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June 2016

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Orlando and Willful Blindness at the New York Times By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on June 14th, 2016

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.

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.

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?

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On ‘Radical Islam,’ Obama Contradicts Eight Years of Obama By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on June 14th, 2016

In today’s meandering remarks on the Orlando jihadist attack, President Obama rebuked detractors who criticize him for failing to use the term “radical Islam” and be clear about the enemy waging war against the United States. “There’s no magic to the phrase ‘radical Islam,’” the president declared. “It’s a political talking point, not a strategy.” Calling the enemy by a different name, he insisted, would not change the enemy’s behavior – would not “make it go away.”

When Obama speaks about our Islamist enemies, it is always tough to decide whether he is (a) arrogantly clueless (because he always thinks he knows more about this subject than anyone else), or (b) cynically well-aware that what he’s saying is nonsense.

It has been Obama who has maintained for the entirety of his presidency that we have to be careful about the language we use to describe our enemies because our words affect their self-perception and their behavior. Calling jihadists“jihadists,” we were told, gives them too much credit and esteem in their culture. We should, we were lectured, resist applying Islamic terms to them because that affirms their self-image: warriors in a great cause, rather than theperverters of a great religion.

This theory has always been absolute, unmitigated, one-hundred percent BS.

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The Orlando Jihadist and the Blind Sheikh’s Bodyguard Connecting dots between two of the two biggest terror attacks on U.S. soil. by Andrew McCarthy

By on June 14th, 2016

According to Fox News, Omar Mateen, the jihadist who carried out the mass-murder attack at a gay nightclub in Florida this weekend, was a student of Marcus Robertson, an Orlando-based radical Muslim who once served as a bodyguard to Omar Abdel Rahman — the notorious “Blind Sheikh” whom I prosecuted for terrorism crimes in the early to mid 1990s.

Robertson, a former U.S. marine with a serious criminal record, is now 47. That means he was in his early twenties when the Blind Sheikh lived in the New York metropolitan area. It was a commonplace in those days for the Sheikh to travel with an entourage, including bodyguards from various groups (e.g., his fellow native Egyptians, Palestinians associated with Hamas, Sudanese Muslims who lived in New Jersey, and — often in Brooklyn, where he frequented the Farooq and Taqua mosques — African-American Muslims, most of them converts to Islam).

In the spring of 1993, members of the Blind Sheikh’s cell were plotting to follow up the February 26 World Trade Center bombing with simultaneous bombings of several New York City landmarks (including the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, the U.N.’s headquarters, and the FBI’s lower-Manhattan field office). The jihadists planning the landmarks attacks turned to a man named Clement Hampton-el for help obtaining detonators. In a conversation recorded by an FBI informant, Hampton-el explained that it had recently become harder for him to get detonators because his sources had recently been arrested by the FBI in Pennsylvania. He described these sources as members of a gang that robbed banks and post offices —activities ordinarily illegal under Islamic law but that, according to the Blind Sheikh, were permissible as long as a chunk of the proceeds went to support jihad. Before the FBI shut the gang down, Hampton-el said they had been able to supply “C-4s, M-16s, AKs, detonators, bulletproof vests — they had everything.”

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BRUTAL REALITIES: BRUCE BAWER

By on June 14th, 2016

On CNN and Fox News, one politician after another professed to be “shocked” by the massacre in Orlando. “Who would have expected such a thing?” people kept asking. Actually, I’ve been expecting just such a thing for years. The only shock was that it took this long for some jihadist to go after a gay establishment.

Islamic law, after all, is crystal clear on homosexuality, though the various schools of sharia prescribe a range of penalties: one calls for death by stoning; another demands that the transgressor be thrown from a high place; a third says to drop a building on him. In Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Sudan, Yemen, Mauritania, Pakistan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, as well as in parts of Nigeria, Somalia, Syria and Iraq, homosexuality is indeed punishable by death.

