The world we live in

h/t Mike Miles

Sleeper cells

Jim Geraghty analyzes the writings of the Ohio State student who attacked and killed people for Allah.

He’s convinced he and his fellow members of his faith are victims of an aggressive, malevolent West. He believes this while attending class at Ohio State University. Nobody’s oppressing him. No one’s imprisoning him without charges, trial, or appeal. Nobody’s trying to kill him. No one’s closing his mosque, or banning his faith. He’s got a better life with more opportunities, freedom, and material abundance than probably 90-some percent of his fellow Muslims around the world. And he still thinks he’s a victim of a malevolent America, and that everyone around him is a legitimate target for retribution.

He’s convinced that every Muslim around him privately agrees with him, but hides their true views from the non-Muslim world around them. He acknowledges that his fellow believers are carrying out “lone wolf attacks” and even taunts, “every single Muslim who disapproves of my actions is a sleeper cell, waiting for a signal. I am warning you, Oh America.”

Read more here.

Do we expect to get the truth from Hillary Clinton?

Andrew McCarthy writes in National Review,

As U.S. armed forces attack ISIS in Libya, WikiLeaks is poised to remind us that ISIS is in Libya — indeed, that ISIS is ISIS — thanks to disastrous policies championed by Hillary Clinton as President Obama’s secretary of state. Also raised, yet again, is the specter of Mrs. Clinton’s lying to Congress and the American people — this time regarding a matter some of us have been trying for years to get answers about: What mission was so important the United States kept personnel in the jihadist hellhole of Benghazi in 2012?

Specifically, did that mission involve arming the Syrian “rebels” — including al-Qaeda and forces that became ISIS — just as, at Mrs. Clinton’s urging, our government had armed Libyan “rebels” (again, jihadists) to catastrophic effect?

It has been less than two weeks since WikiLeaks rocked the Clinton campaign on the eve of the Democratic convention by leaking hacked e-mails illuminating DNC efforts to rig the nomination chase in Clinton’s favor. Now the organization’s founder, Julian Assange, has announced that WikiLeaks is soon to publish highly sensitive government e-mails that demonstrate Hillary Clinton’s key participation in efforts to arm jihadists in Syria. Just as in Libya, where Mrs. Clinton championed the strategy of arming Islamist “rebels,” the Syrian “rebels” who ultimately received weapons included the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda, and ISIS.

...what is known is outrageous and has not been given nearly enough attention — largely because Beltway Republicans were complicit in the Obama-Clinton policy of allying with Islamists, and thus have shown no interest in probing the inevitably disastrous fallout.

As I have been pointing out for years, for example, we have never gotten to the bottom of why the State Department, under Mrs. Clinton’s direction, had an installation in Benghazi, one of the world’s most dangerous places for Americans.

The Obama administration, like the Bush administration, had touted Qaddafi as a key counterterrorism ally against rabidly anti-American jihadists in eastern Libya. Nevertheless, Secretary Clinton led the policy shift in which our government changed sides in Libya — shifting support to the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies, just as Mrs. Clinton had urged shifting U.S. support to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. In Libya, this included arming “rebels,” who naturally included a heavy concentration of jihadists.

As I’ve recounted, to topple Qaddafi on behalf of the Islamists, the Obama administration — which did not seek congressional authorization for its offensive war (and preposterously maintained that bombing another country’s government was not really “war” anyway) — had to flout a United Nations resolution. The U.N. had agreed only to military operations for the purpose of protecting civilians, not offensive operations against the regime. Besides arming jihadists, the administration took no meaningful steps to make sure that Qaddafi’s military arsenals did not fall into terrorist hands. The regime was toppled and Qaddafi was brutally murdered — prompting Secretary Clinton’s bizarrely giddy quip, “We came, we saw, he died.” As some of us not-so-giddy types had warned would happen, Libya then became a safe haven for terrorists who turned on the American and Western forces that had cleared the path for them.

In small compass, this is the story of J. Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador killed in the Benghazi massacre. As Business Insider’s Michael B. Kelley recounts, before becoming ambassador, Stevens was the Obama administration’s official liaison to Qaddafi’s Islamist opposition in Libya, including its al-Qaeda-linked groups. The latter included the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). Stevens worked directly with a top LIFG leader, Abdelhakim Belhadj.

...In the months leading up to the attack on the State Department facility, and on the even more shadowy CIA outpost a little over a mile away, jihadists in eastern Libya conducted a series of attacks against Western targets — including, on June 6, 2012, a bomb detonated just outside the State Department compound. The British government and the International Red Cross pulled their personnel out; yet the Obama administration left U.S. government personnel in, despite grossly inadequate security precautions. Why? I believe that one significant mission was the coordination of weapons transfers from Libya to Syrian jihadists.

