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Archive for the ‘Gun control’ category
Cartoons of the Day
June 15, 2016No letup seen in ISIS terror for US, Western cities
June 15, 2016No letup seen in ISIS terror for US, Western cities, DEBKAfile, June 15, 2016
US President Barack Obama offers no clear strategy for destroying ISIS other than predicting a long, hard road for his too-little, too-late military interventions overseas. That was evident from his latest speech Tuesday, June 14. Realizing this, Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Bagdadi still does not feel threatened by military defeat, and whenever his forces are pushed back on one front, he promptly opens a new one.
And so, when earlier this year, US and Russian-backed local forces aided by air strikes began forcing ISIS out of territory it had occupied since 2014 in Syria and Iraq. ISIS shifted a large part of its forces to Libya and opened a third front there.
The 5,000 Islamist fighters were quietly moved from Iraq to southern Jordan, from there to the Sinai Peninsula and from Egypt to Libya. How come that neither the Americans nor anyone else in the West acted to thwart this large-scale military movement?
In Libya, the Islamists partly made up for the shortfall in revenue caused by the financial and military measures which President Obama described at length Tuesday when he outlined his war in ISIS. After the US bombed the Syrian oil wells and refineries captured by ISIS, Al-Baghdadi found new sources of income by seizing Libyan oil facilities, smuggling migrants out of Africa and flogging arms on Middle East black markets.
Only after ISIS had got itself well organized in Libya, some 200km from Europe, did the Americans and Europeans step in to launch a limited military strike.
ISIS also boosted another important front by launching and sponsoring terrorist assaults in American and European cities.
President Obama described the war on the terror organization from a one-sided perspective, as though only his side was making progress on the battlefield. However, DEBKAfile military and counter terrorism sources say this account is skewed. Like any other tough war still in progress, both contestants have good days of achievements and bad days of failures.
The Orlando terror attack on June 12, when 49 Americans were murdered by a young Muslim man who swore allegiance to al-Baghdadi was one of the bad days, on which America suffered an agonizing blow.
In his speech, Obama bent all his rhetoric skill and intelligence to drawing a thick line between 29-year-old Omar Mateen and “one of the world’s great religions” by dismissing him as a “disturbed individual” notwithstanding the mass-murderer’s oath of allegiance to the ISIS leader.
Obviously, any young Muslim ready to die in the service of ISIS for a terrorist attack on harmless civilians is “disturbed.”
This label is not a strategy and it will endure in the very short term only up to the next attack by an Islamic terrorist. Neither can such language be simplistically applied for thwarting terrorism, such as the jihadist killing sprees at San Bernardino, Paris and Brussels, the blowing-up of Russian and Egyptians airliners, the murderous assaults in Amman, Jordan and the Sarona Market in Tel Aviv – and now, Orlando, which capping a run of disasters that spread like a malignant plague in under a year.
Obama’s words will not reassure worried and suffering Americans that the plague is over. His tactic, used also by the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, to urge restricting the purchase of guns as the main root of the evil, is no more than a distraction from the main cause. Denying Muslim terrorists free access to assault rifles will not stop them from getting hold of these guns and other weapons of death from illicit sources.
The same goes for Obama’s lengthy defense against critics who accuse him of deliberately avoiding using the term “radical Islam” in relation to terror.
“What exactly would using this label accomplish?” he asked rhetorically. “What exactly would it change? Would it make ISIL less committed to try and kill Americans?”
The truth is that a clear and precise definition of the enemy is vital to any nation and army fighting a war. When this definition is fuzzy or imprecise, the war is liable to continue to limp along as it does today against an enemy whose main advantage is relentless, undivided resolve.
Even if Obama is correct in calling ISIS a perversion of Islam that is not shared by a billion Muslims worldwide, it will continue to spread, in the absence of a practical strategy for stemming Islamic terror, and American and European cities will continue to live under its dark cloud.
Is ISIS a GOP Franchise?
June 14, 2016Is ISIS a GOP Franchise? Front Page Magazine, Caroline Glick, June 14, 2016
Originally published by the Jerusalem Post.
Making clear the partisan assault intrinsic to Obama’s position, following his statement Sunday, Democratic Senator from Connecticut Richard Blumenthal blamed Republicans for the massacre at the Pulse.