Nor do Muslims magically change their views on the subject when they move to the West. As long ago as 2005, the head of the Netherlands’ leading gay rights group said that, owing to the growth of Islam in Amsterdam, tolerance of gay people was “slipping away like sand through the fingers”; over the last 10 or 15 years, Dutch gays have fled the cities in droves to escape Muslim gay-bashing. In Norway, several high-profile Muslims have refused publicly to oppose executing gays, and when challenged on their views have gone on the offensive, demanding respect for orthodox Muslim beliefs. This past April, a poll established that 52 percent of British Muslims want homosexuality banned.

Many on the left (and some on the right, too) refuse to face these facts. In 2004, when gay activist Peter Tatchell urged London’s then-mayor Ken Livingstone to rescind an invitation to Koranic scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi—who supports the death penalty for gays—Livingstone issued a report calling Qaradawi a liberal and Tatchell a racist.

Yes, there are self-identified Muslims who harbor no antigay prejudice; I suspect that more than a few of them are actually apostates who—aware that Islam considers apostasy, too, a capital crime—choose to keep quiet about their infidel status. Some gays who were born into Islam claim that they’ve worked out for themselves a version of their faith not inconsistent with their homosexuality; good luck to them, but they’re in a tiny minority. Whenever a Muslim commits some atrocity, we’re reminded that the world contains some 1.5 billion Muslims, the great majority of them tolerant, peace-loving, etc.; the fact is that the great majority of those 1.5 billion Muslims also belong to varieties of Islam that preach contempt for, and severe punishment of, homosexuals.

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ISIS and ‘Domestic’ Terrorism In reacting to terrorism, Obama cannot bring himself to say the words ‘radical Islam.’ By Victor Davis Hanson

By on June 14th, 2016

There are many threads to the horror in Orlando.

Most disturbing is the serial inability of the Obama administration — in this case as after the attacks at Fort Hood and in Boston and San Bernardino — even to name the culprits as radical Islamists. Major Hasan shouts “Allahu akbar!” and Omar Mateen calls 911 in mediis interfectis to boast of his ISIS affiliation — and yet the administration can still not utter the name of the catalyst of their attacks: radical Islam. It is hard to envision any clearer Islamist self-identification, other than name tags and uniforms. The Obama team seems to fear the unwelcome public responses to these repeated terrorist operations rather than seeing them as requisites for changing policies to prevent their recurrence.

On receiving news of the attack, Obama almost immediately called for greater tolerance for the LGBT community — as if American society, rather than jihadism and the cultural homophobia so characteristic of the Middle East, had fueled the attack; or as if Mateen had not phoned in his ISIS affiliation. Obama strained to find vocabulary equivalent to “workplace violence” and was reduced to suggesting that the Orlando club was a nexus for gay solidarity and thus a target of endemic LGBT hatred, a half- but only half-right summation. Why is Obama’s first reaction always to find perceived fault within American society rather than with radical Islamism, an ideology certainly at odds with all progressive notions of gay rights, feminism, and religious tolerance?

In Obama’s view, it appears, the problem was a dearth of the community-organizing spirit, not of anti-terrorist measures. And then he channeled the gun-control narrative — forgetting apparently that the Islamist security officer Mateen had passed the requisite background checks to get his guns (Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?), and that the Boston massacre, the beheading in Oklahoma, and the stabbings at UC Merced had nothing to do with firearms, and that the strictest firearms legislation in the world did little to prevent Islamist terrorism in Belgium and France. Obama, both ideologically and temperamentally, apparently is not up to the task of putting the security of American citizens at a higher priority than his preconceived multicultural ideas of Middle Eastern “difference” and his domestic agendas. Or perhaps he believes, as do many, that there is no practicable way to prevent these sorts of radical-Islamist killers from murdering Americans. Banning knives, box-cutters, pressure cookers, ball-bearings, and all guns will not stop the Tsarnaevs and Mateens of the world, although holding accountable authorities who ignore warning signals about radical Islamists might.