Remember the state of play in mid 2012. Obama was locked in a tight reelection race. He was falsely claiming that he had “decimated” al-Qaeda (which was actually thriving); that he was ending American wars (which were actually intensifying as he drew troops down despite ground conditions); and that his pro-Islamist policies were helping forge democracy in places like Egypt (then under Muslim Brotherhood rule) and Libya (which had disintegrated into a failed state under domination by Islamist militias). Prior to the November election, if Obama had openly announced that his administration was arming Syrian Islamists, it would have been highly controversial. It would have spotlighted how that same policy had failed in Libya, a fact to which neither the media nor Republicans had called public attention. This, no doubt, is why reports that Obama was “launching a covert operation to send weapons to Syrian rebels for the first time” (as the Times of London’s Christina Lamb put it) did not appear until immediately after Obama had won a second term.

Were Obama, Clinton, and others in the administration steering arms to Syrian jihadists before that time?

Recall that in mid 2012, Obama was also feeling heat — from the Islamist regimes he was appeasing, from Beltway Republicans, and even from some in his own administration, apparently including Secretary Clinton — for not doing enough to help the “rebels” drive Assad from power in Syria. There was a good explanation for this reluctance: Our government knew that the Syrian “rebels,” like the Libyan “rebels,” teemed with jihadists. Not only has this fact long been notorious; Judicial Watch managed to wangle from the government an August 2012 Defense Department memo that flatly states, “The Salafist [sic], the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [i.e., al-Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria.” The memo elaborates that its reference to AQI incorporates both Jaish al-Nusra (which is al-Qaeda’s main affiliate in Syria) and the Islamic State (the breakaway “caliphate” spawned by AQI).

...Putting aside the administration’s recklessness in failing to keep Qaddafi’s arsenals out of jihadist hands, what are the “other things” that the State Department and the CIA were up to?

...Were U.S. personnel stationed as sitting ducks in Benghazi in order to help supply weapons to Syria, where it was inevitable they would fall into the hands of America’s enemies? Perhaps we’ll soon find out.

Read more here.

That is no way to protect our country

I often excerpt the writings of Andrew McCarthy, the successful prosecutor of the jihadists who conducted the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. The leader of that attack was Omar Abdel Rahman. This week McCarthy spoke to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing on “Willful Blindness: Consequences of Agency Efforts to Deemphasize Radical Islam in Combating Terrorism.”

Omar Abdel Rahman was not merely blind. He was beset by several other medical handicaps. Terrorism is hard work. Yet, here was a man who seemed utterly incapable of doing anything that would be useful to a terrorist organization: he couldn’t build a bomb, hijack a plane, or carry out an assassination.

Still, he was the unquestioned leader of terror cells and revered by jihadists across the globe. How could that be?

The answer is straightforward, though it plainly remains one we do not want to hear.

The Blind Sheikh is a doctor of Islamic jurisprudence graduated from al-Azhar University in Cairo, the seat of Sunni Islamic learning for over a millennium. His area of expertise is sharia -- Islam’s legal code and societal framework.

The jihadists who listened to him did so because he is an internationally recognized authority in the political ideology that draws on Islamic scripture to inspire attacks against the West.

The centrality of ideology tells us why terrorists obeyed the Blind Sheikh. It tells us why terrorists act. This is something we must grasp if we have any hope of defending ourselves and defeating our enemies.

Yet, instead of focusing on this ideology, we have wasted much of the last two decades on a fool’s errand: attempting to define a “true Islam,” in the futile hope of discrediting terrorists as purveyors of a false Islam.

The stubborn fact is that there may not be a “true Islam.” Islam has a rich and diverse history, and there are various interpretations of it, all vying for the mantle of “true Islam” and denying it to one another. Innumerable factions of Muslims have been debating one another, often violently fighting amongst each other, for fourteen centuries. They have not settled the question, “What is the true Islam?”

The United States is not going to settle it, either.

From a humanitarian standpoint, we have to hope courageous reformers prevail – devout Muslims like my co-panelist here this afternoon, Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser. We should do what we can to help them, including marginalizing – instead of taking our cues from – sharia-supremacist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood.

But from the standpoint of American national security, it is irrelevant whether there is a true Islam. What matters is that there is a sharia-supremacist construction of Islam to which hundreds of millions of Muslims have adhered for centuries. They are supported by centuries of scholarship and scriptural literalism. We are not going to convince them that they are wrong.

They do not care what American politicians and commentators think about “the true Islam.” They judge themselves by their own civilization and culture principles – just as we in the West do by ours. It is absurd to believe, as what passes for today’s counterterrorism strategy maintains, that they are motivated or even affected by the language we use to speak about them, or by our stated beliefs about Islam.

