Noor Salman and Omar Mateen (Photo: Video screenshot)
Dr. Michael Welner, a forensic psychiatrist renowned for his work both in cutting-edge legal cases and research on criminal evil, explained to Clarion Project that important questions about the wife of Omar Mateen, who attacked a gay club in Florida, remain unanswered.
He also explained how political correctness and the difficulties in discussing Islamism are undermining our ability to combat the ideology.
You can read our previous interview with Dr. Welner here. Below is the latest interview between Clarion Project’s National Security Analyst Ryan Mauro and Dr. Welner :
1. Clarion Project: What’s the significance of Omar Mateen’s wife’s role in Mateen’s actions based on what we currently know?
Dr. Welner: Mateen’s wife, Noor Salman, was aware of his objectives to carry out a mass casualty attack, and she could have easily engaged his or her own support system to stop him from doing so.
Mrs. Salman accompanied Mateen during a visit to Disneyworld that caught the attention of Disney security in April. Salman knew Mateen was purchasing offensive weaponry. And not just any gun, but an assault weapon (MCX Sig Sauer) far more expensive than needed for a mass killing – even as Mateen was quite underemployed.
Ms. Salman did not stand in the way of her husband’s activities that would “martyr” himself, knowing that her child would be fatherless and she would be without financial support. Or is there more?
The San Bernadino killers, who long planned the mass killing yet bore a child together, was the watershed of ISIS in America. ISIS has redefined Islamic feminism by embedding women in vital support roles in terror (martyrdom), recruitment and facilitation.
That Mateen was willing to leave a child behind and Salman accepting of same is an idea unthinkable to Americans and to terrorism in America. But it is a mindset indoctrinated in Palestinian life.
Salman, born of Palestinian parents and raised with traditional Islamic restrictions, was first wed in an arranged marriage with a man from the West Bank. She divorced her first husband. Yet she stayed with Mateen, who long claimed aspirations to be a martyr.
Salman did more than stay with Mateen, she admittedly participated with him in preparations for his eventual attack, including driving him to Pulse to case the nightclub. She thus actively supported her husband’s efforts, even she had family living nearby where she could separate herself. She agreed, with Mateen, to sign over the deed to their house two months before the attack on the Pulse nightclub.
Facilitators, collaborators, and handlers are the unseen support of Islamist suicide terror – especially in the Palestinian theater. How did Mateen get the resources for an MCX Sig Sauer? How did he pay for the upscale accommodations of his overseas travel? How does his wife anticipate supporting herself financially in the face of the attack – and having divested herself of her home?
Did he expect to survive, as had the San Bernadino attackers? And what then would have happened? How is it that we do not even know the identity of her first husband’s family? How is it that there is no public discussion about Mateen’s mosque or the influences who inspired him?
2. Clarion Project: When Mateen had outbursts of extremism at work, such as declarations of support for terrorist groups, he blamed it on anti-Muslim discrimination by his colleagues, basically saying that Islamophobia causes Islamic terrorism. Is this just a standard deflection tactic or is there more involved with Islamists’ incessant use of the Islamophobia card?
Dr. Welner: The American dialogue about the Islamist supremacist movement and, in fact, all of Islam is not based in fact. This is because public impressions and the nature of the dialogue we have are carefully controlled by at least three sources of influence:
1) Unregulated and below-the-radar financial influence on American lawmakers by countries ruled by sharia law,
2) intellectuals and other American media and thought-leader proxies funded by dogmatic Saudi Arabia and Qatari deep pockets. These funding resources, whose assets tie back to their respective governments, export the spread of sharia as a neoconservative would aim to export democracy. Funding now heavily influences university education, think tanks and media and promotes impression management by respected academia deliberately dissimulates and whitewashes Islamist terrorism and its broader goals, and
3) CAIR, the Council on American Islamic Relations, who have been ceded standing by the press to speak for Muslims in America despite a legacy of apologia and of actively teaching the Muslim community to impede law enforcement’s investigations of terror inquiries.
Islamic supremacist advocates and, more importantly, the organizations empowered to speak for Islam are very sensitive to American public opinion and the buttons to push among social activists.
At a time that enhanced interrogations and waterboarding came under scrutiny in Afghanistan and Guantanamo, for example, al-Qaeda was teaching its conscripts to assert that they were tortured when they went into custody.
They could rely upon an academia-media complex that grasped at any opportunity to attack a Republican president through the safe space of declared “social justice.” Al-Qaeda exploited these willing opinion soldiers to fuel public sentiment against Guantanamo Bay and to delegitimize the U.S.-led war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
The Islamic supremacists have also cynically co-opted national sensitivities on other fronts. Recognizing the mainstream news media’s identification with black grievances against the police, the Islamists have successfully fused the idea of blacks targeted for their skin color to advance the notion that Muslims are victimized as a direct result of discussion of the centrality of Islam to Islamic supremacist terror incidents.
President Obama, has been the highest authority to subscribe to this false canard. The President has famously disassociated Islamic supremacist terrorism from Islam, often with servile platitudes that embellish Islam’s history in America or submissive deference to “The Prophet.”
The administration has promoted a CVE (Countering Violent Extremism) program that emphasizes the purported risks of “right wing terrorist” groups in America. While the facts demonstrate otherwise, an imposed groupthink has rooted out teaching and training from among law enforcement that engages the Islamist threat with any appreciation for its urgency and current relevance.
References to Islamic terror have been literally erased, right down to “Allah” being airbrushed from transcripts of the Mateen 911 calls.
Political correctness extinguishes any criticism of Islam or its intolerance to alternative lifestyles. This includes speech laws in many otherwise free countries that equate criticism of Islam with hate speech, laws which are enforced particularly as they relate to Islam.
With freedom controlled, even where expression is normally free, the public submits. The psychological intimidation by legal repercussion extends what is accomplished by terror or, if not, by threat of terror.
The consequences have filtered all the way through American life, as they have in Europe. A migrant gang sex assault in Idaho of a small child is suppressed by the local authorities. Nidal Hassan’s advocacy of martyrdom is not sufficient to remove him from active military duty, and when he later embarks on a mass shooting of the troops to whom he was to apply a Hippocratic Oath, the military – which answers to the Commander-in-Chief – insists that it is a work accident.
