Posted tagged ‘Orlando massacre’

Florida: America’s Jihad Playground

June 17, 2016

Florida: America’s Jihad Playground, Front Page MagazineMichelle Malkin, June 16, 2016

Terrorists wanted

The home of the “Happiest Place on Earth” has been breeding killer jihadists and Muslim zealots for years. 

Omar Mateen, the cold-blooded mass murderer who gunned down 49 people at an Orlando gay nightclub and wounded 53 more before police took him out late Sunday, may have worked alone. But he operated in the larger context of a teeming, terror-coddling paradise.

While tourists from around the world soak up sunshine and dreams at Disney World, Islamic extremism festers around them.

Schools: The Muslim Students Association, founded by the radical Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood whose stated purpose is to wage “grand jihad” on America, is active at the publicly funded University of Central Florida in Orlando. The group defiantly brought un-indicted terror co-conspirator Siraj Wahhaj to campus. He’s the black Muslim convert and inflammatory imam tied by federal prosecutors to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and New York City landmarks bombing plots.

Wahhaj served as a character witness for convicted terror mastermind Omar Abdel Rahman (the Blind Sheik), called for replacement of America’s “constitutional government with a caliphate” and roots for our nation to “crumble” so Muslims can take over. UCF funded a Muslims “da’wa” (conversion) seminar and with an endowment by the Saudi-supported International Institute of Islamic Thought sought to create an Islamic Studies chair to “help the Ummah regain its intellectual and cultural identity and re-affirm its presence as a dynamic civilization.”

The IIIT, also a Muslim Brotherhood affiliate, donated at least $50,000 to a “think tank” run by Sami al-Arian that served as a front group for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. While al-Arian, a Muslim Brotherhood member dating back to the 1980s, served as a computer science professor at Tampa’s University of South Florida, he toured the country raising money for terrorism overseas. Investigative reporters and the feds caught al-Arian on tape inciting his attendees against, America, Israel “and their allies until death.” The left-wing academic pleaded guilty to a terror-fundraising conspiracy charge in 2006.

Al-Arian brought Palestinian-born Ramadan Shalah to teach at USF and head his “think tank” for a spell. Shalah left the school in 1995 and resurfaced as head of Syria’s Islamic Jihad. He remains one of the FBI’s most wanted indicted terrorist fugitives.

Apologist officials at USF, first exposed by counter-jihad researcher Steve Emerson as America’s “Jihad U,” turned a blind eye to the terror helpers among them.

Mosques: Mateen’s homicidal hatred for gays didn’t exist in a vacuum. Mateen’s neighborhood mosque in nearby Fort Pierce, Florida, was also the house of worship of Moner Abu-Salha, an American jihad recruiter and suicide bomber who blew himself up in Syria last year. The Palm Beach Post reported this week that Abu-Salha had posted videos of an imam’s death-to-gays rant on Facebook.

Marcus Dwayne Robertson (a.k.a. Abu Taubah), a former U.S. Marine turned career criminal and bodyguard to the Blind Sheik, headed another mosque, Masjid Al-Ihsaam, in Orlando. He also founded the Orlando-based Fundamental Islamic Knowledge Seminary in 2008 and railed against gays and non-Muslims. Mateen was enrolled in Taubah’s course.

Just weeks before the Pulse nightclub massacre, another Orlando mosque, the Husseini Islamic Center, hosted a guest imam who had preached that “gays must die” and that Muslims should not “be embarrassed about this … let’s get rid of them now.”

Also in Orlando, the al-Rahman mosque led by Imam Muhammad Musri made headlines in 2010 after holding a fundraiser for the terrorist group Hamas.

In Tampa, Sami al-Arian founded the al-Qassam mosque named after an infamous Syrian terrorist. Last fall, the mosque — owned by the North American Islamic Trust, an un-indicted terror co-conspiracy organization — invited an exiled Muslim Brotherhood instigator and Hamas cheerleader to speak.

In South Florida, the Darul Uloom Institute mosque in Pembroke Pines counted al-Qaida jihad pilot Adnan el-Shukrijumah (allegedly killed in a raid in Waziristan by the Pakistan military in 2014) and convicted jihadist Imran Mandhai — who plotted with fellow mosque attendees Hakki Aksoy and Shueyb Jokhan to blow up power stations, synagogues and a National Guard armory — among its worshipers.

Shukrijumah’s brother still lives in Broward County near the Darul Uloom mosque and has posted social media videos condemning “moderate” Muslims, blaming 9/11 on Jews and promoting the caliphate. Darul Uloom’s imam is a gay-bashing, Christian-bashing, Jew-bashing bigot who has publicly stated that at least one of the 9/11 hijackers prayed at his mosque.