Sharia supremacism, their interpretation of Islam, is not a religion as we understand religion. It is political radicalism with a religious veneer. Sharia supremacism is virulently anti-Western, misogynist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic. It rejects basic tenets of Western liberalism, including the power of people to chart their own destiny and make their own laws in contravention of sharia. It rejects individual liberty and equality. It brooks no separation between spiritual life and civil society. It endorses violent jihad to implement and spread sharia. And it regards the United States, closely trailed by Israel and Europe, as the principal enemies of Islam that must be defeated.

That is something we desperately need to understand and highlight, not obscure and avoid.

There has been a reluctance to do this. Government counterterrorism policy has been willfully blind for a quarter-century to the ideological underpinnings of radical Islamic terrorism. The reluctance has been rationalized on the wayward theory that because a person’s religious beliefs and political speech are constitutionally shielded from prosecution, they are similarly shielded from mere inquiry and investigation – notwithstanding that we know they are often precursors to violence.

A sensible national security policy cannot regard the objective presentation of evidence as if it were the promotion of hate speech.

There is nothing inherently wrong with, much less constitutionally offensive about, the concept that radical religious or political beliefs should trigger investigations. That is especially the case if those beliefs are conveyed by aggressive language, or by association with other radicals or mosques known to endorse jihadism.

Here’s an important principle we must get right:

It cannot be that evidence an investigator may use to prove guilt of terrorism offenses is somehow insulated from an investigator’s suspicions about potential terrorism offenses.

The goal of counterterrorism is supposed to be the prevention of jihadist attacks, not the hope that there may be a living terrorist or two still around to be indicted and tried only after Americans have been murdered.

In 1996, I was awarded the Justice Department’s highest honor for proving the nexus between (a) jihadist commands in Islamic scripture, (b) their exploitation by sharia jurists like the Blind Shiekh, and (c) the commission of jihadist atrocities by the young Muslims he inflamed. Today, to say aloud what the Clinton administration honored me for twenty years ago, is to be ostracized as an Islamophobic bigot.

Mr. Chairman, members of the Committee, that is no way to protect our country.

Read more here.

"He liked Hillary Clinton"

Democrat organ Washington Post thinks it has a good one. It plays videos of Trump saying Muslims need to help us identify potential terrorists. It finds one who reported Orlando killer Omar Mateen to the FBI, and asks him to write a column in the Post. Only one problem: he writes,

Omar and I continued to have infrequent conversations over the next few years. I last saw him at a dinner at his father’s house in January. We talked about the presidential election and debated our views of the candidates that were running – he liked Hillary Clinton and I liked Bernie Sanders. This banter continued through texts and phone calls for several months. My last conversation with Omar was by phone in mid-May. He called me while he was at the beach with his son to tell me about a vacation he’d taken with his father to Orlando the previous weekend. He’d been impressed by the local mosque.

Your clever idea backfired on you, Washington Post.
Read more here.

FBI under scrutiny

At The Weekly Standard Thomas Joscelyn, who has served as a trainer for the FBI's counterterrorism division, writes,

The FBI's handling of Mateen will undoubtedly come under heavy scrutiny in the weeks ahead. FBI agents had investigated Mateen twice prior to the massacre at Pulse nightclub. Both times the bureau found troubling information but decided he was not a first-order threat. That assessment proved to be wrong—fatally so. The public needs to know what, if anything, the FBI could have done to stop the Orlando shooter.

This is a crucial question, especially because Omar Mateen was not the first terrorist to slip through the cracks, and it is reasonable to fear he won't be the last.

On at least four occasions since 2009, a jihadist has successfully carried out an attack in the United States after being investigated by the FBI. The shooting at Fort Hood, Texas (November 2009), the Boston Marathon bombings (April 2013), and the San Bernardino assault (December 2015) were all executed by terrorists who had been on the FBI's radar. The Orlando massacre is the fourth such instance. In each case, there was at least some incriminating information on the suspect, but the FBI determined it was not enough to prosecute or take other action.

Read more here.

A discussion of jihadists, Ramadan, and Isis

Rukmini Callimachi has been reporting on the connection between the Orlando shooter and ISIS, as well as the stabbing last night of a French police officer and his girlfriend in a town near Paris, for which ISIS claimed responsibility. The New York Times provides a video here in which she answers questions about ISIS and Ramadan, which began last week.