Referring to the jihadist attack as “a public health crisis,” caused by “gun violence,” Blumenthal alleged that fifty people who went dancing in Orlando Saturday night never made it home because Republican Senators oppose Obama’s bill to limit gun ownership rights.
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Is Islamic State opposed to gay marriage? Was anger at the US Supreme Court’s decision mandating recognition of homosexual marriage what prompted Omar Mateen to massacre fifty Americans at the gay nightclub in Orlando on Saturday night? What about gun control? Is Islamic State, to which Mateen announced his allegiance as he mowed down innocents like blades of grass, a libertarian group that abhors limitations on private ownership of firearms? In other words, are Islamic State and its fellow jihadists from Iran to Hamas, Hezbollah, Boko Haram and al Qaida adjuncts of the Republican Party? Is Omar Baghdadi, the self-declared caliph at the helm of ISIS a social conservative, a libertarian and a card carrying member of the GOP, or just one of the three? Because President Barack Obama seems to think that this is the question most Americans should be asking. In his statement on the massacre on Sunday, Obama placed Mateen’s action in the context the partisan debate on gay rights and gun control.
With regard to the former, Obama said that the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, which was the site of the attack was more than a mere nightclub. It was, “a place of solidarity and empowerment where people have come together to raise awareness, to speak their minds and to advocate for their civil rights.” In other words, Obama intimated, the victims were murdered because Mateen opposed all of those things, specifically.
Turning to gun rights, Obama said, “The shooter was apparently armed with a handgun and a powerful assault rifle. This massacre is therefore a further reminder of how easy it is for someone to get their hands on a weapon that lets them shoot people in a school, or in a house of worship, or a movie theater, or in a nightclub. And we have to decide if that’s the kind of country we want to be. And to actively do nothing is a decision as well.” So as the president sees things, if you oppose limitations on firearm ownership, then you’re on Mateen’s side.
To say that Obama’s behavior is unpresidential is an understatement. His behavior is dangerous. It imperils the United States and its citizens.
Adolf Hitler did not go to war against Great Britain because he opposed parliamentary democracy. Hitler went to war against Britain because he wanted to rule the world and Britain stood in his way.
Just so, Islamic jihadists are not sides in America’s domestic policy debates about gun ownership and gay rights. Islamic jihadists like Mateen, the Tsarnaev brothers from Boston, Nidal Malik Hassan at Ft. Hood, Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi at Garland, Texas, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik in San Bernadino didn’t decide to slaughter innocents because of their passionate opposition to the liberal takeover of the US Supreme Court.
They killed Americans because they thought that doing so advances their goal of instituting the dominion of Islamic totalitarians across the world. They oppose freedom and democracy because democracy and freedom stand in the way of their goal to subordinate humanity to an Islamic caliphate.
Maybe Obama is right that more limitations on gun ownership would have limited Mateen’s ability to acquire the means to slaughter fifty people. Then again, maybe if guns were easier to come by, Mateen’s victims would have stopped him as soon as he started firing.
There are data supporting both views. A learned exchange about whether or not restrictions on gun ownership would advance or detract from the fight against Islamic violence would be worthwhile.
But to his disgrace, Obama is not remotely interested in having that debate. To the contrary, he has silenced it for nearly eight years. And as he made clear on Sunday, he has no intention of enabling such a discussion now.
The same Obama who was quick to blame permissive gun laws and anti-gay discrimination for the bloodbath, refused to mention the fact that Islam was Mateen’s expressed motive for committing the carnage.
While unforgivable, Obama’s silence on the cause of Mateen’s bloodbath was predictable. From the outset of his first term Obama has studiously avoided discussing the Islamic motivation that stands behind most of the terrorism in the US and throughout the world.
The most devastating outcome of Obama’s behavior is not necessarily the policies he has adopted to counter Islamic violence. Some of those policies are reasonable. Some of his policies are dangerous and destructive. And it is important to discuss each of them on its merits.
The most devastating, and at this point clearly premeditated, outcome of Obama’s refusal to name the cause of the violence is that he has made it illegitimate to discuss it. He has made it controversial for Americans to talk about Islamic supremacism, extremism, violence and war for world domination.
He has made substantive criticism of his policies tantamount to bigotry. And he has rendered the public debate about the most salient strategic threat to American lives, liberty and national security a partisan issue.