Jails: Florida’s prisons and penitentiaries are unfettered cesspools for jihad radicalization and recruitment. Convicted al-Qaida dirty bomb plotter Jose Padilla (a.k.a. Abdullah al Mujahir) was introduced to Islam while serving time for an armed road rage incident in Sunrise, Florida. The above-named Abu Taubah radicalized nearly 40 fellow inmates while behind bars on a weapons conviction. He was freed last summer by U.S. District Judge Gregory Presnell after time served despite prosecutors’ pleas to add 10 years to his sentence based on enhanced terror charges.

Gun-grabbers and bleeding hearts, wake up and stop playing Mickey Mouse politics. The problem isn’t weapons. It’s the weaponized Muslim hate-mongers and jihad enablers operating openly in our midst.

Trump rattles Obama on radical Islam

June 16, 2016

Trump rattles Obama on radical Islam, Israel Hayom, Richard Baehr, June 16, 2016

Trump’s critique of the Obama/Hillary Clinton policy on immigration, domestic intelligence gathering, fighting the Islamic State group (or ISIL as the president insists on calling the organization) and protecting homeland security clearly struck a nerve. Trump laid out what should be obvious: Radical Islamists despise gays, Jews and Christians. Islam as generally practiced in large swaths of the globe is extremely bigoted and accepting of violence against non-believers. The West has a much bigger problem than 100,000 active jihadis spread around the globe. There are many millions of radical Islamists.

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It has been a while since President Barack Obama was so visibly angry on camera.

When Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Obama lost his restrained cool composure for a few seconds. When discussing a few cases in which African-American men or teens were shot by police, he was also a bit enraged, noting that any of those boys could have been his son (as could of course the 6,000 or more African-American men and boys shot by other African-American men on the streets of American cities each year, who go unmentioned by the president except as a prop to support gun control).

Then came the Orlando slaughter of members of the LGBT community over the weekend, and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump lost no time tying the attack to the Obama administration’s policy failures. This was simply too much for the president, whose tantrum suggested an inability to accept criticism (especially not from Trump) or admit failure.

Trump’s critique of the Obama/Hillary Clinton policy on immigration, domestic intelligence gathering, fighting the Islamic State group (or ISIL as the president insists on calling the organization) and protecting homeland security clearly struck a nerve. Trump laid out what should be obvious: Radical Islamists despise gays, Jews and Christians. Islam as generally practiced in large swaths of the globe is extremely bigoted and accepting of violence against non-believers. The West has a much bigger problem than 100,000 active jihadis spread around the globe. There are many millions of radical Islamists.

Obama is fiercely protective of his legacy and actions, and seemingly unable to deal with being reminded about parts of his record that are nothing short of abject failures. Has Obama kept the American homeland safer than his predecessor? Has Obama’s withdrawal of American forces from Iraq and Afghanistan led to a more peaceful region? Has Obama contributed to the carnage in Syria, Iraq and Libya by his actions or inactions? Has Obama demonstrated weakness abroad and at home by failing even to identify that we face not just random terrorists, but killers tied to a radical strand of Islam, which has rapidly gained adherents all over the Muslim world the last half century, and whose members now control a significant number of Muslim majority countries, including our newest ally Iran? Are people really stupid enough to buy into an argument that the country will be safer and groups like Islamic State more easily defeated so long as Obama never says the words radical Islam? Is that the key recruiting tool that groups like Islamic State have been lacking so far, hence their failure to attract new holy warriors from the West or the Middle East?

Obama’s temper tantrum on Tuesday was much more about reacting to criticism of his record than Trump’s controversial call for a temporary ban on Muslim immigration to America. Part of the Obama attack on Trump was also of course a feature of a presidential campaign, in which Democrats now have their presumptive nominee, Hillary Clinton. Full fire on Trump, whether or not he says something new, will be part of the daily news cycle for the next five months, highlighted by a liberal press corps worshipful and adoring of both Obama and Clinton. The press is behaving this year as if it is doing sacred work by preventing Trump from winning.

Trump’s address in New Hampshire on Monday occurred less than two days after the Orlando mass murder committed by an American-born Muslim, who shot people in the head at short range while simultaneously declaring his allegiance to Islamic State and talking to police during the siege. He was married to a Palestinian woman who helped him scout out targets and dropped him off at the club prior to the attack, but never considered alerting authorities, and who may be indicted as an accomplice for the slaughter. His father claims to be the president of Afghanistan and states that his son was angered when he saw two gay men kissing on a street in Miami. The father says his son’s actions were unnecessary, since God will deal with gays. Afghanistan, the birthplace of Mateen’s parents, is one of the many Muslim majority countries where homosexuality is a crime punishable by death. Among the family members, the father rates as the “moderate Muslim” — he is O.K. with dead gays, but did not personally kill them or facilitate their murder.