The need for more American engagement with Europe

Walter Russell Mead writes in The American Interest that it is time for a pivot in American foreign policy, a pivot to Europe:

...If the twenty first century goes well, the model of the EU — an international organization based on democratic and liberal ideas that protects the rights of individual states while working for their common good — will have more and more impact on the world. Regional associations in Africa, Latin America, South East Asia and the Middle East will offer more people worldwide the freedom and prosperity that Europeans now share. Promoting this kind of international system has been the chief goal of American foreign policy for more than 100 years, and it is hard to see any other potential American agenda that would be as good for American security and prosperity — and would be more welcome or more successful abroad. The prestige and the drawing power of the EU is one of the most important elements of the soft power that makes the American ideal of a rules-based, peaceful and commercial international order globally attractive, and trouble for the European Union means trouble for the American world project as well.

Against that background, the weaknesses in Europe’s policymaking that the Greek crisis places in such a harsh spotlight are grounds for deep concern in the United States. Poverty in Africa, and mounting instability in the Middle East is creating a major migration crisis to Europe’s south. The wars in Syria and the rise of ISIS (and evidence of a jihadi Fifth Column inside Europe itself) present a new kind of security threat which requires new thinking about European defense. An aggressive Russia is pressing on Europe’s weak eastern flank. Unless the EU gets its groove back, a divided, inward-looking EU is not going to be very effective dealing with the growing threats to its east and south, and the already difficult challenges facing American foreign policy will become significantly harder to manage.

...Instead of facing this honestly and sharing the pain, the rich European governments decided to let their banks off the hook and throw all the costs onto the Greeks. This was a terrible betrayal of the European ideal, and the damage that has resulted (and not only in Greece) will reverberate for years to come. In a just world, the losses would be divided between creditor and debtor alike — and the IMF has made this point more than once. The citizens of debtor countries are being squeezed too hard, and the rich countries aren’t facing up to their co-responsibility for the disaster.
Arguably, German unity means that Europe needs America more. We need to be in the mix, not as a rival to Germany or trying to thwart it in some kind of 19th century balance of power game. Far from thwarting Germany, the American presence in Europe since 1945 greatly assisted Germany’s recover and reintegration into Europe, and promoted and helped secure the foundation of Franco-German cooperation on which everything else in Europe rested for many years. The next American presidential administration is going to have to take Europe seriously again. Bilateral relations with all the leading European countries need to be deepened, and the United States also needs to think much more intensively about the nature of Europe’s difficulties and the things we can do that would promote the health of the Atlantic partnership in a dangerous world.

The world doesn’t work well when Europe is a mess, and Europe doesn’t work well when America is absent. Those are the two most important lessons of the tragic twentieth century; we forget them at our peril.

Read more here.

Do you hate jihadists? You are in good company.

David French writes in National Review,

I’m far more hateful than Pamela Geller. In fact, I’d argue there’s no way that she could hate jihad more than I do. I’ve seen jihad up-close, in an Iraqi province where jihadists raped women to shame them into becoming suicide bombers, where they put bombs in little boys’ backpacks then remotely detonated them at family gatherings, where they beheaded innocent civilians while cheering wildly like they were at a soccer match, and where they shot babies in the face to “send a message” to their parents. I’ve seen the despair in the eyes of the innocent victims of jihad, and — believe me — that despair is infinitely greater than the alleged “anguish” caused by a few cartoons.

...I don’t know Pamela Geller, and I certainly don’t know her heart, but it’s simply bizarre that so few of the tens of thousands of words decrying her “hatred” have actually examined the actions of the jihadists she opposes. Isn’t genocide worth hating? Isn’t the systematic oppression of women? The selling of children into slavery? And in our hatred, we are in good company. As the writer of Proverbs states, there are “six things that the Lord hates, seven that are an abomination to him” among those “abominations” are “hands that shed innocent blood.” Those are jihadist hands — hands even God hates.

Read more here.

Bill O'Reilly and Laura Ingraham support free speech, but...

T. Becket Adams summarizes various media viewpoints on this subject at the Washington Examiner.

Sure enough, we traded five top jihadists for a deserter

Thanks to Instapundit

Scott Johnson weighs in at Powerline:

It remains a bad deal wrapped in deceitful rhetoric and a complete humiliation of the United States

Recalling Obama’s and Rice’s praise of the deal, we see that they are willing to say anything in defense of a bad cause. We already knew that, but there is much more to come.

Read more here.

Coverups

In no uncertain terms, Andrew McCarthy excoriates the chairman of the select committee on Benghazi, Congressman Trey Gowdy, a favorite of conservatives. Why? Because Gowdy has known since last summer that Clinton circumvented federal law by using private email accounts to conduct State Department business, but waited until last Wednesday to issue subpoenas for all of Clinton’s communications related to Libya.