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Most Western Gays Remain in Denial about Islam The greatest threat to their rights and security does not come from the political Right. By Douglas Murray

By on June 14th, 2016

Back in January, the U.K.’s Gay Times ran a morbidly fascinating piece. Following the latest attacks in Paris and ISIS’s throwing of gays off buildings, the magazine asked, “Is Islam itself really a threat to the gay community?” Readers may be unsurprised to hear that the next sentence read, “The answer is simple. ‘No.’”

According to the piece (written by one Thomas Ling), there is nothing in Islam that need worry gays. But what, I hear you ask, about the Islamic traditions? What about the Koran? Fortunately, Gay Times had this covered, insisting that the Koran says “nothing at all” about being gay. Phew! So everyone can flip over to the articles on diets and work-out routines?

Well, not quite. The reason given was that “the word ‘homosexual’ simply didn’t exist when it [the Koran] was written.” Okay, but what about the founder of Islam, Mohammad, and his injunction to kill people who are gay? Our intrepid reporter avoided that hadith but did note another “prophetic narration,” which says, “When a man lies with another man, the throne of heaven shakes.” (The author fails to make the obvious frippery that if you’re really lucky the earth will also move.)

Anyway, having got near the rub, Gay Times author promptly slipped into the more comfortable issue of Biblical injunctions on homosexuality. He insisted that “the ruthless and reckless applications of Sharia law by IS are not inevitable consequences of Islam.” To give the reader a boost, we are reminded of a Muslim MP who voted for same-sex marriage and told how great the work of an “anti-Islamophobia” group was before closing with some bashing of tabloids for their publishing “negative” news stories about Muslims. The whole exercise in casuistry concluded thus:

Maybe it’s time to accept that Islamic State has very little to do with the teachings of Islam. Maybe we should start comparing their fighters to terrorists like Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer, motivated by skewed personal beliefs, instead of to an entire diverse religion. It’s maybe then that society can accept Islam and promote a tolerance that can be proudly looked back on by future generations of gay Muslims.

That’s a lot of “maybes.” So let me add a couple of my own. “Maybe” Gay Times and Mr. Ling are wrong. Maybe they are in fact only symptomatic of the slow learning of gay communities in the West when it comes to Islam. And maybe, just maybe, after Orlando, a few more people will realize that the patchwork-quilt paradise of societal atomization we call “diversity” is a hell of our own creation.

It isn’t surprising that most gay spokespeople and publications lean left. For historic reasons — principally the political Right’s opposition to gay rights — most gay spokespeople continue to think that the political Right is the sole locale from which anti-gay sentiment can come. For many years Pat Robertson was their worst nightmare. But Pat Robertson just wanted to stop gays from marrying. He didn’t call for people to throw us off high buildings.

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Election 2016: Knowns and Unknowns We still have five more months of Trump vs. Hillary. Then four or eight years of – what? By Victor Davis Hanson

By on June 14th, 2016

The Disaffected. Will stay-home so-called establishment Republicans outnumber renewed Reagan Democrats, Tea Partiers, and conservative independents, some of whom likely sat out 2008 and 2012, but who now are likely to vote for Trump? The latter energized group will probably continue to support Trump even if he persists in his suicidal detours like the legal gymnastics of Trump University, or if he keeps repeating ad nauseam the same stale generalities he has served up throughout his campaign.

And will the ranks of the #NeverTrump holdouts, despite claims to the contrary in the spring, thin by autumn, should Trump change a few of his odious spots and become a more disciplined candidate? Will his populist message be recalibrated to appeal to minorities who, albeit less publicly than their white counterparts, resent illegal immigration and its effects on the poor and working classes, are angry about record labor nonparticipation and elite boutique environmentalism, and appreciate tough, even if crazed, El Jefe talk in place of politically correct platitudes?