Today in Obama’s America, only Republicans use the terms Islamic terrorism or radicalism or jihad. Democrats pretend those things don’t exist.
Making clear the partisan assault intrinsic to Obama’s position, following his statement Sunday, Democratic Senator from Connecticut Richard Blumenthal blamed Republicans for the massacre at the Pulse.
Referring to the jihadist attack as “a public health crisis,” caused by “gun violence,” Blumenthal alleged that fifty people who went dancing in Orlando Saturday night never made it home because Republican Senators oppose Obama’s bill to limit gun ownership rights.
This sort of talk, which makes opponents of leftist policies and ideology illegitimate, is arguably Obama’s dangerous legacy.
Obama’s efforts to render discussion of Islamic violence an illegitimate topic of debate is part of his larger policy of Europeanizing American politics.
For more than a generation, the Left’s policies have reigned supreme in Europe. For leftist ideologues and politicians, controlling policies was never sufficient though. To truly rule, they set out to control the public discourse in order to delegitimize their opponents.
And they succeeded. Today it is impossible for Europeans to openly debate the policies and social forces that affect their lives.
For instance, Islamic immigration is the most pressing public policy issue in Europe today. But due to the Left’s destruction of free speech through criminal statute and social pressure, in Europe today you cannot mention the word “Islamic” in the context of the public discourse on Islamic immigration without risking social exclusion and even criminal prosecution.
Many Americans have expressed alarm, surprise and dismay at Donald Trump’s success in winning the Republican nomination. They note, angrily and to a degree, justifiably, that Trump’s policies of nationalist isolationism and economic protectionism are antithetical to the pillars of the Republican Party.
But what this storm of protest misses is that Trump’s rise to power, and his prospects for defeating Hillary Clinton in November are not fueled by popular opposition to Obama’s foreign policies, or his economic policies per se. Trump’s supporters are attracted to the outspoken businessman for reasons that eclipse the partisan discussions of those issues.
Trump’s main attraction for his supporters – millions of whom voted in the Republican primaries for the first time process — is his willingness to attack Obama’s efforts to delegitimize his political opponents. Obama’s success in making his opponents toxic has caused millions of Americans to feel shut out from the national discourse and national life.
Trump’s supporters object to Obama’s Europeanization of American politics far more than they object to his health care policies or his counter-terror policies. They see in Trump a leader who is willing to “tell it like it is,” and they are captivated by this aspect of his personality. In Trump they see a means to regain their own voice in the public square.
Trump’s supporters understand that the Pulse nightclub in Orlando didn’t become slaughterhouse because Americans disagree on gun control or gay rights. They know that it became the scene of the largest mass murder in US history because Mateen, like his fellow jihadists believed that Allah wants his followers to kill innocents to advance the cause of Islamic world domination.
Trump’s supporters are angry that Obama has made stating the obvious illegitimate. And they are right to be angry.
America must not become Europe. And the most urgent step that must be taken to preserve America as America is to make discussing reality legitimate again.
Cartoons of the Day
June 14, 2016
US intelligence misses cues to terror – again
June 13, 2016US intelligence misses cues to terror – again, DEBAfile,June 13, 2016
Moner Mohammad Abusalha, the suicide bomber who was the Orlando killer’s buddy
Omar Mir Seddique Mateen, a US Muslim citizen aged 29, son of Afghan migrants, perpetrated the deadliest shooting attack in American history on June 12, when he massacred 50 people and injured 53 at the Pulse gay club in Orlando, Florida, with an AR 15 assault rifle and a Glock 17 handgun.
The guns were purchased legally a few days earlier at a local shop. This alone ought to have alerted the various US intelligence and surveillance agencies responsible for countering terrorism – except that, for lack of coordination, they missed the fact that a man twice questioned by the FBI was suddenly loading up on deadly weapons.
Mateen fit the profile of an Islamic terrorist, whose attributes the incumbent US administration consistently refuses to acknowledge: He was a Muslim, whose Afghan immigrant father is a Taliban supporter; a religious extremist, who recently made the pilgrimage to Mecca; he was divorced, known for violence, and licensed as a security officer to carry a gun.
The Orlando killer had long been overdue for close monitoring – or least a flag to prevent him from working as a security officer or carrying arms.