Fabulous! Gowdy just got finished railing about how Clinton used private e-mail precisely to avoid the government-mandated paper trail. So what’s he been doing about it for six months? Discussing the matter with Clinton’s loyal staffers — i.e., people who helped her carry out the scheme — and with the State Department — i.e., the people he just got done telling you have neither the relevant e-mails nor access to them.

That’s it: no subpoenas, no hearings, no nothing. Just as Mrs. Clinton did not turn over any of her private e-mails until the State Department finally asked for them, Gowdy, by his own account, did not issue a subpoena to address a scandal he has long known about until the scandal became public.

That in itself is a scandal.

...As some of us have contended for some time, there is abundant reason to fear that Republicans do not want to get to the bottom of Benghazi. GOP congressional leaders were major supporters of Obama’s disastrous decision to ditch our counterterrorism alliance with Qaddafi and empower jihadists to oust him. Some of those jihadists were complicit in the Benghazi attack — and they’ve since turned Libya into a failed state in which both al-Qaeda and ISIS now have footholds. Furthermore, if there was a covert operation to help move arms from Libya to the Syrian “rebels” — some of whom worked with al-Qaeda, others of whom became ISIS — it is a near certainty that top congressional Republicans were in the loop when it was approved.

Read more here, including a long list of questions the Benghazi select committee has failed to answer.

Do we recognize it?

Thanks to Mostly Cajun, All American and Opinionated, who writes an essay this week on how history repeats itself.

Denial, deflection, and demonization

Charles Hoskinson writes in the Washington Examiner that Obama kept reform Muslims out of his recent summit on violent extremism. Hoskinson links to a story in the Daily Beast by Muslim journalists Asra Nomani and Hala Arafa in which they wrote:

we need to own up to our extremist theology instead of always reverting to a strategy of denial, deflection and demonization.

Hoskinson writes:

The refusal of Obama and his officials to name their real enemy is referred to among reformers as the "Voldemort effect," after the villain in the Harry Potter books whose name could not be mentioned.

Hoskinson quotes Maajid Nawaz, co-founder of the Quilliam Foundation, an anti-extremist British think-tank,

Nawaz told CNN on Wednesday that refusing to address the Islamist ideology directly puts all Muslims at risk of being blamed for the actions of a tiny minority — the exact opposite effect of what Obama intended by his approach.

..."Islam is a religion like any other with all the various sects and denominations. Islamism is a desire to impose Islam over society. And that is a very theocratic extremist desire. It can manifest itself violently. When it does, I call it jihadism. But it can also manifest itself politically. It's still a problematic ideology because any desire to impose anyone's faith over anyone else is inherently flawed and must be challenged," he said.

Another reform Muslim is Zuhdi Jasser, a doctor and former Navy officer who leads the American Islamic Foundation for Democracy. Jasser told the Washington Examiner in November:

"This is a Muslim problem that needs a Muslim solution."

Hoskinson writes:

many so-called mainstream Muslim groups that Jasser has criticized have documented extremist ties. Sympathies with the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egypt-based Islamist movement, landed two U.S. groups, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim American Society, on the list of terrorist organizations banned by the United Arab Emirates.

Though both groups vigorously deny extremist sympathies or ties, there is ample evidence that CAIR was founded by supporters of Hamas, the Brotherhood's Palestinian branch and a banned terrorist organization in the United States, and that the Muslim American Society is the Brotherhood's U.S. branch.

Read more here.

Delusional dreams of Western leaders

Victor Davis Hanson worries about the Western response to jihadist murderers:

after all the brave words and feel-good marches, little significant action will be taken to prevent such atrocities from happening again.

Who are these jihadists?

They are proud Muslims, adherents of a 14-centuries-old faith that conquered its way to one of history’s largest empires, the warriors before whom a now dominant, arrogant West once trembled. Their faith preaches that Allah wills the whole world to be united under the rule of Islam and its illiberal, totalitarian law code. Those who resist and refuse to convert are defying Allah; they are the enemies of Islam, the denizens of the “House of War” who endanger the spiritual wellbeing of the faithful in the “House of Islam.” As such, the infidels are the legitimate objects of Muslim violence, conquest, enslavement, and dominance, an aggression recorded on every page of history. If you want contemporary evidence for the reality of jihad, look around the world today, where Muslim violence is endemic, and accompanied by theological arguments drawn straight from Islamic scripture, theology, and jurisprudence.

As we speak, plenty of Muslim human beings every day in Nigeria, Libya, Syria, northern Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen, to name a few venues of jihadist violence, are doing “horrible” things like murder, torture, beheadings, rape, sex-slavery, crucifixion, and all the other atrocities that are also copiously documented in the history of Islamic conquest and occupation. As a brave Egyptian critic of Islam, Ahmed Harqan, asked recently, “What has ISIS done that Muhammad did not do?” Thus it’s no coincidence that of the 7 global conflicts costing at least 1000 lives a year, 6 involve Muslims.