Unquestionably dangerous prisoners released from Guantanamo Bay, only to return to attack and kill American servicemen and Ankara airport-goers alike.
Surveillance programs that would monitor mosques in which attendees are particularly poisoned to support terrorism shut down, despite court support of their legality and police respect for their effectiveness.
Americans who cared about their country reported concerns about Mateen to entrusted law enforcement agencies, only to have investigations shut down. All of these systemic errors feed back to the active thought control and stifling of free thinking about efforts of the Islamic supremacist movement to gain submission of non-believers.
The first of those affected are Muslims themselves, because open-mindedness is crushed by sharia advocacy as opposed to pluralism advocacy among Muslims.
The only solution is a nonviolent but defiant revolt of free speech that demands that leaders and the news and information media stop lying to our free society about terrorism and its origins.
Only from that point can collaboration then begin between the general public and Muslims who are invested in a pluralistic America to undertake a constructive anti-terror policy that wins the war that we are now losing.
____________________
(We are currently) not losing by terror, but by the success of our Machiavellian enemy (who has been able to) buy the influence of those who do not appreciate that non-violent war is more destructive than terrorism and who exploit our inherent empathic nature as Americans as the first step on the road to submission.
After a distinguished career spanning more than three decades in the military, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn was sacked in 2014 as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
When he asked the director of national intelligence James Clapper, who came to deliver the news to him, if his forced retirement had anything to do with his leadership of the agency, the answer was “no.”
“I knew then it had more to do with the stand I took on radical Islamism and the expansion of al Qaeda and its associated movements,” Flynn wrote in a first-person account published by theNew York Post. The account specifically calls out how the “intel system (has become) way too politicized.”
Flynn, who is reportedly one of the names surfacing as a running mate for Donald Trump, outlined his strategy for defeating America’s “global enemy,” who he defines as an alliance of secular dictatorships (North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela) with Iran and other radical Muslim countries and organizations such as the Islamic State, Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
Of the alliance, he says, “That’s a formidable coalition, and nobody should be shocked to discover that we are losing the war.”
However, Flynn believes the enemy can be defeated. He says they must be fought on both the battlefield and politically, especially through combating jihadist doctrines.
“On military battlefields, we have defeated radical Islamic forces every time we have seriously gone after them, from Iraq to Afghanistan,” he says. “Their current strength is not a reflection of their ability to overwhelm our armed forces, but rather the consequence of our mistaken and untimely withdrawal after demolishing them …
But defeat on the battlefield is not enough, according to Flynn. It is a known tenet of groups like the Islamic State that they view their battlefield successes as a nod of approval from Allah.
Flynn explains this doctrine, saying, “Defeat on battlefields does great damage to their claim to be acting as agents of divine will. After defeating al Qaeda in Iraq, we should have challenged the Islamic world and asked: ‘How did we win? Did Allah change sides?’ We need to denounce them as false prophets, as we insist on the superiority of our own political vision. “
In terms of the secular dictatorships that Islamists are allied with, the same strategy applies. “Is North Korea some sort of success story?” he asks. “Does anyone this side of a university seminar think the Cuban people prefer the Castro’s tyranny to real freedom?”
Flynn worked more than 33 years in Army intelligence, including coordinating on-the-ground operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. His colleagues included General Stanley McChrystal, General David Petraeus and Admiral Mike Mullen.
His book about the subject, The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies, is due to be released Tuesday.
(The views expressed in this article are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)
The contempt for America held by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama rivals that of Black Lives Matter, The New Black Panther Party, The Nation of Islam, The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and similar Islamist groups. Obama has tried to remake America in His own foul image. Now Hillary wants Her turn. Will we give it to Her?
In the following video, Michael Cutler speaks about the Obama-Clinton contempt for America. Rather than try to summarize the points Mr. Cutler makes, I’ll let the video speak for itself.
Leadership comes from the top, and the leadership that Obama has provided has been deadly to America.
As noted by Sheriff Clarke, Obama has been a powerful force for the racial polarization of America. The Dallas shooting gave Him a splendid opportunity to ramp up the polarization.
Judge Jeanine’s favorable comments about Black Lives Matter reflect common misconceptions, which I had shared until recently. The El Paso police chief made the comments on Black Lives Matter quoted below:
“Black Lives Matter, as far as I am concerned, is a radical hate group,” he said. “And for that purpose alone, I think the leadership of this country needs to look a little bit harder at that particular group. The consequences of what we saw in Dallas is due to their efforts.” [Emphasis added.]
According to the El Paso Times, Allen is the first black police chief in the city’s history. He’s been in charge of the department—one of the country’s largest—since 2007. And during his tenure, the city has been consistently ranked as one of the safest large cities in America. [Emphasis added.]
BATON ROUGE, La./MINNEAPOLIS (Reuters) – Protests against the shootings of two black men by police officers shut down main arteries in a number of U.S. cities on Saturday, leading to numerous arrests, scuffles and injuries in confrontations between police and demonstrators.
Undeterred by heightened concerns about safety at protests after a lone gunman killed five police officers in Dallas Thursday night, organizers went ahead with marches in the biggest metropolis, New York City, and Washington D.C., the nation’s capital, among other cities.
It was the third straight day of widespread protests after the fatal shooting of Alton Sterling, 37, by police in Baton Rouge on Tuesday and the death of Philando Castile, 32, on Wednesday night in a St. Paul, Minnesota suburb, cities which both saw heated protests on Saturday.
The most recent shooting deaths by police come after several years of contentious killings by law enforcement officers, including that of Michael Brown, a teenager whose death in the summer of 2014 caused riots and weeks of protests in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson.
On Saturday evening, hundreds of protesters shut down I-94, a major thoroughfare linking the Twin Cities, snarling traffic.
Protesters, told to disperse, threw rocks, bottles and construction rebar at officers, injuring at least three, St. Paul police said. Police made arrests and used smoke bombs and marking rounds to disperse the crowd. [Emphasis added.]
Here is a link to an article about the roots of Black Lives Matter. It’s fascinating and I hope you will read the whole thing. Here just three introductory paragraphs:
The Black Lives Matter movement (BLM) casts itself as a spontaneous uprising born of inner city frustration, but is, in fact, the latest and most dangerous face of a web of well-funded communist/socialist organizations that have been agitating against America for decades. Its agitation has provoked police killings and other violence, lawlessness and unrest in minority communities throughout the U.S. [Emphasis added.]