In 2013-14, the FBI interviewed him after he made “inflammatory remarks” to a colleague, before closing its investigation.
In 2014, the FBI hauled him in again over a connection with Mohammad Abu-Salha, a 22-year old Palestinian American. They had grown up together at the small Florida coastal town of Fort Pierce. Abu Salha went off to Syria, joined the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front and killed himself in a suicide attack by driving a massive truck bomb into a restaurant filled with Syrian government soldiers.
Yet the FBI against closed the file on Mateen after determining that the links between the two young Muslims did not warrant a full-dress inquiry.
Compiling all the known data on the Orlando killer with the results of the FBI interviews with him would have placed him high on the list of suspects and called in for further questioning.
The oversights of US law enforcement, intelligence and security agencies recur each time Islamists terrorist strike. The Ramadan 2016 attack in Orlando showed that no lessons had been learned from the lapses that led to 9/11.
The FBI erred gravely in closing the case over the Mateen connection with the Palestinian American suicide bomber. This explains why senior FBI officials are down-playing the importance of that connection.
When he was exculpated, the federal authorities also discontinued electronic surveillance of the terrorist’s movements. So they missed his mounting extremism, his frequent attendance at a mosque led by a radical imam, who regularly incited his flock to murder (“Gays must die”). He thus kept his Security Officer’s ID which gave him access to secure government sites. His name was kept on the list of licensees for carrying firearms.
It is especially hard to understand the lackadaisical handling by federal agents of this prime suspect when the FBI Director James Comey was reiterating: “The Islamic State remains the top threat America is facing.”
Before entering the Pulse night club with the intent to slaughter those partying inside, Mateen called 911 and swore allegiance to the leader of the ‘Islamic State’ Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and recalled Tamerlan and Dzhokhar, the brothers responsible for the 2013 Boston Marathon terror attack.
For 20 minutes, the dispatchers did not understanding what he was saying and lost the chance to triangulate his cellular phone’s location and send police to nab him.
At the door of the club, he got into a brief exchange of fire with policeman before going in. Mateen went from room to room, firing well aimed semi-automatic rounds, killing tens of people, wounding tens more, and rounding up 30 people as hostages. He knew enough from his experience as a security guard to lock them in the restrooms which had no windows.
Long before the police, the city hall or any other official entity came to their senses, the club’s management sent a message via social networks: ‘Everyone get out of pulse and keep running.’
For three precious hours, dozens of police cars and ambulances, with FBI agents, dog handlers, special bomb disposal units, and other security officials huddled outside the club without doing anything. During these hours only a few shots sounded and many of those wounded lost their lives from blood loss and lack of medical treatment.
Only at 5 am, did the special anti-terror unit enter the scene, with one team using small detonators and firing at the terrorist to distract him while a force of 9 officers blew up the opposite wall and broke a hole through which officers could enter, fire and kill the terrorist. This entire event took 4 minutes.
Despite the three-hour wait, not enough ambulances had reached the scene, and some of the casualties had to be driven in civilian vehicles.
Mateen committed his murderous assault on the 300 partygoers at the Pulse club with ease, due to a number of factors:
- US law enforcement agencies have shown inexplicable tolerance toward Islamist extremists to the point that the Orlando killer was free to purchase an unlimited amount of deadly weapons.
- Due to lack of coordination between intelligence and law enforcement agencies, this killer was able to gain employment with a firm that trains its personnel in the use of firearms.
- As soon as the local police were alerted to gunfire at the door of the club, they should have swarmed in to neutralize the killer. The three-hour wait for the SWAT team’s arrival betokened weakness and an unwillingness to fight, so leaving the horrendous event in the hands of the terrorist.
- Pinning the dreadful episode on lack of gun control avoids the issue. Terrorists will always find murder weapons – if not guns, then homemade bombs like the Boston Marathon brothers, kitchen knives or vehicles. Even in countries with strict gun control, there is always a black market.