Yet progressive orthodoxy dismisses this evidence as Islamophobic bigotry. Unable to deny the reality of theologically inspired Muslim violence daily filling the international news, they resort to blaming Western historical crimes, or scapegoating Israel. Another tack is to invoke the tu quoque fallacy, charging that Hebraism and Christianity are just as violent as Islam.

Is it time for moderate Muslims to step forward and speak out?

But we’ve been waiting ever since 9/11 for moderate Muslims to “step forward” and “proclaim very loudly” that the jihadists have distorted their faith. A few apologists, brave critics, and duplicitous spin-doctors have spoken out, but the Muslim masses globally have been mostly silent. Of course, many Muslims have no desire to follow Islam’s precepts about waging jihad, and just want to live their lives in peace. But there have not been mass marches protesting those who murder in their name and who allegedly “corrupt,” as Eric Holder said in Paris, Islamic theology.

This silence of the Muslim masses about jihadist terror has been the case for over a decade of such attacks. In 2004 after the brutal murder of Theo van Gogh in the streets of Amsterdam––another attack on free speech––only a handful of Dutch Muslims attended a public rally and memorial service. In the intervening years, after similar attacks––like the murder of 7 French Jews and soldiers in 2012, or the 3 Jews massacred in Brussels in 2014––we have not seen the kind of public, unequivocal, unqualified, mass condemnations of the jihadists one would expect if the latter were a fringe whose beliefs are so alien to traditional Islam.

What we have seen are thousands of Muslims celebrating in the streets after 9/11. We have seen riots and murders in response to Westerners exercising the right to free speech. We have seen rallies against Israel in which nakedly genocidal rhetoric is indulged––“Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas” is a favorite–– and temples attacked, as happened during Israel’s war against Hamas last summer. And we have seen polls consistently demonstrate that significant numbers of Muslims, including large majorities in the Middle East, continue to support an illiberal, intolerant shari’a law that codifies the attitudes and beliefs justifying such violence.

Our ancestors for centuries acknowledged the true nature of Islam, a simple fact proven by 1000 years of Muslim aggression. Alexis de Tocqueville, one of our most brilliant political philosophers, wrote in 1838, “Jihad, Holy war, is an obligation for all believers. … The state of war is the natural state with regard to infidels … [T]hese doctrines of which the practical outcome is obvious are found on every page and in almost every word of the Koran … The violent tendencies of the Koran are so striking that I cannot understand how any man with good sense could miss them.”

But that was when our leaders and intellectuals, schooled by history and experience, their minds not blinded by fashionable self-loathing and incoherent cultural relativism, were “men of good sense.” Our leaders today have slipped into delusional dreams, in which people like Tocqueville or Winston Churchill––who in 1897 said, “Civilization is face to face with militant Mohammedanism”––are dismissed as ignorant bigots and racists who lack our superior knowledge and morality. Meanwhile, the bodies of jihadism’s victims continue to pile up, and Iran’s genocidal theocracy closes in on a nuclear weapon. And many in the West continue to sleepwalk through it all.

Read more here.

Projections

Psychologist Robert Godwin diagnoses liberals, feminists, race hustlers, and jihadists in one blog post! Here are some excerpts:

A liberal by definition rejects or falls short of his concrete individuality and instead identifies with an abstract group of some type, usually a persecuted one. But the persecution, at least in America, is usually a projection of the interior into the exterior.

What is a microaggression? As they candidly acknowledge, it has no objective definition, since there is no such thing as truth anyway ("there are no objective definitions to words and phrases").

Therefore, a microaggression is anything that offends a liberal for any reason at any time. Follow this insane logic to its ultimate end, and feelings become the only arbiter of reality. From here it is but a step to totalitarianism, which differs from mere tyranny, in that the latter doesn't care what you think, only what you do. But the leftist totalitarian cannot tolerate deviant thoughts, and tries to exert control over interiors.

As we have discussed in the past, just as, in terms of economic development, there is the first world, second world, third world, etc., there are various psychic worlds inhabited by different populations. Al Sharpton's world is not our world, because, among other reasons, his is a demon-haunted world peopled by projections of his own sociopathy. Does it surprise you that a sociopath should see sociopathy everywhere, or that envious people see greed everywhere, or that racists see race everywhere?

Speaking of our Muslim friends, my attention was also arrested by this interview with a member of the Islamic State. They too project their interior into the exterior, which is the sole source of their motivation. In other words, if they were to withdraw their psychic projections, they would have absolutely nothing to do but sit in the sand all day and contemplate the pathetic state of the Islamic world. But by projecting this into the west and attacking it, it converts weakness into strength, and every day can be a bracing new day of rage.