The facts above are all pretty well known, including that Mateen was on the FBI radar as a possible threat twice earlier. But these facts have been utterly ignored as part of the ferocious pushback from the Obama administration and the Left to explain what happened. This is a troublesome attack for the Left — a group of individuals, mostly Latino members of the LGBT community in Orlando, were gunned down by a Muslim. Muslims and gays are two core constituency groups for the Democratic Party, the party that invented identity politics and believes it can win campaigns now and in the future by stroking the various racial/religious/ethnic/nationality groups that lean their way.

The pushback has been designed as a misdirection strategy, to make this horrible attack about anything but radical Islam. The killer was gender-confused. He was a lone wolf. He was deranged. Christians hate gays too (Sally Kohn) and their rhetoric probably inspired the killer (the ACLU). All religions have violent members (Julia Ioffe). This could not have happened had there been stricter gun controls in place in Florida (everybody in the Democratic Party and the mainstream media). This was gun violence, no different than Sandy Hook or Columbine.

So far, the pushback seems to be working. Unlike the primary campaign, when Trump seemed to have the airwaves to himself (good for audience size and advertising rates), now his critics are getting plenty of time and exposure to blast him, with favorable comments by major media personalities always preceding or following the political attacks on him by Obama or Clinton. Trump noted yesterday that Obama seemed angrier at him than he ever has been at terrorists who killed Americans. That is undoubtedly true. After every prior attack before San Bernardino last December, the president could show up at the funeral ceremony, express his sympathies, call for all of us to love one another and heal, and bash the National Rifle Association and Republicans for resisting commonsense gun laws. San Bernardino upset the pattern: The killers were Muslims, and the victims were not a core Democratic constituency, but really a cross-sample of the community. Obama skipped an appearance after this attack.

Americans feel less safe today than they did eight years ago. It is likely that Israeli-type security measures to guard public places will be far more prominent in years to come, especially given that there may be liability exposure for negligence if such places do not hire guards and attacks then occur.

But Israel’s lesson is more than just the need for security — it is that vigilance is a permanent feature of our modern, open societies. A few killers can do immense damage, and in America there is a real needle-in-the-haystack problem.

Muslim Privilege Killed 49 People in Orlando

June 16, 2016

Muslim Privilege Killed 49 People in Orlando, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, June 16, 2016

Flowers in Orlando

The deadliest mass shooting in American history happened because of Islamophobia.

Islamophobia killed 49 people in Orlando. It didn’t kill 49 Muslims. Instead it allowed Omar Mateen, a Muslim terrorist, to kill 49 people in the name of his Islamic ideology and the Islamic State.

Omar, like so many other Muslim killers, could have been stopped. He talked about killing people when he worked at G4S Security, a Federal contractor that provided services to the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department. But, according to one of the co-workers he stalked, a former police officer, his employers refused to do anything about it because he was a Muslim.

The FBI conducted an investigation of Omar Mateen. They put him on a watch list and sent informants. They interviewed him and concluded that his claims of Al Qaeda ties and terrorist threats were reactions to “being marginalized because of his Muslim faith.” Omar told the agents that he said those things because “his co-workers were discriminating against him and teasing him because he was Muslim.”

And they believed him.

Poor Omar wasn’t a potential terrorist. He was just a victim of Islamophobia.

Omar got away with homophobic comments that would have gotten Americans fired because he was Muslim. He weathered an “extensive” FBI investigation because he was Muslim.

Anyone who says that there is no such thing as Muslim Privilege ought to look at Omar Mateen.

There is a direct line between Omar’s Muslim privilege and the Pulse massacre. Omar Mateen’s Muslim privilege protected him from consequences. While the media studiously paints the image of a beleaguered population of American Muslims suffering the stigma of constant suspicion, Omar’s Muslim background actually served as a shield and excused behavior that would have been unacceptable for anyone else. Omar Mateen’s Muslim privilege shielded him until he was actually murdering non-Muslims.

And Omar’s case is not unique. The Fort Hood killer, Nidal Hasan, handed out business cards announcing that he was a Jihadist. He delivered a presentation justifying suicide bombings, but no action was taken. Like Omar, the FBI was aware of Hasan. It knew that he was talking to Al Qaeda bigwig Anwar Al-Awlaki, yet nothing was done. Instead of worrying about his future victims, the FBI was concerned that investigating him and interviewing him would “harm Hasan’s career”.