If Trump comes up with a detailed, even if clumsily delivered, conservative agenda, and if a now-die-hard-leftist Hillary Clinton continues to deprecate and caricature the entire conservative tradition, will he who seems a buffoon in June prove preferable in November to ensuring a 16-year Obama–Clinton regnum?

Anti-Hillary vs. Anti-Trump. Will Sanders holdouts roughly approximate the number of Republican #NeverTrumpers? For now, it would be more socially acceptable for a Sanders supporter to vote for Hillary than for an anti-Trumper to give in and vote for Trump. Voting for Hillary would not entail the social and class costs for a Sanders supporter that voting for Trump would for a Republican of the “not-in-my-name” Romney or Jeb Bush wing. The Wall Street Journal is more likely to show repugnance for the idea of finishing the wall than an advocate of Sanders’s 70 percent top tax rate is to reject Hillary’s less radical, though radical enough, idea of upping the current 39.5 percent top rate. An oddity of the campaign is that the Republican establishment applies a higher standard to its own candidate than it has applied to either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, who, with a modicum of research, can be proven to have matched Trump, slur for slur.

Criminality. No one knows at this point whether Hillary will be indicted or, if she is not, whether her exemption will trigger outrage in the FBI ranks that will garner headline notoriety even in the liberal media. Almost daily, yet another detail in the e-mail scandal emerges that reinforces the narrative that everything Hillary has said so far about her e-mails has been demonstrably false. More importantly, the Clintons, especially post-2000, became a near-criminal enterprise. Almost weekly over the last few months, we have learned of a new wrinkle to the Clinton Foundation’s pay-to-play syndicate. Bill Clinton was apparently, at $4 million a year, the highest-paid “chancellor” in the history of American higher education, for steering toward the scandal-plagued Laureate “University” millions of dollars in business from the State Department, which was run by his wife. Because the Clintons became so rich so quickly, and without any apparent mechanism other than leveraging government service, there is a two-decades reservoir of scandals that is largely untapped — suggesting that Balzac’s aphorism should be amended to read in the plural, “Behind every great fortune there are plenty of great crimes.”

The Obama Matrix. Pollsters are still trying to calibrate to what degree Hillary will recapture Obama’s record minority registration, turnout, and block voting — and whether such pandering will in turn spike the white-male anti-Hillary vote to record levels. There is something foreign and uncomfortable about Hillary’s faux-accented performances; perhaps her shrill obsequiousness will strike at least some minority voters as a sort of elite white and repugnant condescension. No one likes a transparent suck-up, especially by someone whose past record of honesty and character is so disreputable. Conventional wisdom suggests that the supposed “new” demography will allow Hillary to replicate the Obama coalition, but that assumes that minority voters, who supposedly vote along ethnic and racial lines, are comfortable with Hillary’s tastes and with her disingenuous career, and will vote as they did in 2008 and 2012, more than making up for new white-working-class converts to Trump.

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ISIS Takes Credit for Stabbing Police Commander, Wife Near Paris By Bridget Johnson

By on June 14th, 2016

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/2016/06/13/isis-takes-credit-for-stabbing-police-commander-wife-near-paris/

Through its same wire service that has claimed credit for Orlando, Brussels and other attacks, ISIS took responsibility for the double murder of a police commander and his wife.

The 42-year-old cop was in front of his suburban home in Magnanville, about 30 outside of Paris, this evening when he was attacked by a knife-wielding assailant.

The attacker then took the victim’s wife and 3-year-old son hostage inside their house.

Police surrounded the property, evacuating nearby residents, and attempted to negotiate for a few hours before storming the home and fatally shooting the attacker. The wife was found dead inside the house; the toddler was rescued.

Le Parisien newspaper reported that a neighbor heard the attacker yelling “Allahu Akbar.”

The paper said the police commander had been stabbed nine times in the abdomen and the assailant announced the wife’s murder on social media after he killed her.

The ISIS-linked Amaq Agency later issued a breaking news alert stating an “Islamic State fighter kills deputy chief of the police station in the city of Les Mureaux and his wife with blade weapons near Paris.”

