered: we’ll give Islamists pride of place in our new speech-control regime, in exchange for political support. It’s the deal of the century for us, because we’re giving up nothing of value. We weren’t interested in drawing cartoons of Mohammed or insulting Islam anyway.

...Mrs. Jihad waltzed right through Obama’s vaunted “screening” process, the one he says American voters are bigots and fools to express reservations about, when it comes to flooding the United States with Syrian refugees. Mr. Jihad somehow eluded the all-seeing eye of our trillion-dollar Surveillance State, even though he was chatting with terrorists online and checking out ISIS propaganda. The killers swore fealty to the Islamic State at literally the same moment Obama was offering confident assurances ISIS could never pull off a Paris-style terror attack in the United States. Confronted with these failures, the Democrat Party – to a man and woman – has absolutely no idea what to do, other than smear law-abiding Americans who had nothing whatsoever to do with the crime.

And that’s where the raw, slavering hatred comes in. It’s palpable right now. The Left hates decent Americans so very, very much. They hate your religion, your independence, your stubborn refusal to submit. They hate your prosperity, your resourcefulness, and your refusal to believe their fairy tales about an Almighty State that can take care of everyone’s needs in a fair and just manner. They hate that you keep noticing their failures. They hate that you won’t let them import a more pliable electorate from other countries without putting up a fight. They’re furious that you won’t accept their sacred religious belief that everything is your fault, and you deserve generations of punishment for the sins of your fathers.

The very first reaction of liberals – the knee-jerk response of lefties with keyboards and Internet connections – was to attack Christians for daring to offer “thoughts and prayers” for the victims of the shooting. They did so with a speed and volume that strongly suggests coordinated effort.

These same liberals rushed to hold every pro-lifer, and indeed every Christian and Republican, in America responsible for the crazed actions of Robert Dear in Colorado. They were still pounding out op-eds along those lines when police scanners in California lit up with the name “Farook,” and it suddenly became necessary to spin on a dime and insist the ideology, religion, and political objectives of murderers are entirely irrelevant.

The New York Times headlined its profile of the Colorado lunatic, “For Robert Dear, Religion and Rage Before Planned Parenthood Attack.” Think they’ll be using a headline like that for the San Bernardino couple? “For Farook and Malik, Religion and Rage Before Christmas-Party Attack.” Of course not, because the Left has issued a fatwa that religion has nothing whatsoever to do with Islamist terrorism.

The Left is most focused and direct in their hatred of your guns, my fellow Americans, because they are a symbolic representation of everything else that is wrong with you. The Second Amendment (and, increasingly, the First) are viewed by liberals as archaic, irrational barriers against their power. They are united in their contempt for the idea that Government, the divine incarnation of Law and the General Will, could be restrained by laws. How can the makers of law be subject to it? Why, the very idea is perverse! When smart people with big hearts see the urgent need to Do the Right Thing and enact Common-Sense Laws, they should face no centuries-old speed bumps, or listen to modern-day libertarians whining about “due process.”

That’s how you get to the New York Times running an editorial that due process and the Second Amendment should simply be ignored at this moment of crisis. That’s how you get the emerging liberal dogma that Congress can be ignored, after refusing to give a far-Left President what he wants after repeated demands. The Constitution is anathema to the Left’s preferred system of government-by-crisis, in which they get to define the crises, and the “solution” always involves compromising the liberty of law-abiding citizens.

Guns are also an unacceptable totem of skepticism for the sacred State. Gun owners are frank about their desire to protect themselves, and their families, in the absence of police, who are rarely able to arrive at a crime scene in time to save every victim, despite their most sincere efforts. This is absolutely unacceptable to the Left, which views dead law-abiding citizens as acceptable collateral damage – indeed, they’re practically human sacrifices to the god of the State. (Elite liberals hold this belief, in part, because they’re convinced they personally will not be sacrificed, especially when they have armed personal guards.)

At this point, it should be clear that nothing terrifies Democrats more than the possibility that the next terror attack will be thwarted by an armed citizen. That would be absolute narrative apocalypse for them. They’ve put a lot of effort into cooking up phony statistics and writing tortured reports to “prove” that guns in the hands of lawful citizens are a net minus to public safety. If the next Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik take two in the chest from some NRA member with a concealed-carry permit… why, it would ruin hundreds of carefully-prepared Democrat gun control speeches!