Nevertheless, BLM appears to be exercising considerable leverage over the Democratic Party, in part by pressuring and intimidating Democratic candidates such as Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders (VT) into embracing their cause. The movement could also assist President Obama’s exploitation of racial divisions in society beyond his final term in office. [Emphasis added.]
This report examines in detail, for the first time, how communist groups have manipulated the cause of Black Lives Matter, and how money from liberal foundations has made it all possible.
Organizations supportive of and related to Black Lives Matter
The “lead organizer” of the Dallas Black Lives Matter protest at which five police officers were murdered and others killed was apparently a quasi Muslim convert who combined “Christian” and Islamist teachings in his sermons.
A Breitbart News review of Jeff Hood’s internet footprint revealed regular posts about the apocalypse, violent retribution to police, and Hood even recently posted about the 2013 death of a self proclaimed “social justice warrior” who committed suicide by lighting himself on fire in front of a shopping mall in Texas.
Breitbart Texas’ Brandon Darby tweeted about protest organizer Jeff Hood wanting to “create a space for anger and rage” at the Dallas protest.
Reverend Hood closely follows police shootings and state executions and regularly prays for divine retribution for police, like this post in response to a police shooting in Dallas from April 24, 2015:
For now, the blood of black men will continue to roll down driveways, streets and sidewalks with impunity. However, God is not mocked. The judgment is coming. Those police who continue to spill the blood of black men will be held accountable…for black blood matters just as much as any other blood to God.
According to Pamela Geller, the shooter (Micah Johnson) “was a Facebook member of The Nation of Islam and Black Liberation Party, Obama’s old stomping grounds.” His Arabic name was “Fahed Hassen, according to Denver Police Department.”
The Nation of Islam is not an orthodox Muslim group, and subscribes to a great deal of racial mythology that is nowhere in Islamic tradition. It is, however, also true that many black Americans first enter the Nation, and then become orthodox Sunni Muslims. And given the increased racial tensions of the Obama era, many people in both the NOI and among mainstream Sunnis have a taste for the “revolution” that is brought about by means of jihad. [Emphasis added.]
In his post linked immediately above, Mr. Spencer quotes from an article posted at The Australian [subscription required] on July 9, 2016:
As the FBI and local authorities launched an investigation, their focus was expected to probe militant black rights groups set up in Dallas. Anti-police groups include the New Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton Gun Club, named after the founder of the 1960s activist Black Panther Party.
I wonder whether the FBI, et al, focused as expected but which CAIR, et al, would have resisted.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), as well as other Islamist groups, have been quite supportive of Black Lives Matter.
The Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and other Islamic supremacist groups have assiduously courted Black Lives Matter, and linked their propaganda efforts against “Islamophobia” to the Black Lives Matter stand against perceived racism. In Dallas last night, we see where this is tending. . . . [Emphasis added,]
Once the dust settled, last week’s protest of a Donad Trump rally in Chicago demonstrated a growing nexus between Islamist groups in the United States and the radical leftist “Black Lives Matter” movement.
This rhetoric of unity between these movements was clearly on display at the 2015 joint conference of the 2015 Muslim American Society (MAS) and the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA). MAS was described by federal prosecutors as the “overt arm” of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood, and ICNA is recognized as the front for the Pakistani Islamist group Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI) founded by one of the foremost thinkers on modern Jihad, Syed Abul A’la Maududi.
At the event, MAS leader Khalilah Sabra openly discussed the importance of Muslim support for Black Lives Matter, and urged “revolution.” Comparing the situation in the United States to the Muslim Brotherhood-led Arab Spring revolutions, she asked, “We are the community that staged a revolution across the world; if we can do that, why can’t we have that revolution in America?” [Emphasis added.]
CAIR joined other groups named by federal law enforcement as Muslim Brotherhood organizations and lined up behind the Ferguson protests.
In November of 2014, Fox News reported on an effort by CAIR Michigan Director Dawud Walid to link the death of Michael Brown at the hands of police and the death of Luqman Abdullah, a Detroit imam shot during an FBI raid. [Emphasis added.]
Abdullah was described by the FBI as a leader of a nationwide Islamic organization known as “The Ummah,” run by convicted cop-killer Jamil Abdullah Amin. Abdullah’s group engaged in criminal activity in order to raise funds in order for an effort to establish Sharia law in opposition to the U.S. government. [Emphasis added.]
Amin and CAIR have a long association together, with CAIR providing funding for Amin’s legal defense, and issuing numerous press releases in support of the Georgia radical imam and former Black Panther.
While this linkage of Islamist front groups to radical racial politics may seem a relatively new development, the reality is it has been the result of a nearly four decade long effort by Islamist groups. A major thinker on this effort was a Pakistani immigrant and ICNA leader named Shamim A. Siddiqui, who knew JeI founder Maududi personally. Siddiqui wrote his work, Methodology of Dawah Il Allah in American Perspective in 1989.
The shooter in Dallas who killed five policemen and wounded others had been a member of the New Black Panther Party, about which the Obama administration has simply laughed.
In 2009 and 2010, lawyers working at the United States Justice Department warned top Obama political appointees and other Justice Department officials about the dangerous threats of New Black Panthers to kill police officers and other whites. I was one of those lawyers who delivered those warnings. [Emphasis added.]
Our warnings came in the context of the Voting Rights Act case I and other lawyers brought against the New Black Panthers on behalf of the United States in 2009, a case the Obama administration ultimately abandoned. Both top DOJ officials, including now Labor Secretary Tom Perez, as well as rank and file employees in the Civil Rights Division, were warned but did not take the New Black Panther threat seriously or otherwise considered the organization to be a laughable joke. [Emphasis added.]
. . . .
As President Obama’s pastor put it, these chickens may have come home to roost.
Bob Price has this piece: Confirmed: Dallas Shooter was Member of Houston New Black Panther Party. The story has a disturbing video of an armed New Black Panther march in Texas where the armed uniformed panthers chant – “Off the pig,” and “Oink, oink, bang, bang.” They also note “Revolution has come. Time to pick up the gun.” The piece states:
One of the members holding an AR-15 style rifle appears to be Micah Xavier Johnson. During the march, the armed members of the New Black Panther Party stood off against Harris County Sheriff’s Deputies who came to Waller County responding to a request for assistance from Sheriff Glenn Smith
You can see the full video here of the Houston New Black Panthers armed formation and chants to “off the pig” with the individual armed with an M-16 with his finger positioned above the trigger guard as someone trained in firearms would do.