One of his classmates later said that the military authorities, “Don’t want to say anything because it would be considered questioning somebody’s religious belief, or they’re afraid of an equal opportunity lawsuit.”

Would the FBI have been as sensitive if Nidal Hasan had been named Frank Wright? No more than Omar Mateen would have kept his security job if his name had been Joe Johnson.

It’s an increasingly familiar story.

The neighbors of San Bernardino killers Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik noticed that something strange was going on, but they were afraid of profiling Muslims. If they had done the right thing, the 14 victims of the two Muslim killers would still be alive. If the FBI had done the right thing with Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood victims would still be alive and whole. If the FBI had done the right thing with Omar Mateen, his 49 victims would still be alive and those he wounded would still be whole.

We have some basic choices to make. We can empathize with Muslims or with their victims.

We cannot however do both.

After 9/11, Muslims somehow became the biggest victim group in America. And even if you contend that most Muslims are not responsible for the actions of Islamic fundamentalist groups, even if you believe that most Muslims are being wrongly blamed for the actions of a smaller group of radicals, the pernicious myth of Muslim victimhood has become a distorting force that protects terrorists.

Muslim victimhood has elevated Islamist groups such as CAIR to the front row of political discourse alongside legitimate civil rights organizations, despite their terror links and history of obstructing law enforcement efforts to fight Islamic terrorism, while mainstreaming their Islamist agendas.

Muslim victimhood has silenced the victims of Muslim terrorism. Every Muslim terror attack is swiftly diverted to the inevitable “backlash” narrative in which the media turns away from the bodies in the latest terror attack to bring us the stories of the real Muslim victims who fear being blamed for it.

This obscene act of media distraction silences the victims of Muslim terrorism and rewards the enablers and accomplices of Muslim terrorism instead. It is every bit as terrible as claiming that the real victims of a serial killer are his family members who are being blamed for not turning him in, instead of the people he killed and the loved ones they left behind.

Muslim victimhood protects Muslim terrorists like Omar Mateen. It shields them from scrutiny. It invents excuses for them. While Omar made his preparations, while the FBI investigation of him was botched, the media leaped nimbly from a thousand petty claims of Muslim victimhood. And the worst of them may have been Tahera Ahmad, a Muslim woman who claimed she was discriminated against when a flight attendant poured her soda in a cup instead of being given a can. This insane nonsense received days of media coverage. That’s more airtime than any American victim of Islamic terrorism has received.

The media will wait as short a period as it can and turn away from Orlando to some manufactured viral media claim of Muslim discrimination that will be unbearably petty. Meanwhile the next Omar Mateen will be plotting his next act of terror.

It’s time to tell the truth.

Islamic terrorism is caused by Muslim privilege. These acts of violence are motivated by racism and supremacism in Islam. Allahu Akbar, the Islamic battle cry often associated with acts of terror and ethnic cleansing since its origin in Mohammed’s persecution of the Jews, is a statement of Muslim superiority to non-Muslims.

Muslim terrorism is not the groan of an oppressed minority. Its roots run back to racist and supremacist Islamic societies in Saudi Arabia and Egypt where non-Muslims have few if any civil rights. Muslims are a global majority. Islamic terrorism is their way of imposing their religious system on everyone.

Standing in solidarity with Muslims after Orlando makes as much sense as standing in solidarity with Klansmen after the Charleston massacre. No one should be standing in solidarity with hate groups.

Omar wasn’t radicalized by the “internet”. He got his ideas from Islamic clerics who got their ideas from Islam. He was “radicalized” by the holiest texts of Islam. Just like every other Muslim terrorist. His actions weren’t “senseless” or “nihilistic”, he was acting out the Muslim privilege of a bigoted ideology.

Even in this country, the majority of hate crimes are not directed at Muslims. Instead Muslims have disproportionately contributed to persecuting various minority groups. Orlando is only the latest example of this trend. In Europe, Jews are fleeing Sweden and France because of Muslim persecution. In Germany, gay refugees have to be housed separately from Muslim migrants. So do Christian refugees.

This isn’t the behavior of victims. These are the actions of oppressors.

Muslims are not part of the coalition of the oppressed, but of the oppressors. The sooner we recognize that, the sooner we can deal stop Islamic terrorism and protect the victims of Muslim terrorists.

Muslim privilege killed 49 people in Orlando. How many people will it kill next week or next month? How many will it kill in the next decade or the next century?