Ramadan Massacre in Orlando
June 13, 2016Ramadan Massacre in Orlando, Front Page Magazine, Robert Spencer, June 13, 2016
(The Orlando massacre happened because of homophobic Christians and their horrid firearms. CAIR and Obama have told us so and it’s true. It had nothing to do with Islam and to claim that it did is Islamophobic. Muslims are the victims. Thus spake the left. When will they blame anthropomorphic climate change? — DM)
It was the worst mass shooting ever on American soil: Omar Mateen, 29, opened fire at the Pulse, an Orlando, Florida gay nightclub, on Saturday night. Mateen murdered at least fifty people and wounded another 53. The death count is almost certain to go higher, as many are quite gravely wounded. Mateen was a Muslim who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and mentioned the Boston Marathon jihad killers in a 911 call just before he started shooting. Thus in the wake of the jihad massacre, it was time for the Leftist political and media elites to do what they always do first and foremost after every jihad massacre: make sure that no one thought ill of Islam.
The FBI, to its credit, immediately declared the massacre a terror attack, but Barack Obama was circumspect about what kind: he declared that it was too early to know “the precise motivations of the killer.” This despite the fact that not only had Mateen pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and made reference to the Tsarnaev brothers, but also the Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attack, and the FBI is investigating reports that Mateen recited Islamic prayers during the massacre. On top of all that, the attack took place during the Muslim month of Ramadan, during which the Islamic State has called for jihad attacks against Americans.
Nonetheless, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, along with many other Leftists, tried to turn the jihad attack into a commercial for rolling back Americans’ Second Amendment rights, tweeting: “We mourn with the people of Orlando and the LGBT community as a whole on the news that -once again- we have lost precious lives to the gun.” Who knew that guns could be so diabolical and anti-gay?
Leftist responses ranged from the ominous to the absurd. Ominously, Facebook and Reddit turned to censorship to try to prevent people from thinking ill of Islam. Facebook removed the Stop Islamization of America (SIOA) page, which had been up for six years and had over 55,000 members, and Reddit began banning people who dared to mention that the killer was a Muslim.
On the absurd side, ACLU staff attorney Chase Strangio tweeted that the massacre was the fault of conservative Christians: “You know what is gross — your thoughts and prayers and Islamophobia after you created this anti-queer climate.” Does the illustrious Strangio actually believe that Omar Mateen was incited to commit mass murder in the gay nightclub in Orlando by an “anti-queer climate” created by Christian conservatives? He probably does, since, as a Leftist, he knows that non-Muslims are always and everywhere to blame for atrocities that Muslims commit.
Not only are non-Muslims to blame for Muslim atrocities, but Muslims are their victims, even when no Muslims are killed. AFP reported that “Florida officials also invited a local Islamic leader to address the media in a bid to preempt a possible backlash against the Muslim community.” Imam Muhammad Musri of the Islamic Society of Central Florida warned against“sensationalizing” the story.
In a similar vein, gay activist Steven W Thrasher wrote sanctimoniously in the Guardian: “Let us remember that we have never really blamed all Christians, Republicans or Democrats (many who have organized en masse to subject queer people to systematic violence and destruction at different points in American history) for the violence waged against us. We should remember that again today. We should remember not to blame all members of any other religion or political ideology for what one person does.” Right. The problem is that any examination of the motives and goals of people such as Omar Mateen, and any consideration of what can be done about them, is always met with the accusation that such examinations and considerations constitute blaming all Muslims for the actions of jihadis. It is so obviously fallacious that it is hard not to suspect that it is an intentional obfuscation.
In reality, the motivation for the jihad is quite clear, but Barack Obama doesn’t want to acknowledge that, because to do so would force him to confront the reality of Islamic teaching regarding gays. The Qur’an says: “If two men among you are guilty of lewdness, punish them both. If they repent and amend, leave them alone; for Allah is Oft-returning, Most Merciful.” (4:16) That seems rather mild, but there’s more. The Qur’an also depicts Allah raining down stones upon people for engaging in homosexual activity: “We also sent Lot. He said to his people: “Do you commit lewdness such as no people in creation committed before you? For you practise your lusts on men in preference to women: you are indeed a people transgressing beyond bounds….And we rained down on them a shower of brimstone: Then see what was the end of those who indulged in sin and crime!” (7:80)
Muhammad makes clear that Muslims should be the executors of the wrath of Allah by killing gays. A hadith depicts Muhammad saying: “If you find anyone doing as Lot’s people did, kill the one who does it, and the one to whom it is done.” (Abu Dawud 38:4447) And: “Stone the upper and the lower, stone them both.” (Ibn Majah 3:20:2562)
Combine this with the fact that Islamic State spokesman Abu Mohammad al-Adnani recently called on Muslims to use this Ramadan to “get prepared, be ready … to make it a month of calamity everywhere for nonbelievers…especially for the fighters and supporters of the caliphate in Europe and America,” and Mateen’s pledge of allegiance to the Islamic State, and there is no doubt whatsoever what Omar Mateen was trying to do.