More recently, Dallas shooter Johnson “liked” the Face Book page of the African-American Defense League. Here are a few posts from its now deleted Face Book page, copied just before the page was taken down:
Obama’s plans
In response to public concerns about potential Islamist terror attacks, Obama turned the nation’s “war on terror” into a “Countering Violent Extremism” (CVE) farce, the focus of which has been largely on promoting the agenda of CAIR and other Muslim Brotherhood-linked Islamist organizations. To that end, the Department of Homeland Security has stricken the study of Islam from its teaching materials and banned the use of words such a “jihad” from the lexicon of Federal law enforcement officials. Its primary focus has been on combating “Islamophobia,” rather than on preventing Islamic terror attacks.
Obama appears to have comparable plans to deal with public concerns about potential attacks by members of Black Lives Matter and other racist groups.
President Barack Obama is harnessing the increasing attacks on police in Dallas — and the periodic shootings of people by stressed cops — to push his agenda to federalize state and local police forces. [Emphasis added.]
“I want to start moving on constructive actions that are actually going to make a difference,” he said during his evening press conference in Poland when he was asked about the Dallas attack.
Those actions, he said, wouldbe based on the recommendations of the panel that he picked after the 2014 street riots in Ferguson, Missouri. The panel offered “practical concrete solutions that can reduce — if not eliminate — the problems of racial bias,” Obama said. [Emphasis added.]
Racial bias on the part of whom? Police? The public at large? Or racist organizations such as The Nation of Islam, the New Black Panther Party and Black Lives Matter?
The dramatic shootings are an opportunity to push that agenda, Obama said. “If my voice has been true and positive, my hope would be that… [the panel] surfaces problems, it frames them, it allows us to wrestle with these issue and try to come up with practical solutions,” he said. [Emphasis added.]
The report urges the federal government to federalize police training and practices, via the use of federal lawsuits, grants and threats to cut federal aid. So far, Obama’s deputies have cajoled and sued more than 30 police jurisdictions to adopt federal rules in a slow-motion creation of a national police system, similar to the slow-motion creation of a federal-run health-sector via Obamacare. [Emphasis added.]
Obama also used the press conference to insulate his federalized police program — and his allies in the Black Live Matter movement — from popular rejection after the five police were murdered by the anti-cop African-American in Dallas. [Emphasis added.]
“The danger is that we somehow think the act of a troubled person speaks to some larger political statement across the country — it doesn’t,” Obama insisted. [Emphasis added.]
The ambush-style mass shooting of cops in Dallas, Texas, last night makes it clear that it is time for the dangerous, anti-American insurgency called Black Lives Matter to be designated a terrorist organization for fomenting a war against the nation’s law enforcement officers.
. . . .
President Barack Obama . . . has long tried to provoke civil unrest here in the U.S. with his hateful anti-cop rhetoric and his relentless demonization of opponents. His goal is fundamental transformation of the United States. A Red diaper baby who identifies violence-espousing communist Frantz Fanon as an intellectual influence, he has also steadfastly refused to condemn the explicitly racist, violent Black Lives Matter movement. In fact Obama has lavished attention on the movement’s leaders and invited them to the White House over and over again. [Emphasis added.]
Obama has done the same for the Islamist movement CAIR
Members of the Democratic National Committee expressly endorsed Black Lives Matter, throwing their lot in with black racists and radical Black Power militants. The DNC officially embraced a statement that slams the U.S. for allegedly systemic police violence against black people. A resolution passed by hundreds of delegates at the DNC meeting in Minneapolis last year accuses the nation’s police of “extrajudicial killings of unarmed African American men, women and children.” [Emphasis addes.]
The Left persists in these lies because, well, that’s what these people do.
Hillary would bring us at least one more term of Obama. As He has stated, She is the best qualified candidate to continue His fundamental transformation of America.
Will “we the vulgarians people” give Hitlary that opportunity? Do we hold America in as profound contempt as do Obama and Clinton, as well as the various racist and Islamist organizations they favor?
We still have our grand old flag.
After November 8th, will we deserve her? Or will we have to lower her for the last time? Doing so would doubtless make Obama truly “proud” of His fundamentally transformed “America.”
The House Select Committee on Benghazi report confirms what we pretty much already knew. The Obama administration and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton completely politicized this country’s foreign policy in order to ensure the reelection of Obama and to serve the future presidential ambitions of Hillary Clinton. Along the way Obama, Clinton et al. made dangerous decisions, such as establishing the consular outpost in Benghazi, and ignoring the consul’s pleas for more security. They also ignored the many warning signs of incipient attacks, bungled the response to the attack on September 11, 2012, and then obfuscated, spun, and outright lied in the aftermath. The House report adds new details that flesh out the story, but enough had already been leaked to confirm Clinton’s despicable sacrifice of American lives on the altar of her obsessive ambition.
Toxic ambition, sheer incompetence, and the self-serving politics of the individuals involved mean they bear the primary responsibility for this disaster. But Benghazi illustrates as well the climate of bad ideas that make such decisions possible. Bad politicians eventually go away, but malignant ideas and received wisdom are deeply rooted in our institutions, transcending individuals. The Benghazi fiasco illustrates two particularly tenacious ones.
The military intervention in Libya, the origin of the Benghazi tragedy, was another act of Western wishful thinking about “democratizing” and “reforming” the Muslim world. Despite the failure of George W. Bush’s efforts to bring democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan, the so-called “Arab Spring” revolutions encouraged the Wilsonian “freedom and democracy” promoters in 2011 to make Libya yet another poster-child for this doomed project. Moreover, intervention seemingly could be done on the cheap. No troops need be deployed, since jets and missiles could topple the psychotic Muammar Gaddafi––an autocrat straight out of central casting, whose genocidal bluster gave the West a pretext for intervention.