The Muslim genocide of non-Muslims is already happening in Syria and Iraq. Islam has a long genocidal history. And if we continue to confuse the oppressors and the oppressed, the next genocide we fail to stop may be our own.

Did Anyone Talking About Trump’s Speech Actually Hear It?

June 16, 2016

Did Anyone Talking About Trump’s Speech Actually Hear It?, Daily Caller, Anne Coulter, June 15, 2016

(Obama connected himself to the Orlando massacre by allying with CAIR, et al, to prevent his “countering violent extremism” troops from considering Islamism and Sharia Law as inducements to terror. — DM)

The media have lost their minds after Trump’s magnificent speech on Monday. It’s all hands on deck, no attack is too extreme. Their main point is: DO NOT LOOK AT THAT SPEECH. It has “words that wound.” Much too dangerous even to read it.

Instead of reporting what Trump said, the media give us the “gist” of it (in the sense of an unrecognizable distortion). It was awful, Hitlerian, beneath our dignity as a nation. They lie about what he said and then attack their own lies as if they’re attacking Trump.

The Washington Post’s headline, which got their reporters banned from Trump’s press briefings, was: “Donald Trump Seems to Connect President Obama to the Orlando Shooting.”

I guess OK, You’re Right, didn’t sound professional, so the Post pretended not to understand Trump’s speech, at all. We can’t makes heads or tails of it, but he seems to be saying …

One thing Trump is not, is unclear.

Contrary to the Post’s headline suggesting that Trump had posited some crazy theory about Obama secretly meeting with Omar Mateen to plot the attack — No, this gun is much better for a mass shooting, Omar — Trump criticized the Obama administration policies that are not keeping us safe. (It’s completely unprecedented to respond to a mass murder by criticizing the policies that allowed it to happen!)

After San Bernardino and Orlando — also, the Boston Marathon, Fort Hood, Little Rock, Chattanooga and Times Square — quite obviously, Trump is right.

Washington Post: We’re confused. What do you mean?

How about: Washington Post seems to Connect President Bush to Abu Ghraib

Washington Post, May 26, 2006: “Bush has … addressed Abu Ghraib the same way he did last night: Expressing regret without responsibility.”

Or: Democrats Seem to Connect President Bush to Anti-Americanism in Muslim World

Washington Post, May 20, 2005: “It is certainly true that the Bush administration, at Guantanamo and at Abu Ghraib, is responsible for a good deal of anti-Americanism in the Muslim world.”

Or: Washington Post Seems to Connect President Bush to Missing WMDs and Katrina Deaths

Washington Post, April 5, 2006: “How much was President Bush personally responsible for taking the country to war under false pretenses, or for the botched response to Hurricane Katrina? To hear the White House tell it, it wasn’t really his fault.”

In his speech, Trump said:

“The killer was an Afghan, of Afghan parents, who immigrated to the United States. His father published support for the Afghan Taliban, a regime which murders those who don’t share its radical views. The father even said he was running for president of that country.”

“The bottom line is that the only reason the killer was in America in the first place was because we allowed his family to come here.”

“That is a fact, and it’s a fact we need to talk about.”

“We have a dysfunctional immigration system which does not permit us to know who we let into our country, and it does not permit us to protect our citizens.”

Immediately after Trump’s speech, MSNBC’s Katie Tur “fact-checked” Trump, announcing that he had incorrectly said Omar was “born in Afghan.”

What did Tur think this meant? “Afghan” isn’t a country. Didn’t she pause for a moment and realize that what she thought he said makes no sense? Journalists with their outsized sense of importance say, No, no, that’s not what I heard. It says in my notes right here, you said, “blue carrots for Eisenhower.” I stand by my notes.

Obviously, what Trump said was that Omar was “born an Afghan.” Which he was.

The media began indignantly informing us that Trump was wrong because — as The Washington Post put it: “The shooter was born in Queens to parents who emigrated from Afghanistan.”

With the media, you’re an “American” when you commit the worst mass shooing in U.S. history, an “Afghan” when you’re applying to college. You’re an “American” when you shoot up the San Bernardino community center, a “Pakistani” when you’re offended by Trump’s remarks. You’re an “American” when you slaughter troops at Fort Hood, a “Muslim” when the Army realizes it can’t fire you.

This can lead to confusion. After the Post snippily corrected Trump on Omar not being an “Afghan” on Monday, on Tuesday, the Post admitted he was. Headline: “Orlando gunman said he carried out attack to get ‘Americans to stop bombing his country,’ witness says.”

