RUTHFULLY YOURS

Less than a week ago, French lawmakers voted to extend the state of emergency initiated in November after the Paris jihadist attacks that left 130 dead and 367 wounded. By law, the emergency status vests police with expanded powers to conduct raids, seize property, and detain persons without judicial oversight, much less trial.

It was impossible not to think of France this morning as President Obama once again agitated for the closing of the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay. It is an unkept promise to the hard Left from his 2008 campaign that the president has been working on since his first full day in office seven years ago.

The case has not gotten better with time, unless we factor in the extortionate tactics of the community organizer. Obama has released so many jihadists to other countries that the Gitmo prisoner population is down to 91 (according to the New York Times). Obama, in his brass knuckles way, is telling Congress, “Either shutter this place or I’ll spring even more committed terrorists to return to the jihad.” The threat is his most persuasive argument.

The rest of his case is as preposterous as it ever was. Or worse, actually. The president claims that our allies in the fight against “violent extremism” are dismayed by Gitmo’s continuing operation. Really? Does anyone really believe that the French are worried about Guantanamo Bay when they have suspended their own civil-liberties protections to deal with the prospect of more mass-murder attacks? How about other European countries grappling with the fallout of “migrants” overrunning their territories? Think Gitmo is at the top of their list?

RELATED: Closing Guantanamo Bay Will Only Empower Our Enemies

The most laughable claim Obama makes is that Gitmo drives terrorist recruitment. This has always been a specious assertion, made all the more remarkable now by Obama’s campaign to bring thousands of unvettable Syrian “migrants” into our country — on top of the hundreds of thousands of foreigners from Islamic countries who have come to the United States during Obama’s presidency. For the guy who is bringing the recruits here in droves to fret about recruitment is even more precious than is the urging of Gitmo’s closing as a cost-saving measure by the guy who has added $10 trillion to the national debt in just over seven years.

In any event, I’ve responded to the recruitment point several times, most recently after the San Bernardino attack in December:

[T]here are two things that drive terrorist recruitment. The first is Islamic supremacism. In a West ever more indifferent to religion and entranced by the smug assumption that our “values” are universal, the power of a conquest ideology cloaked in religion eludes us. But it seizes our enemies and burns like a fire inside them. While Obama sees America as something to apologize for, Islamists portray their jihad as the road to esteem in this life and bounty in the next. It is a heinous belief system, but belief in something always beats belief in nothing.

The second driver of terrorist recruitment is the perception that the jihadists are winning, the conviction that they will ultimately prevail. Osama bin Laden wooed young Muslims with the wisdom that people are always drawn to the strong horse and shun the weak one. While Islamic State “caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi follows up each jihadist atrocity by seizing more territory and enslaving more subjects, the president of the United States follows each jihadist atrocity — Benghazi, Paris, and now San Bernardino — by releasing more jihadists from Gitmo.

It’s not Gitmo driving recruitment. It’s our president.

If you want a monument to the failure of American schools, just look around a Bernie Sanders rally. It will be full of millennials, the 83 million people born between the early 1980s and 2000s. Most of them have been educated in schools that abandoned basic skills and knowledge, and put in their place curricula designed to “improve” human nature in order to conform to progressive utopian ideals. So instead of informed citizens, we have today’s “tolerant,” “sensitive,” and “diverse” narcissists whose heads are uniformly filled with intolerant leftwing dogma and unexamined political orthodoxy.

Exhibit one is the enthusiasm for socialism on the part of many millennials. This affection for a failed ideology in turn explains their attraction to an antique hippie and self-proclaimed socialist whose only jobs his whole life have been on the public payroll in a state with fewer people than Fresno County. So no surprise that in New Hampshire 83% of the under-30 vote went for Sanders, in Iowa 84%, and in Nevada 82%. That electoral approval, of course, is predicated on massive ignorance of socialism’s historical reality. In a 2010 New York Times/CBS poll, only 16% of millennials knew that socialism means some degree of government ownership of the economy. But it’s not just millennials: 43% of Democrats––and 56% of Democratic primary voters–– also view socialism favorably. That’s why Hillary Clinton is furiously tacking left in the primaries.

Nor do millennials know that Bernie’s advice to “look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway and learn from what they have accomplished for their working people,” ignores the fact that those countries have long been reforming their welfare states and liberalizing their economies, backing away from the failed dirigiste policies that excite the Berniacs. Denmark does have a generous welfare state, but high taxes on the middle class and a regressive Value Added Tax fund these benefits. This inconvenient truth contradicts Bernie’s claim that all his promised goodies can be paid for by punitively taxing “billionaires,” whose combined total wealth couldn’t pay for one year of the federal budget, let alone the trillions of dollars in unfunded social welfare liabilities.

But the flip side of this love of socialism is a strange hatred of capitalism, another consequence of the degeneration of our schools, which teach very little about the history and true nature of capitalism. So all that students know are what popular culture, movie actors, and progressives teach them with caricatures of capitalism as silly as Scrooge McDuck diving into piles of currency or pin-striped Mr. Moneybags lounging at Park Place.

Barack Obama announced Tuesday that he was finally fulfilling one of his foremost campaign promises and closing the Guantanamo Bay detention center. Usually the closing of a prison camp for enemy combatants signals the end of the war, and since Obama has never acknowledged that the U.S.’s defense against the global jihad is a war at all, it is fitting that he should end his presidency by closing the camp that so notoriously demonstrated otherwise. And besides, the jihadi leadership ranks need replenishing.

Certainly Obama has replenished them a great deal already. With as many as thirty percent of prisoners freed from Gitmo returning to the jihad, one would think that the Obama administration would pause and consider their plan very carefully before releasing more or transferring them to far less secure prisons inside the United States. That is, administration officials would pause and consider if they had any genuine concern for national security, but it is increasingly clear that they do not. After all, in January, al-Qaeda bomb expert Tariq Mahmoud Ahmed al-Sawah was released from Guantanamo.

What could possibly go wrong? What benefit could jihad terrorists possibly get from a bomb expert? And just last week, Fox News reported: “When Ibrahim al Qosi was released from Guantanamo Bay in 2012, a lawyer for the former Usama bin Laden aide said he looked forward to living a life of peace in his native Sudan. Three years later, Qosi has emerged as a prominent voice of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, appearing in a number of AQAP propaganda videos — including a 50-minute lecture calling for the takeover of Saudi Arabia.”

And on the same day that Obama announced his plan to close Gitmo, a former Gitmo inmate was arrested in Spain for recruiting for the Islamic State. The arrest epitomized just how much Obama’s plan is rooted in Leftist fantasy that would prefer to ignore the global jihad, rather than in reality.