For Hillary and Obama, this was the perfect opportunity to show those neocon militarists what “smart power” was all about, and strike a contrast with the “cowboy” Bush’s “unilateralist” bumbling in Iraq. A UN resolution was secured, and a NATO-led coalition of 19 states assembled for enforcing a no-fly zone. The mission soon escalated into bringing about regime change and the death of Gaddafi.
For a while, this was a perfect, low-cost, quick little war that would illustrate the various shibboleths of moralizing internationalism: international diplomatic approval for the use of force, multilateral coalition building, a reliance on air power that minimized casualties among participating militaries, and a smaller role for the US, which would be “leading from behind,” as an Obama advisor said. This last idea reflected Obama’s belief that the US needed to diminish its role in world affairs and avoid the arrogant overreach that stained its history abroad, most recently in Iraq. This notion of America’s global sins is another bad idea reflecting ideology, not historical fact.
For Secretary of State Clinton, the Libya intervention would be the showcase of her tenure at State and proof of her superior foreign policy skills and presidential potential. Of course, we all know that the toppling of Gaddafi has been a disastrous mistake. Gaddafi was a brutal creep, but he kept in check the jihadists from Libya eager to kill Americans in Iraq and foment terror throughout the region. His departure created a vacuum that has been filled with legions of jihadist outfits across North Africa, including ISIS franchises. They are armed in part with weapons plundered from Gaddafi’s arsenals such as surface-to-air missiles, assault rifles, machine guns, mines, grenades, antitank missiles, and rocket-propelled grenades. Yet eager to protect her defining foreign policy achievement, Hillary kept open the diplomatic outpost in Benghazi even as other nations pulled out their personnel because of the increasing danger caused by the new Libyan government’s inability to control and secure its territory.
Four dead Americans were the cost of political ambition and adherence to the bankrupt idea that liberal democracy can be created on the cheap in a culture lacking all of the philosophical and institutional infrastructure necessary for its success: inalienable rights, equality under the law, transparent government, accountability to the people, separation of church and state, fair and honest elections, and the freedom of speech and assembly. The folly of expecting democracy in a culture alien to it became clear in the aftermath of Gaddafi’s downfall, when the Libyan National Transitional Council’s Draft Constitutional Charter proclaimed, “Islam is the religion of the state, and the principal source of legislation is Islamic Jurisprudence (Sharia).” The idea of exporting democracy, however, still has a tight hold on many in the West both on the left and the right, which means we have not seen the last of its bloody and costly failures.
Equally bipartisan has been the next bad idea: that al Qaeda, ISIS, et al. are fringe “extremists” who have “hijacked” Islam, and that the vast majority of Muslims are “moderates” grieved by this tarnishing of their noble faith. It was George W. Bush who said in his first address after 9/11 that Islam’s “teachings are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah,” establishing the model for his administration’s policy of “outreach” to Muslims. Obama has taken this delusion to surreal extremes, refusing in the face of mountains of evidence to link the numerous ISIS attacks of the last few years to Islam, and proscribing “jihad” and “radical Islamist” from the government’s communications and training manuals.
It was this imperative to sever Islamic terrorism from its roots in traditional Islamic doctrine that in part accounted for the lies that Hillary, Obama, and their minions like National Security Advisor Susan Rice told in the aftermath of the Benghazi attacks. They peddled the narrative that a spontaneous protest against an obscure Internet video insulting Mohammed had morphed into a violent attack. This lie traded in the delusional belief that despite its 14-century-long record of invasion, murder, slaving, colonization, and occupation––all in fulfillment of the divine commands “to slay the idolaters wherever you find them” and “to fight all men until they say there is no god but Allah” –– Islamic doctrine could not possibly justify the actions of modern terrorists. So powerful was the need to protect this belief and, of course, her political future that Clinton lied to the faces of the parents of the four dead Americans, promising to “get” the hapless filmmaker, even as she knew on the very night of the attacks that there was no protest against the video near the consular outpost.
Nor are the various pretexts for this evasion of historical fact convincing. The worst is that making explicit the link between jihadism and Islam will endanger innocent Muslims and stoke “Islamophobia.” There is no evidence that this is the case, and hate crimes against Jews still vastly outnumber those against Muslims. Not much better is the notion that pious Muslims, supposedly offended by “blasphemers” like al Qaeda, the Taliban, and ISIS, will not cooperate with police and the FBI if we state simple facts about their faith and its history.
This idea is psychologically preposterous. It assumes that Muslim pique at infidel statements about their religion trumps their assumed desire to stop the violent “distorters” of their beloved faith. It also assumes that to Muslims, such insults justify keeping quiet about the planned murders of innocents––a damning indictment of the very people whom the “nothing to do with Islam” crowd are so anxious to mollify. Worse, it confirms the unique triumphalism of Islam, whose adherents expect from non-believers deference to their faith, even as Muslims across the globe are slaughtering and torturing people simply because they are non-believers. Such careful monitoring of our discourse about Islam, at the same time Muslim intellectuals routinely attack the West for its alleged historical sins against Islam, is a sign of weakness and fear that encourages our enemies to hit us again.
We’ve been operating by this double standard for decades, and terrorist groups have expanded across the globe, while jihadist violence has murdered Americans in Boston, San Bernardino, Fort Hood, and Orlando, to name just the deadliest attacks. It’s safe to say that the tactic of flattering Muslims and confirming their sense of superiority to infidels has failed to keep us safe.
But if we really want to be honest, we won’t just rely on the weasel-word “Islamist,” which still suggests that the beliefs of the jihadists are somehow a doctrinal aberration. Those of both parties who continually talk about “moderate Muslims” and use the word “Islamist” to distinguish them from jihadists should heed Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Erdogan: “The term ‘Moderate Islam’ is ugly and offensive; there is no moderate Islam; Islam is Islam.” Using “Islamic” rather than “Islamist” will recognize the continuity of modern jihadism with traditional Islamic doctrines. Whitewashing that fact has done nothing to stop jihadist violence, and it is an enabler of those ordinary Muslims who refuse to acknowledge Islam’s illiberal and violent doctrines.
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton deserve the opprobrium history will inflict on them for sacrificing our security and interests to their personal ambition and ideological obsessions. But bad ideas had a hand in the killing of four Americans in Benghazi, and those bad ideas will continue to cripple us until we discard them and start facing reality.