The Left has chosen to protect Islam at all costs, even at the expense of its other victim groups. When the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) several years ago ran ads highlighting the mistreatment of gays in Islamic law, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, which is its city council, issued a resolution condemning not that mistreatment, but our ads. Gay advocates such as Theresa Sparks and Chris Stedman attacked us for daring to call attention to the institutionalized mistreatment of gays under Islamic law. Their gay advocacy doesn’t extend to standing up to Sharia oppression of gays, even though that oppression is far more virulent and violent than anything from “right-wing extremists” in the U.S.
And you can’t blame them: given the Leftist/jihadist alliance, it’s clear that if they spoke out against Sharia mistreatment of gays, they would no longer be invited to the best parties, and might even be branded as “right-wing.” Their moral cowardice and duplicity, however, are obvious, and monstrous in the light of what has just happened in Orlando. The Left’s continuing and now reflexive obfuscation and denial in the wake of every jihad massacre only ensures that there will be many, many more such massacres.
Orlando Shooting- Gun Control or Jihadist Control?
June 13, 2016Obama: ‘We’ are to blame, not Islamic terrorism, for massacre
June 12, 2016Obama: ‘We’ are to blame, not Islamic terrorism, for massacre, New York Post, John Podhoretz, June 12, 2016
President Barack Obama walks away from his podium after speaking about the massacre at a Orlando nightclub during a news conference at the White House in Washington, Sunday, June 12, 2016. Photo: AP
So determined is the president to avoid the subject of Islamist, ISIS-inspired or ISIS-directed terrorism that he concluded his remarks with an astonishing insistence that “we need the strength and courage to change” our attitudes toward the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community.
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Omar Mateen called the cops to pledge his fealty to ISIS as he was carrying out his mass murderer in Orlando early Sunday morning. Twelve hours later, the president of the United States declared that “we have no definitive assessment on the motivation” of Omar Mateen but that “we know he was a person filled with hate.”
So I guess the president thinks Mateen didn’t mean it?
Here again, and horribly, we have an unmistakable indication that Obama finds it astonishingly easy to divorce himself from a reality he doesn’t like — the reality of the Islamist terror war against the United States and how it is moving to our shores in the form of lone-wolf attacks.
He called it “terror,” which it is. But using the word “terror” without a limiting and defining adjective is like a doctor calling a disease “cancer” without making note of the affected area of the body — because if he doesn’t know where the cancer is and what form it takes, he cannot attack it effectively and seek to extirpate it.
So determined is the president to avoid the subject of Islamist, ISIS-inspired or ISIS-directed terrorism that he concluded his remarks with an astonishing insistence that “we need the strength and courage to change” our attitudes toward the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community.
That’s just disgusting. There’s no other word for it.
America’s national attitude toward LGBT people didn’t shoot up the Pulse nightclub. This country’s national attitude has undergone a sea-change in the past 20 years, by the way, in case the president hasn’t noticed.
An Islamist terrorist waging war against the United States killed and injured 103 people on our soil. We Americans do not bear collective responsibility for this attack. Quite the opposite.
The attack on the Pulse nightclub was an attack on us all, no less than the World Trade Center attack.
To suggest we must look inward to explain this is not only unseemly but practically an act of conscious misdirection on the president’ s part to direct out attention away from Omar Mateen’s phone call.
True to form, the president spoke more words about the scourge of guns than about the threat of terror. In doing so, he actually retards rather than advances the cause of gun control he so passionately advocates.
A president totally and credibly committed to the destruction of ISIS and other terror groups seeking to bring the war to us might earn the political and moral capital to seek more extensive limits on gun ownership.
A president who cannot name the enemy even as he anthropomorphizes the weapon the enemy is a president unable to bring anyone to his side who’s not already there.
To fight back against the evils of San Bernardino and Orlando, we do need change — and fortunately for us, it’s constitutionally mandated change. It’s the change required by the 22nd Amendment — the change that will compel Barack Obama to leave the White House on January 20, 2017 after completing his second term with America less safe than it was when he took office.