The Atlantic’s Ron Fournier, Dispenser of Conventional Liberal Opinion, wrote an article on Trump’s speech titled “A Victory Lap in Blood” that would make any social justice warrior proud.

Like the rest of the media’s reviews of a speech they apparently didn’t read, there were no quotes from Trump’s speech. Instead, Fournier ran through a string of accusations, SJW-style: “You didn’t call it,” “You are helping ISIS recruit terrorists,” “You are dividing Americans …”

Trump never claimed he “called it,” but, if he ever does, Fournier has a fantastic takedown:

“You didn’t warn that an American man named Omar Mateen, a well-educated security guard investigated by the FBI for suspected ties to terrorism, would legally purchase a weapon made for warfare and use it to slaughter 49 people at a popular gay nightclub.”

Hillary Clinton is presidential because she wants to dramatically increase the number of unvetted Syrian refugees we bring in. But Trump is an embarrassment because he doesn’t have superhuman powers to know that a “man named Omar Mateen” would attack an Orlando nightclub.

Fournier repeated the fake fact currently sweeping the nation about Trump thinking he deserves congratulations, writing, “Donald Trump wants a pat on the back.”

But then Fournier made the fatal mistake of quoting Trump’s tweet allegedly saying this: “Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don’t want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!”

Fournier’s “Trump wants a pat on the back” was 12 words away from Trump saying, “I don’t want congrats.” Even the most bored reader is probably going to make it that far.

Now you see why reporters aren’t quoting Trump and have to hope you won’t read the speech for yourself.

How Many Bodies will it Take?

June 15, 2016

How Many Bodies will it Take?, Front Page MagazinePhyllis Chesler, June 14, 2016

Orlando victims

After being written off as a racist Islamophobe for fifteen years because I raised precisely the same points that both Carl Bernstein (!) and Barney Frank (!) raised earlier today; after viewing the sweet, doomed faces of the 49 murdered gay and perhaps non-gay people, mainly Latinos and Latinas, often people of color, on my TV screen—what do I have to say?

The question I and others have raised since 9/11 (for me, since the Intifada against the Jews that began in 2000), was: “How many bodies will it take for Americans, especially the intelligentsia, including the feminists, including gay people, including our elected officials, before they understand that we: (the West, America, Jews, Christians, Hindus, Muslim and ex-Muslim dissidents) have a very real enemy?” It is radical Islam or Islamism, Islamic Jihad or, if you prefer, Islamist Jihad; and it is not going away anytime soon.

This is precisely what Israel alone has been up against since its founding in 1948. Actually, long before that, Jews suffered the most profound Islamic anti-Semitism. Buddhists in Afghanistan were murdered or forcibly converted. Hindus in India were slaughtered by Muslims by the millions—simply because they were Hindus. Christians have long been persecuted by Muslims for the same reason; that persecution continues today.

Clearly, more than 3,000 bodies on 9/11 were not enough. Clearly, the many millions of Muslims murdered by Muslim Jihadists have not been enough. Will the murder of 49 gay Americans finally be “enough?”

Somehow I doubt it but I certainly hope so. Of course, sure, yes, let’s ban assault rifles completely. That will not stop someone like Omar Mateen. But the handguns and the rifles are not as important as banning and abolishing the routine hate of women, the “wrong” kind of Muslim, ex-Muslim apostates, homosexuals—hatreds that are intimately part of historic Islam.

How many deaths before we become effective in identifying potential Jihadists? Within our borders? Arriving as refugees and immigrants? How many deaths before we are willing to use the word “Muslim terrorist” without fearing we will be demonized for doing so?

The gay websites are more focused on general “hate” against gays and gun control than they are focused on the nature and the danger of radical Islam. The gay communities have been willing to march against Israel—but never against Jihad?

Long ago, Natan Sharansky asked me if I thought I could “turn the feminists, the leftists, the gays around.” I told him that I doubted it, but that I would try.

Will these 49 dead and 53 wounded start that “turning?”

We shall see.

No letup seen in ISIS terror for US, Western cities

June 15, 2016

No letup seen in ISIS terror for US, Western cities, DEBKAfile, June 15, 2016

obama_al_baghdadi_6.16

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.

Bolt Editorial – June 13 – Islamic hatred

June 14, 2016

Bolt Editorial – June 13 – Islamic hatred, Sky News, Andrew Bolt via YouTube, June 13, 2016

Orlando and Willful Blindness at the New York Times

June 14, 2016

Orlando and Willful Blindness at the New York Times, PJ Media,  Andrew C. McCarthy, June 14, 2016

It is really not that difficult to grasp our enemies’ ideology. We just need to end the willful blindness.