Throughout this questioning by Ted Cruz, DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson maintains that how the enemy is identified is unimportant, and that he and other intelligence and law enforcement top dogs know full well who the enemy is, and are busy foiling his plots. Cruz, in response, shreds Johnson, pointing to numerous ways in which the Obama administration’s politically correct willful ignorance led to danger signs being disregarded numerous times — danger signs that, if they had been heeded, might have prevented the Fort Hood, Boston, and Orlando jihad massacres.
Johnson’s irritable arrogance here, and refusal to address the facts Cruz adduces, is revealing of the mindset of the administration in its refusal to name the enemy accurately. The facts to which Cruz points show how this policy is costing lives.
After the Orlando attack, Obama ranted that it did not matter what we called Islamic terrorism. “What exactly would using this label accomplish? What exactly would it change? Would it make ISIS less committed to trying to kill Americans? Would it bring in more allies? Is there a military strategy that is served by this? The answer is none of the above. Calling a threat by a different name does not make it go away. This is a political distraction.”
The “Islamic terrorists by any other name would smell as sweet” argument is the last resort of the losing side. It dismisses the whole issue as a matter of semantics with no bearing on the real world.
And that’s a neat rhetorical trick for the political side that relentlessly refuses to acknowledge reality.
One of the more shocking moments in Jeffrey Goldberg’s extended Atlantic write-up of Obama’s foreign policy came with his conversation with the Prime Minister of Australia. Obama, who has refused to recognize any connection between Islamic theology and violence, and made the hijab into a civil rights issue, told the Australian leader how he had seen Indonesia turn to “fundamentalist” Islam and noted, unfavorably, the large numbers of women now wearing hijabs as a sign of that fundamentalism.
Obama blamed the Saudis for pushing Wahhabism through imams and madrassas into Indonesia.
It wasn’t an original critique, but also not one that you hear much in Obama’s circles. When Obama reportedly tells world leaders that there will be “no comprehensive solution to Islamist terrorism until Islam reconciles itself to modernity” and undergoes reforms the way that Christianity did, it’s like suddenly having Khrushchev explain why Communism can’t work and will end up falling apart.
It’s shocking and revealing.
In moments like these we see that Obama knows that he’s lying. And Obama makes the awkward semantics argument because he knows that the existence of Islamic terrorism can’t be debated. When you are reduced to arguing that names don’t matter, it’s because you know that the name is right.
Plenty of leftists lie to themselves about Islamic terrorism. Obama is not lying to himself. He’s lying to us. He is willing to say things about Islamic terror to foreign leaders that he refuses to say to Americans.
He can tell them that Islamic terrorism is real and that the only way to stop it is to reform Islam.
And here is where we come back to his question of why naming Islamic terrorism matters. It’s a question that Obama has already answered. You can’t solve a problem until you define it. It may not matter what you call a rose, as long as you know that it’s a plant. If you don’t know that a rose is a flowering plant that grows out of the ground, then you’ll never figure out how to plant one. If you don’t know that Islamic terrorism is a theological implementation of its core religious identity, you won’t even know what it is you are supposed to be fighting. And you won’t win except through brute force.
We have never defined the problem of Islamic terrorism because that would just be too dangerous.
Why is Obama willing to talk about Saudi support for terrorism to the Prime Minister of Australia, but not to Americans? Why does he only suggest reforming Islam to foreign leaders in private?
The official story is that it would “empower” Islamic terrorists, but that’s a nonsensical claim. ISIS doesn’t derive its legitimacy from whether we call it ISIS, ISIL or Daesh. Nor are Muslims going to determine the theological legitimacy of a Jihadist group based on whether we refer to it as Islamic.
Telling the truth would no doubt “offend” Muslims. And the threat of offending Muslims continues to occupy far more branches of our government than fighting Muslim terrorism.
But Obama isn’t really afraid of offending Muslims. If he were, he wouldn’t have provided this little peek into his private meetings at all. Obama isn’t afraid of Muslims, terrorists or otherwise, he’s afraid of Americans.
Tell the truth and Americans might suddenly get the naughty idea that instead of waiting for Islam to “reform”, they ought to just deal with the problem at its source with a travel ban. They might decide that extra scrutiny for mosques really is warranted and that airport profiling would save everyone grief.
And, worst of all, they might realize that they have no reason to feel guilty about our foreign policy. If Islamic terrorism exists and is caused by Islam, then America isn’t and was never the problem.
That kind of thinking frightens Obama and the left far more than a hundred Orlando terror attacks.
Name the enemy and Americans might suddenly start feeling good about themselves. That outraged confidence which we associate with Pearl Harbor, but that made a brief return after September 11, might come back to stay. Americans would embrace patriotism and pride without doubt or guilt.
That is why Islamic terrorism can’t and won’t be named.
Whatever dislike Obama may harbor for the Islamization of Indonesia, he appears to be far less concerned by it than by the Americanization of America. He may indeed recognize Islamic terrorism to be a threat of some degree, but he views American patriotism as a much bigger threat.
He can give enlightened Atlantic readers a small peek behind the scenes to show them that he recognizes the obvious problem, but he isn’t about to extend that confidence nationwide.
And it’s not just Obama.
The real reason that our leaders won’t name the enemy is that they don’t like us and they don’t trust us. Running through their heads are nightmare scenarios like Brexit and Trump. They see their job as shepherding us away from our “worst impulses” toward a proper role within the global community.
They are quite capable of recognizing Islamic terrorism for what it is. They may not be terribly bright, but people in their positions have more than enough access to information for the conclusions to be inescapable. But they are determined not to allow Islamic terrorism to disrupt their larger plans for us.
It isn’t another 9/11 or 7/7 that worries them, but a resurgence of nationalism in response to it. That is why they will lie, mislead and even criminalize any dissent. Their response to every Islamic terrorist attack is to make us feel responsible, ashamed and helpless by transforming Muslims into the victims.
For these same reasons they will push mass Muslim migration no matter what the terror risks are. They will champion the hijab, even though they know it harms Muslim women. Why? Because these policies undermine our values and transform our countries. And that is their overriding agenda above all else.
That is what we are up against.
They know that they are lying about Islamic terrorism. It’s why Obama dismisses the subject as mere semantics. But it’s only one of many things that they are lying to us about. Obama lies to us about Islamic terrorism for the same reason that he lies to us about being able to keep your doctor.