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Kerry on Orlando: ‘We Try to Undo Hate’ at State Department By Bridget Johnson

By on June 14th, 2016

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State John Kerry weighed in on the Orlando terrorist attack today as “an act that obviously was — is profoundly filled with hate as well as a desire to sow terror in people.”

Appearing with the Cypriot foreign minister at the State Department today, Kerry called the attack in which Omar Mateen killed at least 49 people “horrific in every — every sense of the meaning of that word.”

“Everyone has spoken to the strength of Orlando, and I have no doubt that the citizens of Orlando, as its papers declared today very clearly, will get through this,” he said. “But all of us will continue in every way possible here at the State Department where we are deeply engaged every single day in this fight against ISIL.”

“We will continue to stand up for our values, which are the antithesis of what drove yesterday’s horrible events. We try to undo hate, and we try to show the value of people coming together working through differences and I think are profoundly driven by a sense of love for other people.”

Kerry added that “the worst thing you can do is engage in trying to point fingers at one group or one form of sectarianism or another or one division or another.”

“Those are not the values of our country. What we need to do is to bring people together and work to forever prevent this kind of hate and terror from playing out as it has so horribly in the last day,” he said.

“So we here at the department are going to continue in every way that we already are to fight against ISIL and any other terrorist group in the world that seeks to impose its will or carry out its hateful ideology against other people. And I’m proud of the actions of this department as we continue to do that.”

Kerry is scheduled to break the Ramadan fast at an iftar dinner with visiting Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman this evening. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Obama, Clinton Say ‘Disarm’ While Failing to Protect They really believe they deserve to be trusted with your security. By Richard Fernandez,

By on June 14th, 2016

The mass shooting at an Orlando nightclub that claimed 50 lives has once again revived the question of how the authorities could have missed warning signs from a perpetrator.

The FBI first became aware of Omar Mateen in 2013 when he made comments to coworkers “alleging possible terrorist ties.” The feds interviewed Mateen three times in connection with his remarks — which may have assumed more than casual importance in light of his employment by a security company that guards government buildings, and Mateen’s ambitions to become a police officer.

Mateen was later removed from a terror watchlist after it was determined that he had broken no laws. The rest is history.

It joins abundant precedent. The father of the so-called underwear bomber warned by U.S. authorities of his son’s intentions to attack America, but they fell through the cracks.

The Russian government warned U.S. authorities the Boston Marathon bombers were radical Islamists more than a year and a half before they killed many and maimed more. As with Mateen, the feds found that no laws were violated. The brothers were sent on their way until they reappeared with a blast.

The Pentagon failed to recognize numerous signs that Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan was up to no good and communicating with terrorists.

The extensive arsenal, recent Middle East travel, and correspondence with Islamist extremists of Syed Rizwan Farook did nothing to alarm the FBI before he and his wife massacred 14 people at a Christmas party in San Bernardino.

The famous complaint of Admiral David Beatty at Jutland — “something is wrong with our bloody ships today” — surely must apply to the State Department after 600 requests for security upgrades from the Benghazi consulate failed to rouse Secretary Clinton to action. When asked how she could fail to see a telegraphed punch, Clinton could only say: “What difference, at this point, does it make?”

The most disturbing aspect of recent terror attacks is that the authorities were taken by surprise each time despite advance warning. This serial failure undercuts the administration’s claim to competence.

This is something the non-expert public understands. Suppose someone came to you claiming he was a brain surgeon. Even if you were not a doctor but had questions only a brain surgeon could answer correctly, you could evaluate the “brain surgeon” by giving him one exam and another to the cleaning person in the hallway. If they scored the same, you would begin to suspect the brain surgeon might be fake.

If the cleaning person continually outscored the “brain surgeon,” a rational employer would consider hiring that person as head of surgery, which possibly explains the rise of Donald Trump.

The administration’s demand for more gun control crucially rests on the claim of competence. CONTINUE AT SITE

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