If something like that happens, the Good Guy With a Gun had better be prepared for the mother of all online vettings – a hundred times more energetic than anything Democrats would demand for a presidential candidate from their own Party – and God help the hero if he ever said anything derogatory about Islam in public or online.

There’s an old joke about a drunk who insists on searching for his lost car keys beneath a streetlamp, even though he knows he didn’t drop them there, because the light is better. That’s how the Left predictably reacts at a moment like this: they make a feral lunge for the nearest group of law-abiding American citizens with politics they dislike. Power is most easily deployed against the law-abiding; statist threats work best against people with something to lose. Hate screeds are most easily written against people who have been culturally gagged from responding. Team Obama is worse than useless against terrorists, but they excel at threatening Americans who dare to use their Constitutional rights in disapproved ways.

Fighting Islamist terrorism is hard, as years of Obama’s failure can attest. Beating up good Christians and the NRA is easy, fun, and profitable. When a pair of well-prepared Islamist terrorists launches a planned attack on a Christmas party with pipe bombs and guns, the problems to be attacked are obviously the Christmas party and guns. That other stuff is too difficult to discuss, and it’s too obviously a result of Big Government failure.

The most incompetent President in American history, the man whose multi-trillion-dollar government can’t launch a website, demands absolute faith and the scourging of unbelievers. His demands grow more strident as they become more absurd. Innocent American citizens will be sacrificed to his true religion, the religion of the State — unless he and his Party are confronted and decisively defeated.

Read more here.

What is the world's most dangerous ideology in 2015?

What should we do?

Andrew McCarthy writes at National Review,

Putin, with China’s indulgence, is obviously attempting to fortify a sphere of anti-American influence across the Middle East. Anti-Americanism in this Islamic-supremacist region long predates Putin, of course. What has changed is that the United States is governed by a man of the hard Left — a president who is sympathetic to the Islamist narrative about American imperialism, ambivalent at best about American power, and determined to diminish America’s regional commitments, and thus American influence.

...Obama, however, is different. He was going to befriend the Islamists by paying homage to the Islamists . . . and then leaving them to their savagery and dysfunction without American interference. This would be fine if (a) the United States had no vital interests at stake, and (b) Obama had not executed this strategy by materially supporting the ascendance of Iran, the jihadist revolutionary state that is America’s mortal enemy.

Obama’s fantasy world, in which Iran is a potential ally and Russia a potentially stabilizing influence, created the opportunity for Putin to move in. He loves to humiliate Obama, so he is having his moment now. It should be remembered, however, that the Soviet Union, though far mightier than the pale imitation that is Putin’s basket-case, was devastated by its failed invasion of Afghanistan. That was a less ambitious project than the one today’s Russia appears to have set upon.

Clearly, there is some real upside for Putin in this. It is an object lesson to the Baltic states that Putin covets: The United States is unwilling to fight so take no comfort in NATO’s empty security guarantee. But for Putin, propping up Assad by making his bed with the snakes in Tehran is no sure thing. If the Kremlin found Afghan jihadists to be a problem, wait until it experiences the pain the more formidable al-Qaeda and ISIS can inflict.

...the backbone of Assad’s opposition has always been Islamist: the Muslim Brotherhood and the even more extreme jihadists with whom they seamlessly make common cause. They are not moderates; they want to overthrow Iran’s despicable cat’s paw, Assad, in order to do to Syria what the Brotherhood tried to do to Egypt — and what Islamists have done to Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, etc.

It is not true that Obama failed to back the Syrian “rebels.” In fact, after the mutual Obama-Beltway GOP strategy of siding with Islamists against Qaddafi blew up on us in Libya, a reprise was attempted in Syria. Alas, the “rebels” we backed kept aligning with the jihadists (just as they did in Libya); the weapons we gave them kept ending up in jihadist hands. That was not just because the “rebels” were insufficiently “vetted”; it was because there was no way to overthrow Assad without the Islamists’ playing a major role — and, probably, a leading role.

This contributed to the ascendancy of ISIS, but was not the cause of that ascendancy. The cause is the dominant regional culture — Islamic supremacism. If Washington won’t face up to that fact, then it will of course continue strengthening our enemies in the delusional hope that they will someday become our friends.