He knows the truth, but the truth would interfere with the left’s larger plans to transform America.
Generally that high honor, the Secretary’s Award for Valor, is bestowed upon government employees who, acting on or off duty, put their lives at risk to save the lives of others. It is not clear if she has been nominated in spite of her outrageous actions or because of them.
Perhaps in the twisted parallel universe of the Obama administration, Ms. Martin “stood up” to five armed ICE agents, thereby “protecting” an alleged accomplice of a massive deadly terror attack and his alien wife. Today we not only have the lunacy of “sanctuary cities,” but apparently “Sanctuary DHS Agencies” where illegal aliens and criminals and terrorists are safe from detection and arrest.
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I have written a follow-up article to my March 18, 2016 piece with the sarcastic title, “Are DHS Leaders Seeking an MVP Award From ISIS? – The day after the San Bernardino terror attack, why exactly did USCIS managers block a team of ICE agents from entering their facility?”
I began my original commentary by saying that I was not trying to go “over the top” with the title of my article and that I had not lost my mind but that I was infuriated that a manager of USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) would block ICE agents from entering that facility.
It is worth noting that both USCIS and ICE are component agencies of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
At the time I wrote my original article, the actual identity of the manager who blocked five ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents was not known, however, it has been disclosed that the manager is Irene Martin.
It must be noted that these ICE agents were assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force and the office that they sought to enter was located in San Bernardino, the very same city where less than 24 hours earlier, on December 2, 2015, Tashfeen Malik and Syed Farook carried out a terror attack that resulted in the murder of 14 and the wounding of 22 innocent victims.
Furthermore, Enrique Marquez, the individual the ICE agents were hoping to locate at the office, was believed to have provided the weapons used in carrying out that terrorist attack. They had discovered that Marquez was scheduled to appear for an interview that day in conjunction with the application he filed for his wife to provide her with lawful immigrant status.
The agents were not only concerned about questioning and arresting Marquez because of the crimes he was alleged to have already committed in providing weapons and possibly other material support to the two terrorists, but the agents were greatly concerned that Marquez may have provided similar assistance to other terrorists who had not yet carried out additional attacks. Time was obviously extremely critical and potentially innocent lives were hanging in the balance. The clock was ticking and time was not on the side of the agents — or of possible additional victims, for that matter.
As for the supposed “marriage” between Marquez and his “wife” Chernykh, they have subsequently been charged with conspiracy to commit immigration/marriage fraud. I addressed this issue in my May 3, 2016 article, “Immigration Fraud Linked to San Bernardino Jihadist’s Family.”
Additionally, it must be pointed out that if ICE agents had information about anyone who was seeking an immigration benefit for an alien, even if terrorism is not a component of the case, the adjudications officers should welcome any information that would provide relevant information about the bona fides of the petition/application that is to be adjudicated. Immigration fraud is a felony without any other factors being involved. Furthermore the 9/11 Commission noted that immigration fraud and visa fraud were key entry and embedding tactics of terrorists.
I am intimately familiar with these issues inasmuch as I served as an adjudications officer for one year, many years ago. I volunteered to be a part of a pilot project that paired adjudications officers with Criminal Investigators (Special Agents) of the former INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) to uncover fraud. During that assignment my colleagues and I collaborated closely with the agents. When I became an INS Special Agent I worked closely with the adjudications officers who, back then, were referred to as Examiners.
However, in this case, Ms. Martin refused the ICE agents entry into her facility for reasons that have never been made clear. This is especially insane given the nexus this all has with a terror attack that was conducted in the very same city as her office less than 24 hours earlier.
On March 16, 2016, Senator Ron Johnson, the Chairman of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee (HSGAC), requested that the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) of the Department of Homeland Security conduct an investigation into the circumstances surrounding this monumental screw-up. On June 1, 2016 the OIG report of the investigation was made public.
That OIG report noted, in part:
At approximately 12:20 p.m., December 3, 2015, less than 24 hours after the shooting, HSI was notified that the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), San Bernardino, CA, had developed information that Mariya Chernykh, a Russian national attempting to adjust her immigration status, was married to EnriqueMarquez, an associate of Syed Rizwan Farook, and that she had an appointment at 12:30 p.m. on December 3, 2015, at the USCIS Office, San Bernardino, CA.
The JTTF believed that Marquez might accompany her to the appointment. HSI dispatched a team to go to the USCIS office to prevent any possible further attacks as well as to detain Marquez and Chernykh for questioning.
The OIG report noted that the five ICE agents were wearing tactical gear and that they explained the importance of their mission and that time was critical. They were delayed by approximately 30 minutes and when they were finally admitted into the offices, they were brought to an interview room.
This is how the GAO report described this meeting:
The Field Office Director told the agents they were not allowed to arrest, detain, or interview anyone in the building based on USCIS policy, and that she would need to obtain guidance from her superior before allowing them access. During this exchange, the agents also spoke by phone with the Acting Chief, Fraud Detection and National Security (FDNS), USCIS, Los Angeles. According to the HSI agents, he told the agents that it was USCIS policy not to arrest, detain, or interview on USCIS property.
The OIG report also noted that Ms. Martin made statements that were contradicted by statements made by others — she apparently lied to OIG investigators. Such lies are felonies and also subject employees to dismissal.
USCIS adjudicates more than 6 million applications for various immigration benefits. This process has serious national security implications.
Page 47 of “9/11 and Terrorist Travel: Staff Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States” includes this paragraph that draws a clear nexus between immigration fraud and national security:
“Once terrorists had entered the United States, their next challenge was to find a way to remain here. Their primary method was immigration fraud. For example, Yousef and Ajaj concocted bogus political asylum stories when they arrived in the United States. Mahmoud Abouhalima, involved in both the World Trade Center and landmarks plots, received temporary residence under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers (SAW) program, after falsely claiming that he picked beans in Florida.” Mohammed Salameh, who rented the truck used in the bombing, overstayed his tourist visa. He then applied for permanent residency under the agricultural workers program, but was rejected. Eyad Mahmoud Ismail, who drove the van containing the bomb, took English-language classes at Wichita State University in Kansas on a student visa; after he dropped out, he remained in the United States out of status.