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The New York Times has an interesting profile of Omar Mateen, the Orlando terrorist who murdered 49 people and wounded more than 50 others at a gay nightclub over the weekend. In the main, the Gray Lady grapples with the profound challenge the FBI faces in striking the balance between investigating ambiguous signs of potential terrorist inclinations and clearing suspects (or “persons of interest,” as they say in the biz) as to whom the evidence seems weak.

It will take some time to draw firm conclusions about Mateen’s case. Still, FBI Director Jim Comey has been admirably open in explaining that while agents appear to have (twice) probed Mateen responsibly, the Bureau must keep exploring whether clues were missed and more could have been done.

That aside, there are two major flaws in the Times’ account, and quite possibly in the government’s self-examination of its performance.

These errors illuminate Washington’s quarter-century of consciously avoiding the proximate cause of jihadist terror: sharia-supremacist ideology.

Our opinion elites resist acknowledging this because it is drawn literally from Islamic scripture.

Sharia-Supremacist Ideology

Drawing on an interview with Mateen’s ex-wife and on aspects of Mateen’s behavior that have been uncovered so far — e.g., frequenting gay bars, possibly using a gay dating app — the Times reasonably speculates that Mateen may have been gay and deeply conflicted about “his true identity out of anger and shame.”

The paper, however, steadfastly avoids asking: What could have caused such wrenching self-loathing?

After all, if he was gay, Mateen would hardly have been the first person to experience great anguish over his sexual preference, despite the fact that American culture has dramatically normalized homosexuality. Yet, those people manage to control their psychological turmoil and depression without walking into a gay club and committing mass-murder.

Assuming that the “he was gay” angle pans out, what could cause such deep conflict in Mateen that he would carry out such an atrocity?

Part of the explanation — probably the explanation — has to be sharia supremacism.

The Times account includes some indicators that Mateen, despite his “Americanization,” leaned toward Islamic fundamentalism: his Afghan roots, his two pilgrimages to Saudi Arabia, his apparently inflated claims of acquaintance with terrorists, his sometimes discriminatory and cruel treatment of his ex-wife. We now know, moreover, that Mateen came onto the FBI’s radar screen because he was acquainted with and attended the same mosque (the Islamic Center of Fort Pierce, Florida) as Mohammed Abu Salha, an American fundamentalist of Palestinian descent. Salha, who had been trained by al-Qaeda’s Syrian franchise, al-Nusra, ultimately returned to Syria and died carrying out a jihadist attack.

Yet the Times omits the possibility, reported by Fox News, that Mateen also enrolled in an online radical indoctrination course: the Islamic “seminary” run by Marcus Robertson (aka Abu Taubah), whose jihadist roots trace back to the early 1990s.

Robertson’s lectures are said to have been extremely hostile to homosexuals. In conjunction with other facts that have been developed, the “seminary” connection suggests that in recent years Mateen had immersed himself in sharia supremacism.

That is significant because of a point I stressed over the weekend — a point the Times ignores: For over a millennium, classical sharia has endorsed the condemnation and brutal killing of homosexuals.

The Times and the Obama administration have gone to great lengths to nail down whether there was a Mateen tie to ISIS: Was he merely “inspired” by the jihadist organization with which he expressed solidarity even as he carried out his attack? Or was there — as seems highly unlikely — some more formal, operational relationship between Mateen and ISIS?

I do not mean to suggest that this is an irrelevant question. But it does miss a key point that Washington and the media always resist exploring: The persecution of gay people is not an ISIS thing or an al-Qaeda thing; it is an Islam thing.

More specifically, it is a bedrock of sharia law and has been since long, long before there was an ISIS.

If Mateen was deeply conflicted over his alleged homosexual leanings, it had to be because they cut so deeply against the grain of his adherence to sharia supremacism. That ideology, not “inspiration by ISIS” (or by other jihadists Mateen invoked, like the Boston Marathon bombers), is far more likely the root of Mateen’s inner rage.

The Sunni-Shiite Alliance Against Common Enemies

The second weakness of the Times report is its botching of historical alliances between jihadist groups. In a transparent attempt to minimize the Islamist ideological underpinnings of Mateen’s atrocity, the report states:

The F.B.I. director said on Monday that Mr. Mateen had once claimed ties to both Al Qaeda and Hezbollah — two radical groups violently opposed to each other.

The not-so-subtle takeaway for readers is that sharia-supremacism cannot really have much to do with Mateen’s actions because Mateen seems to have been woefully confused about it.

No, the Times is confused.