As with the left, regress equals progress, since they live in an inverted world: "Slavery absolutely signals progress.... I would say that slavery is a great help to us and we will continue to have slavery and beheadings, it is part of our religion."

Memo to feminists: this is what rape culture actually looks like:

"[C]apturing women is permissible if they are nonbelievers." If the slave is "a virgin, he [the owner] can have intercourse with her immediately after the ownership is fulfilled." However, "If she was not a virgin, her uterus must be purified." (Don't ask.)

Read more here.

Let's hope jihadists don't get creative

Jonah Goldberg hopes al-Qaeda doesn't get creative:

If I were in charge of overseas contingency operations at the Islamic State or al-Qaeda, I would send as many suicide-bomber types back to America (and France and Britain) with a new weapon: Ebola. Airport scanners don’t pick it up. The incubation period is long enough to get the human biological weapons past screeners without detection. I’d tell them: Take as many connections as you can on the flight home. Help people with their luggage whenever possible. Leave a mess in the plane bathroom and a paper trail of your travels that will foment panic when ultimately revealed.

And, if you do get stopped by security officials en route, so be it. There’s lots of gloveless manhandling of suspected jihadis, which brings ample opportunities to infect interrogators, guards, FBI agents, etc. And every one of those infected Americans or Westerners furthers the cause.

But assuming you make it to Cleveland or Spokane or Washington, D.C., the only order of the day is: Have fun for as long as you can and maybe share your spit, sweat, and other stuff in as many creative ways as you can. See a show. Go to a water park and just hang out in the lazy river all day. Eat at a nice restaurant, leave a messy napkin. Don’t bother to wash your hands — and never flush (or if you do, make sure the toilet overflows!). Why, we’ll even give you all the fatwas and cash you need to hit the strip clubs and see a hooker or two. It’s all for the greater good. And when, alas, you start to feel really, really sick and you are at your most infectious, it’d be great if you could blow yourself up at a mall, or at least pass out at a McDonald’s or maybe in the middle of the F-train. If you opt for blowing yourself up, great. If not, try to tell the EMS team that you have something other than Ebola. The aim here is to keep the responders from treating you and the scene as a biohazard for as long as possible. And if you blow yourself up, don’t worry too much about killing a lot of bystanders, just make sure it’s really messy and there’s a lot of splatter.

Read more here.

Build the border fence!

roger L. Simon urges Republicans to get behind the idea of building a fencealong our southern border with Mexico.

Build a fence across our entire Southern border and do it now. Make it as secure as we can. Spare no expense. Add whatever high tech accoutrements deemed necessary.

Don’t pretend for a minute this is about amnesty — past, future or possible — or immigration — legal or otherwise — or even about murderous drug cartels. Those are minor matters by comparison to a dirty nuke at the Mall of America. It is about the Islamic State and all their myriad clones that change every day but still espouse the same lunatic ideology. If we don’t do everything we can to keep them out, we were are suicidal and just as lunatic as they are.

But we don’t. So maybe we are. But we should sober up fast and do something about it. This should be number one on the agenda of the Republican Party this Fall for every candidate. Make it a cause. Give them all something to agree on, Tea Party, RINOS, whoever. If we can’t agree to save Western Civilization, what can we agree on? I am certain the vast majority of the public will be with us. If they’re not, show them a commercial with Foley’s head being lopped off while Obama heads out to play golf. It’s brutal, but it’s the truth and the public will know it.

And this shouldn’t wait for November. Legislation should be drafted by Congress now, emphasizing border security for the safety of our people. It should be publicized and placed in front of the Senate. Let Harry Reid turn it down, let the Democrats lose and then push the legislation all over again. Don’t stop.

The fact that a jihadi can walk over our border more easily than some of us can cross the street in front of our house is appalling. That we have a government that has permitted that is even more appalling.

Yes, the jihadis may be here already. Indeed many probably are. But we have to start facing it. If we can’t do something as obvious as building a fence, we’re hopeless. We don’t deserve what we have. And, hey, it would even employ some folks who need a job.

Read more here.

Andrew McCarthy to Rand Paul: "knock off the filibuster circus and stop making it harder to fight jihadists who are trying to kill our fellow Americans."

Andrew McCarthy reminds Rand Paul that

we are operating under a congressional authorization for the use of military force overwhelmingly enacted days after the 9/11 attacks and reaffirmed several times since. In the AUMF, lawmakers clearly left to the president’s judgment the determination of who fits the category of enemy against whom force is authorized.