The administration has apparently decided to take action concerning Ms. Martin, however, it is not the action that would make sense. But then when has this administration taken actions that makes sense especially where immigration and terrorism are concerned?
Here is an excerpt from report about the egregious actions of the administration:
Irene Martin heads the San Bernardino U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office, where last December, she allegedly blocked five armed Department of Homeland Security agents from the man authorities say supplied the firepower in the deadly attack a day earlier. Although an Inspector General’s report found she acted improperly, and then lied to investigators, FoxNews.com has learned she has been nominated for the Secretary’s Award for Valor.
Generally that high honor, the Secretary’s Award for Valor, is bestowed upon government employees who, acting on or off duty, put their lives at risk to save the lives of others. It is not clear if she has been nominated in spite of her outrageous actions or because of them.
Perhaps in the twisted parallel universe of the Obama administration, Ms. Martin “stood up” to five armed ICE agents, thereby “protecting” an alleged accomplice of a massive deadly terror attack and his alien wife. Today we not only have the lunacy of “sanctuary cities,” but apparently “Sanctuary DHS Agencies” where illegal aliens and criminals and terrorists are safe from detection and arrest.
Yesterday afternoon, Muslim terrorists associated with al-Shabaab attacked a hotel in Mogadishu, Somalia, killing at least 35:
The assault, the latest in a series by the Islamist group targeting hotels and restaurants, began when a suicide bomber detonated a car laden with explosives outside the building.
Gunmen then stormed Mogadishu’s Naasa Hablood hotel and gunfire rang out for several hours, witnesses said, before the authorities declared the attack over.
The car-bomb blast came at about 4.30 pm on Saturday local time and produced a large column of smoke over the hotel, which is frequented by politicians.
A cabinet minister was among those murdered.
Gunmen fought their way inside, and a witness said they began shooting randomly at hotel guests.
Blood was splattered on the hotel floor. …
It is the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, when extremists often step up attacks in this volatile country in the Horn of Africa.
Likewise, Christians launch terrorist attacks during Lent. Just kidding.
“They came shouting ‘Allahu Akbar!’ and fired bullets on every side,” said a hotel staffer who escaped through the back door.
Of course they did. They always do, to emphasize that their murders have nothing to do with Islam.
“They are devils who merely care for death and blood.”
“Devils” is a fair, well-considered characterization. I have nothing particular to say about this attack–one of many–except that I don’t think it should pass unnoticed. al-Shabaab is devoted to establishing sharia law in Somalia. Who knows, it might succeed. Certainly it won’t fail due to any intelligent action on the part of the Obama administration or other Western powers.
In a historic referendum, millions of British citizens voted Thursday, June 23, to leave the European Union after 43 years by a margin of 52 to 48 percent. Many were undoubtedly moved into approving this pivotal step by three seismic world events:
1. The mass migration flowing into Europe from the Middle East and Africa under the EU aegis. Forebodings in the UK were fueled by figures released a week before the referendum showing an influx of 330,000 migrants to Britain in 2015.
2. The war on the Islamic State which poses a peril which most Western governments avoid addressing by name as World War III in the making.
3. The inability of those governments, beyond empty words, to grapple with the war on ISIS or cope with the mass of migrants expected to beat on the gates of Western societies for many more hard years.
Many Americans and Europeans are dissatisfied and resentful of President Barack Obama’s approach to the war on ISIS, which is to dismiss the enemy as a minor band of fanatics and thus, rather than a war against Islam. Neither do they accept German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s magnanimous invitation to take refugees in – 1.5 million in two years – as her country’s moral responsibility.
This popular disgruntlement has thrown up such antiestablishment figures as Donald Trump in the US and Boris Johnson in Britain and contributes to the rise of far right-wing movements and extremist violence on both continents.
Those two leaders, though different in most other ways, owe much of their popularity to the pervasive fear in their countries that surging immigration will forever alter the fabric of their societies.
Such social upheaval is the result of a trap deliberately set for the West by two Muslim leaders: ISIS “caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and Turkish President Tayyip Reccep Erdogan.
Al-Baghdadi conceived the idea of flooding the western world with waves of immigrants from Africa and the Middle East as a way to achieve three targets:
a) To change the composition of the population of Western countries by expanding the Muslim increment.
b) To plant networks of ISIS terrorists in the West.
c) To boost ISIS Middle Eastern arms, people and drugs smuggling networks as the organization’s main source of income. Migrants are willing to pay an average of between 5,000 and 10,000 dollars to reach the West even though they know that many never make it alive.
Al Baghdadi made up for the revenue shortfall caused by the US bombing of ISIS-held oil fields and money reserves by pushing over a new wave of immigrants.
President Erdogan’s motives are quite different.
He allowed the waves of immigrants to pass through Turkey on their way to the US and Europe – just as for years, he allowed Western jihadists joining ISIS to reach Siria via Turkey – because he was consumed with the desire to punish the US, namely, the Obama administration, for refusing to back up his hegemonic aspirations in the Middle East; Europe was punished for denying Turkey EU membership year after year.
The victory of Boris Johnson’s “leave” campaign – in the face of Obama’s personal championship of Prime Minister David Cameron’s bid to keep his country in, supported by the Democratic presumptive nominee Hilary Clinton – was a loud and clear signal for politicians running in future elections in the West, including the US presidential vote in November.
Republican candidate Donald Trump’s call to stop Muslim immigration into the US until proper screening measures are in place may sound like an unformed idea, but no other US politician has dared put it on the table, or directly challenge the hollow words and self-righteous hypocrisy of Obama and Clinton on the issues of terror, wars in the Middle East and mass immigration. This alone gives Trump a popular edge in widening circles in the USA over his rival.
Trump is not likely to lose votes either by his pledge to rebuild NATO for leading the West in the war against Islamic terror.
During the five months up until the US presidential election, the West can expect more large-scale ISIS terror coupled with dramatic events in the wars raging in at least seven countries – Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Libya and Afghanistan. Refugees in vast numbers will continue to batter down the doors of countries that are increasingly unable and unwilling to accept them.
Wars in general and religious wars in particular, have throughout history thrown up massive shifts of population displaced by violence, plague, falling regimes, famine and economic hardship.
The year 2016 will go down as the year in which Middle East crises spilled over into the west, bringing social change and far-reaching political turmoil in their wake.
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