To be sure, al-Qaeda is Sunni and Hezbollah (Iran’s Lebanon-centered jihadist militia) is Shiite. Uninformed analysts, perhaps looking only at the current conflict in Syria where the two organizations find each other on opposite sides, jump to the conclusion that al-Qaeda and Hezbollah are “violently opposed to each other.” The opposite, however, is actually closer to the truth: al-Qaeda and Hezbollah have had a close working alliance for a quarter-century.

This is not open to debate. It has been proved in court and in major investigations by congressional panels and special commissions. For example, in the prosecution of the 1998 al-Qaeda bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the Justice Department’s indictment expressly alleged:

Al Qaeda also forged alliances … with the government of Iran and its associated terrorist group Hezballah for the purpose of working together against their perceived common enemies in the West, particularly the United States.

Investigators have proved the al-Qaeda/Hezbollah alliance again and again. I’ve laid out some of the highlights several times, including in a recent National Review column:

Iran had an alliance with al-Qaeda beginning in the early 1990s. It principally included training by Hezbollah (the Beirut-based terrorist faction created and controlled by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) and such joint ventures as the 1996 Khobar Towers attack, in which 19 U.S. airmen were killed….

Toward the conclusion of its probe (and thus without time to investigate the matter fully), the 9/11 Commission learned that Iran had provided critical assistance to the [al-Qaeda] suicide hijackers by allowing them to transit through Iran and Lebanon as they moved from obtaining travel documents in Saudi Arabia (Saudi passports and U.S. visas) to training for the attacks in al-Qaeda’s Afghan safe havens.

Indeed, we now know that Iran’s assistance was overseen by none less than Imad Mugniyah, the now-deceased Hezbollah master terrorist who spent much of his life killing Americans, most notoriously in the Beirut marine-barracks bombing in 1983, and almost certainly at Khobar Towers. In October 2000, Mugniyah went to Saudi Arabia to “coordinate activities” (as the 9/11 Commission put it) with the [al-Qaeda] suicide hijackers. (See 9/11 Commission Report at page 240, as well as affidavits of former CIA officers and a 9/11 Commission staffer, here and here). Thereafter, Mugniyah and other senior Hezbollah members accompanied [al-Qaeda’s] “muscle hijackers” on flights through Iran and Lebanon.

By enabling the hijackers to cross through these countries without having their passports stamped — an Iranian or Lebanese stamp being a telltale sign of potential terrorist training — Iran made it much more likely that the jihadists’ applications for Saudi passports and U.S. visas would be approved, as they were. That is why, on the topic of potential Iranian [and derivatively, Hezbollah] complicity in the plot, the 9/11 Commission wrote, “We believe this topic requires further investigation by the U.S. government.”

There is, furthermore, an extensive, well-known history of alliance between Hezbollah and Hamas. The latter is the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian terrorist branch, and notwithstanding its Sunni roots, Hamas has been lavishly backed by Iran’s Shiite regime.

Patently, it is not a sign of confusion about, or overstated connection with, sharia-supremacism to claim, as Mateen did, ideological sympathy with both Sunni and Shiite jihadists. The Iranian regime, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood have been expressing it for at least 25 years.

Indeed, Abdurrahman Alamoudi, one of the more notable al-Qaeda- and Hamas-linked terrorists prosecuted by the Justice Department since 9/11, was recorded at a White House rally in 2000proclaiming:

We are all supporters of Hamas! Allahu Akbar! I wish to add here I am also a supporter of Hezbollah!

The bottom line is quite simple. Despite their differences and simmering hostilities, Sunni jihadists and Shiite jihadists enthusiastically collaborate with each other when dealing with a common enemy — in particular, the United States or Israel. But when the common enemy is not much of a factor, they tend to turn quite viciously on each other, as they are doing in Syria (even as they continue to collude against the U.S. and Israel on the global jihad’s other fronts).

It is really not that difficult to grasp our enemies’ ideology. We just need to end the willful blindness.

We just need to accept that, if we are ever to prevail, we have to study sharia supremacism, including its Islamic roots, and see it plain.

Is ISIS a GOP Franchise?

June 14, 2016

Is ISIS a GOP Franchise? Front Page MagazineCaroline Glick, June 14, 2016

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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.

Finally: A Realistic Plan for Fighting the Jihad and Protecting Americans

June 14, 2016

Finally: A Realistic Plan for Fighting the Jihad and Protecting Americans, Front Page MagazineRobert Spencer, June 14, 2016

(Please see also, Donald Trump’s Full Speech on National Security/Hillary Clinton in Manchester, NH (6-13-16) — DM)

Trump on Jihad

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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