Omar Mateen Worked for Company that Provides Security to Federal Buildings
June 12, 2016Omar Mateen Worked for Company that Provides Security to Federal Buildings, Power Line,
(Feel safer now? — DM)
Ponder this: G4S, a major, nationally known security firm, has confirmed that Omar Mateen had been employed by them since 2007.
G4S’s web site says:
For more than 50 years, G4S has partnered with government agencies – from the Department of State to the Department of Homeland Security among several others – in many capacities that include:
* Systems integration services that deliver world-class electronic and physical security solutions for critical infrastructure and government facilities
* Security management products, including access control, video management and facility management software
State-of-the-art security software, risk management, incident reporting and facility management technology* Security personnel who are consistently ranked the best in the security business
Mateen had a security license, and I take it that he was one of those “security personnel.” Then there is this:
Ensuring the safety of travelers and the efficiency of the international transport system
In the global economy, international trade and travel is reliant upon the security of our vast network of ports and airports.
At G4S, we know that the key to releasing wider benefits for our clients is to always look at the overall picture to consider solutions that transform performance.
G4S works with clients to understand the specific security issues they face. We design solutions to meet those issues, bringing together our expertise in logistics, technology, project management and managing the world’s biggest security personnel work force.
Our solutions and capabilities include:
* Design and build automated video surveillance systems to improve security and enable facility operators to detect and monitor threats
* Perimeter security enhancements that include lighting, thermal imaging cameras, CCTV and motion-detecting systems
* Video analytics, wireless communications links and vessel traffic monitoring systems
And this:
Nuclear Facility Security
High-risk facilities need a partner with the experience and capability to deliver comprehensive security solutions
As the security solutions pioneer for the high-level critical infrastructure industry, G4S has an outstanding reputation, strong historical commitment and unsurpassed expertise for our clients.
* G4S has partnered with more than 90 percent of U.S. nuclear facilities
* Our force-on-force prep has sites earning a 100 percent passing rate
* Our engineering team has performed design work for more than 80 percent of U.S. nuclear facilities
* Our technology has systems in more than 70 percent of U.S. nuclear facilities
In the wake of Mateen’s terrorist attack, liberals have already begun blathering about guns. Bernie Sanders, for example:
I gotta tell you over 25 years ago, I believed that in this country we should not be selling automatic weapons which are designed to kill people. We have got to do everything that we can on top of that to make sure that guns do not fall into the hands of people who should not have them, criminals, people who are mentally ill. So that struggle continues.
Mateen didn’t use an automatic weapon. He used a semiautomatic rifle and a handgun that presumably was also semiautomatic. A large majority of the handguns sold in the U.S. are semiautomatics, and, while I haven’t seen statistics on rifles, the most popular rifle in the U.S. is the AR-15. Many millions have been sold, and many other rifles are also semiautomatics. And, news flash, Bernie: every firearm is “designed to kill people.”
Everyone would agree that it is desirable to keep guns out of “the hands of people who should not have them.” In fact, that is tautological. But Omar Mateen wasn’t mentally ill, and until yesterday he wasn’t a criminal. He evidently passed whatever background check was necessary to work for a well-respected security firm. While we don’t yet know where he obtained his firearms, it is reasonable to assume that he bought them legally, and would have been able to buy them legally under any regime that liberals have proposed, other than a ban on semiautomatic rifles.
Rather than talking about keeping guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them, how about a narrower focus on how we can insure that jihadists are not hired to provide security at federal buildings, airports and nuclear power plants?
The mountainous Arab Israeli gun problem has spiralled beyond control
January 7, 2016The mountainous Arab Israeli gun problem has spiralled beyond control, DEBKAfile, January 7, 2016
The mountainous quantities of illegal weapons, run-of-the-mill and exotic, in the hands of Israeli Arabs have grown to unmanageable proportions. No Israeli civilian police, or even military force, has the scale of manpower required to mount raids in Israeli Arab population centers – ranging from Galilee in the North, the Triangle and Jaffa in the Center and the Bedouin of the Negev – for a comprehensive campaign to impound them – not even if backed by tanks and commando units.It is pointless to call on all 1.5 million Arab, Bedouin, Druze and Circassian minority citizens to voluntarily surrender their guns. Almost every individual has at least one shooter. The accumulation would not shame any Middle East militia.