Then, to make matters worse, Washington forgot that it had gotten enmeshed in Syria in order to oust Assad. Obama desperately wanted his deal with Iran, which wanted Assad left alone. So the Syria misadventure turned on a dime from targeting Assad on behalf of Sunni Islamists and jihadists to targeting Sunni jihadists — ISIS — to the benefit of Assad. Does anyone wonder why the U.S. has no credibility in the region?

Our interests in the region are to defeat both Russia/Iran/Assad and ISIS/al-Qaeda/Muslim Brotherhood.

...Our vital interest in Syria (and Iraq and elsewhere, for that matter) is to prevent its being used as a platform for the launching of attacks against the United States, our allies, and our interests. Moreover, this, it is crucial to remember, is an American problem.

That means it is going to take a large commitment of American forces on the ground as well as in the air to achieve our vital interests. But there is no political support for that in our country at the moment. That, no doubt, is why a candidate like Marco Rubio, who is smart enough to see the writing on the wall, seems reluctant to come out and say it.

Even if there were political support for using American force, it would be a losing cause to take up unless and until we finally start seeing Iran the way Iran sees us: as the enemy.

There are not good guys and bad guys in this equation. There are bad guys and other bad guys. And quelling the threat these bad guys collectively pose to the United States is our responsibility — not something we should do out of humanitarian concern for Middle Easterners, or because we are somehow obliged to slake their purported thirst for freedom.

Make no mistake, though: This challenge is not going away. The threat to our national security posed by radical Islam — both the Sunni and the Shiite varieties, plus their state sponsors — is intensifying. It will have to be dealt with, hopefully before it deals with us in a catastrophic way.

Read more here.

Jeb Bush interview with Hugh Hewitt

Recently Hugh Hewitt interviewed Jeb Bush. Hugh asked Jeb

...where do you see the source of the radicalism, the Islamist violence? What’s the root source? We heard Marie Harf say it’s joblessness, in part. What does Jeb Bush think?

JB: I just cannot believe that a spokesman for our government would say that. It is deeply disturbing to me that this is the language that’s used in the Obama administration, that it’s an isolated act if it was in Paris, or that joblessness creates despair that creates this radical behavior, that it’s a law enforcement incident and all these things. It really makes it harder to garner the necessary support in our own country and around the world for what this is. This is radical Islam. And these are barbarians. And they want to destroy Western civilization. I don’t think that’s a gross exaggeration, and that’s what, if you believe, if you start with that premise, you have a completely different strategy.

Read more here.
Hewitt does not ask any questions about Jeb's unpopularity with conservative Republicans. Perhaps that is because Hewitt, himself, is out of touch with conservatives!

Homocidal intolerance

She of the Fuzzy Slippers wrote this back in September:

I see the beheadings, and I don’t feel fear. I am not cowed. I am not terrorized. Instead, I feel rage. I feel outrage. I feel motivated to stop the animals who commit these barbaric, uncivilized, unconscionable acts. And most of all, I feel closer than ever to my God, a God who eschews the violent “conversion” of followers; my God neither needs nor wants followers who are coerced at the end of a dull blade into sputtering a false belief. My God doesn’t need such indignity and would be horrified at such actions by His followers. For all the anti-Christian crap we’ve heard for years, no Christian has yet held hostage a mall and systematically slaughtered anyone who could not recite the Lord’s Prayer (the equivalent of what these godless Islamic beasts did in India, Kenya, and wherever they spread their homicidal intolerance).

Read the whole thing here.

The Medieval Christian threat is under control, Mr. President

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal released a statement after Obama made his comments at the National Prayer Breakfast:

“It was nice of the President to give us a history lesson at the Prayer breakfast,” Jindal said. “Today, however, the issue right in front of his nose, in the here and now, is the terrorism of Radical Islam, the assassination of journalists, the beheading and burning alive of captives. We will be happy to keep an eye out for runaway Christians, but it would be nice if he would face the reality of the situation today. The Medieval Christian threat is under control, Mr. President. Please deal with the Radical Islamic threat today.”

Read more here.

Obama's moral equivalence

President Obama, at the National Prayer Breakfast this morning, said:

"Unless we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ."

Victor Davis Hanson has some advice for Obama:

The president and his advisers should be investigating why radical Islam is currently terrorizing the globe, rather than denying it entirely, hiding it by euphemisms, or excusing it by citing morally equivalent examples from the past.

Read more here.