If Senator Paul truly believes American citizens are unduly threatened, the constitutional path is clear: He should propose legislation repealing the AUMF. Without the AUMF, the laws of war would not be operative — at least in the absence of an attack or threatened attack on the United States. We would be back to a pre-9/11 state in which terrorism was strictly a law-enforcement matter. Senator Paul would then have his wish: It would be unlawful to target American citizens with lethal force. But . . . we would also no longer be permitted to conduct the military operations against jihadists that have prevented a reprise of 9/11.

If the senator, despite the utter dearth of substantiating evidence, really thinks the president is so likely to kill Americans capriciously that it is worth forfeiting our capacity to strike al-Qaeda militarily, he should say so. If he’s not willing to be accountable for this choice, however, he should knock off the filibuster circus and stop making it harder to fight jihadists who are trying to kill our fellow Americans.

Like his father before him, Senator Paul has a libertarian following, some of whom have convinced themselves that counterterrorism measures are more of a threat to our country than terrorism itself. In some ways, this is understandable. A dozen years ago, the average young adult’s formative experience was 9/11; today, it is the daily shredding of the Fourth Amendment at airports and public buildings, where political correctness has institutionalized unreasonable searches. But the fact that there has been excess in counterterrorism does not mean all counterterrorism is excessive. The use of lethal force authorized by Congress against our enemies on foreign soil is vital to our security, even if a few of those enemies hold American citizenship.

Please read more here.

Andrew McCarthy on terrorism

Andrew McCarthy nearly fell out of his chair watching a replay of a discussion between George Will and Charles Krauthammer, in which Will didn't see Boko Haram as a terrorist group. McCarthy defines terrorism:

Terrorism is the use and threatened use of mass violence in violation of the laws of war in order to coerce a government or society into policy changes or the acceptance of some ideological agenda.

A terrorist organization is distinguished from a militia by its failure to comply with the laws and customs of war—particularly, its intentional targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure. Al Qaeda has military objectives, too; so does every terrorist organization. The fact that a terrorist organization has “military objectives” is beside the point if it pursues those objectives through mass-murder attacks in conjunction (with) other operations distinguished by their extreme cruelty—like brutally murdering scores of school boys and turning young girls into sex slaves, as Boko Haram does.

Boko Haram’s official name is Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad, meaning “People (or The Group) Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teaching and Jihad.” The short handle Boko Haram reflects a part of this overarching Islamic supremacist mission: “Western education is forbidden.” (Note the wishful thinking of progressives repeatedly peddled over the past few days: Boko Haram, we’re told, is not an Islamist group; they are just a backward-thinking political group opposed to education. In fact, what they oppose is Western education; they are all for Islamic education because they are an avowedly Islamist group.)

This jihadist ideology does not recognize national borders, so it is foolish to portray it as content to wage local wars for political control of this country or that. It sees the world as Dar al-Harb (the realm of war) versus Dar al-Islam, in which the latter must conquer the former. In fact, as I noted here at Ordered Liberty a few days ago—citing Tom Joscelyn’s Long War Journal partner, Bill Roggio—Boko Haram’s leader, Abubaker Shekau, explicitly threatened the United States (in sympathy with al Qaeda) in 2010: “Do not think jihad is over. Rather, jihad has just begun. America, die with your fury.” Like al Qaeda, Boko Haram sees itself as at war with the West and non-Muslims generally, not just with the Nigerian government.

I will be presumptuous again regarding what George Will may be thinking because I have expressed a similar frustration for many years. I’ve always objected to the term “War on Terror.” My problem with it is not just that “terrorism” is a tactic rather than an identifiable group of people, and therefore that the term “War on Terror” conveys a reluctance to name the enemy we are fighting against. It is also that the imprecision of the term “War on Terror” easily lends itself to mission creep: You start out fighting jihadists who mass-murdered Americans and the next thing you know you’re in a (now) thirteen-year-old futile experiment to bring Western democracy to sharia societies—a mission that very few Americans would have supported using our troops for but one that slipstreamed behind the effort to fight “terror.” After a while, under the same spell of political correctness that produced the term “War on Terror” in the first place, the government is institutionalizing procedures that undermine liberty under the guise of combatting “terror”—e.g., intrusive, non-particularized, unreasonable searches of everyone who wants to get on a plane or enter a building, 99.999 percent of whom clearly pose no threat to anyone.

If what George Will is saying is that we should be clear in what we mean by “terrorism” so that we have an accurate understanding of who the real enemy is, he is right. But you do not advance your understanding, or your security, by failing to call real terrorists terrorists. Boko Haram jihadists are real terrorists and their organization should have been designated as a terrorist organization several many years ago.

Read more here.