The authorities’ inability to deal effectively with this arsenal is not only shocking but has also made the Israeli underworld rich. And even more alarming, it provides a profitable link between terrorist organizations and both Israeli and Palestinian crime mobs and drug dealers. The failure to enforce order in some parts of the population, while other communities abide by the law, has created two parallel societies living by different rules.
The official data on the quantity of guns loose and unaccounted for are sketchy, bu the variety is hair-raising: grenade launchers; AT-3 Sagger and BGM-71 TOW antitank missiles; M-16 and Kalashnikov automatic rifles, submarine guns – mostly Uzis; heavy and light machine guns and mortars; explosive devices for remote detonation; concussion, gas and stun grenades; diverse ammunition; magazines; IDF uniforms; protective and bulletproof vests; night vision equipment; and much more.
The approximate black market price list we have obtained includes handguns – 15,000 shekels; grenades – 2,500 shekels; M-16 automatic rifles – 50,000 shekels; explosive devices (depending on size and power) 15,000-25,000 shekels; hand grenade – 500 shekels.
Arab Israeli leaders, especially their representatives in the Knesset, have vocally and repeatedly appealed to the police to collect the weapons loose in Arab villages and cities. They see their prevalence as a major cause of the violence and disorder rampant inside those communities. This is no doubt true, but there is also an element of hypocrisy in their demand, in view of their own failure to address – and even exploit – the underlying causes of the epidemic
1. Israeli Arabs customarily resort to the use of guns rather than the law to resolve their disputes and conflicts of interest.
2. It has finally been admitted that 90% of the weapons in illegal hands today were stolen from Israeli army depots, some by traffickers in uniform. Those soldiers were not averse to flogging arms to gangs capable of turning against their own units.
According to DEBKAfile’s defense and counterterrorism sources, the remaining 10 percent, mostly handguns and submachine guns, are manufactured on underground production lines in the West Bank, Gaza or even within the Green Line in Israel. A small amount of the weapons is smuggled by land from the Sinai, Jordan and Lebanon.
3. The IDF’s failure to properly guard its weapons and ammunition depots is stunning, scarcely illuminated by the figures the IDF has presented to various parliamentary committees: From 2010 to 2015, an average of only 100 weapons per year were officially stolen from army bases, military vehicles and the homes of soldiers.
However, army and police officers familiar with the figures say the number is tenfold, more like 1,000 pieces of weaponry stolen year by year.
Officers and enlisted men whose weapons were stolen receive only light penalties. However, robbing arms depots has become endemic, with Bedouin in the south making the Negev training bases their “home ground.”
They follow IDF units on exercises and steal anything lying about, even cooking utensils and sleeping bags.
There is a sour joke in IDF tank and artillery battalions, that every maneuver has its “camp followers” of Bedouin gun and ammunition thieves.
4. Internal Security Minister Gilad Erdan, addressing the problem in a Knesset debate on Jan. 6, said that a comprehensive police roundup of illegal guns in Arab communities would immediately raise the charge that Israel was persecuting the Arab minority. He was answering charges of negligence hurled by Arab Knesset Member Ahmad Tibi.
5. The symbiosis that has developed between regular crime mobs and terrorists further boosts the illicit gun traffic. The availability of weapons encourages serious crimes. The “crime families” most notorious for their uncontrolled use of gunfire are to be found embedded in the Arab community, including the mixed towns of Lod, Jaffa and the Arab Triangle towns. Some of these mob chiefs may also contribute their violent services to Palestinian terrorist organizations.
Their activities certainly have a detrimental effect on the majority of their societies who are law abiding and uninvolved in criminal pursuits.
The problem could become more dangerous if the Bedouin, Druze or Circassian communities decided to rise up against Israeli majority rule, because their sons enlist for service in the IDF, the police and the prisons service. They are armed from head to toe, highly trained as soldiers and may be infected with the religious or national fanaticism sweeping the region.
In any case, there is no chance of the illegal guns and arms in every Arab home and gang arsenal being relinquished voluntarily. It is no good looking to national Arab leaders to lead any effort to collect them, because its much more convenient and politically profitable to blame Israel’s national authorities for the violence fostered by a culture that has made gun possession rife and a status symbol.
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