Displaying posts categorized under

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

It’s Time We Faced the Facts about the Muslim World Islam has a serious problem. America needs to start acting accordingly. By David French

Here is a plain, inarguable truth: A series of Muslim immigrants and “visitors” are responsible for killing more Americans on American soil than the combined militaries of Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. Two more attacks over the weekend left 38 Americans wounded, and it appears that both were carried out by Muslim immigrants.

In Saint Cloud, Minn., Dahir Adan’s family identified him as the man who stabbed eight people in a mall before being shot and killed by an armed civilian, an off-duty police officer named Jason Falconer. Adan’s family said he was born in Kenya. In New York, police arrested an Aghan-American named Ahmad Khan Rahami after a shootout. He’s a “person of interest” in bombings in both New York and New Jersey that injured 29.

Despite making up a tiny fraction of the American population, Muslims are responsible for exponentially more terror deaths than any other meaningful American community. Even if you use the Left’s utterly ridiculous standard of “terror deaths since 9/11” (why exclude America’s worst terror attack when calculating the terror threat?), Muslim terrorists have killed almost twice as many people as every other American faction or demographic combined.

Yet when any politician or pundit suggests restrictions or even special scrutiny applied to Muslim immigrants — especially Muslim immigrants or visitors from jihadist conflict zones — entire sectors of the Left (and some on the right) recoil in shock and horror. Whenever there’s a terror attack, there’s an almost palpable desperation to determine that the attacker was not Muslim and the attack had “no connection” to international terror, in spite of the fact that it is now ISIS and al-Qaeda strategy to inspire lone wolves.

The Response to This Weekend’s Terror Attacks Showed Willful Blindness in Real Time The ideology behind the attacks in New York, New Jersey, and Minnesota must be confronted forthrightly. By Andrew C. McCarthy

In the all too familiar pattern, things are going boom, Americans are under attack, and the American political class is already busy playing the “See No Jihad” minuet.

In a rational world, where our highest imperative would be to understand the threat that confronts us rather than to find the least offensive way of describing it, it would be patently, undeniably obvious that we are targets of international terrorism fueled by Islamic supremacist ideology. Nevertheless, the political class can only bring itself to say this kicking and screaming, and only if there is no other plausible alternative — which basically means a terrorist caught in the act while wearing an ISIS T-shirt.

That is because Islamic supremacism is a mainstream interpretation of Islam. The political class has convinced itself that uttering the plain truth would be condemning all of Islam, meaning all Muslims — notwithstanding that no one sensible claims Islamic supremacism is the only way of interpreting Islam, and, in fact, jihadist battalions kill more Muslims than non-Muslims.

Speaking forthrightly would also undermine a fiction the political class inanely believes is essential to social cohesion: The notion, oft-repeated by President Obama and Hillary Clinton, that Islam is part of the fabric of American life, as native in our history as apple pie and Judeo-Christian culture.

Islam, of course, is an alien belief system. That doesn’t make it bad per se. Our society is a melting pot and many things alien to it have blended their way in, making us more vibrant, dynamic, innovative, and successful. Clearly, though, not everything alien is benign and welcome.

Many Muslims embrace the Western culture of reason, liberty, and equality, and they flourish in our society, to which they are a real asset. Nevertheless, nothing is more alien and hostile to our society than Islamic supremacism — which, at its core, is sharia supremacism. Its adherents resist assimilation and seek to impose a totalitarian system that suppresses liberty and is systematically discriminatory against non-Muslims, women, apostates from Islam, homosexuals, and other groups.

Trump shatters GOP records with small donors ‘He’s the Republican Obama,’ one operative says as Trump monetizes his Republican supporters. By Shane Goldmacher

Donald Trump has unleashed an unprecedented deluge of small-dollar donations for the GOP, one that Republican Party elders have dreamed about finding for much of the past decade as they’ve watched a succession of Democrats — Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders and, to a lesser extent, Hillary Clinton — develop formidable fundraising operations $5, $10 and $20 at a time.

Trump has been actively soliciting cash for only a few months, but when he reveals his campaign’s financials later this week they will show he has crushed the total haul from small-dollar donors to the past two Republican nominees, John McCain and Mitt Romney — during the entirety of their campaigns.

All told, Trump is approaching, or may have already passed, $100 million from donors who have given $200 or less, according to an analysis of available Federal Election Commission filings, the campaign’s public statements and people familiar with his fundraising operation. It is a threshold no other Republican has ever achieved in a single campaign. And Trump has done so less than three months after signing his first email solicitation for donors on June 21 — a staggering speed to collect such a vast sum.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said a senior Republican operative who has worked closely with the campaign’s small-dollar fundraising operation. “He’s the Republican Obama in terms of online fundraising.”

Clinton counted 2.3 million donors as of the end of August, the result of decades of campaigning, a previous presidential bid and allies who painstakingly built her an email file of supporters even before she formally announced her second run. But Trump had zoomed to 2.1 million donors in the past three months alone, his campaign has said.

The question now is what the gusher means for the GOP. The Republican National Committee, through a deal struck with Trump in May, is getting 20 percent of the proceeds from its small-donor operation for Trump plus access to this invaluable new donor and email file. But can Trump’s candidacy help close the Republican Party’s small-donor divide in one fell swoop? Will these donors — 2.1 million and counting — give to other Republicans? Will they drag the Republican Party in Trump’s direction for years to come? Or, if he loses, will they simply vanish?

Trump’s Marshall Plan for Inner-City Kids School choice is the most important civil rights cause since Martin Luther King. September 19, 2016 Matthew Vadum

Eleven days ago Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gave a revolutionary speech in Cleveland about public education that should have changed the face of American politics forever. Unfortunately few people know about this compassionate blueprint for desperately needed change. That is because the Sept. 8 address came the day after Trump’s strong performance at the Commander In Chief Forum hosted by Matt Lauer. Pundits’ tongues were still wagging furiously over what happened at that event as the thought that Trump could actually win in November began to sink in.

But it’s not just the fault of talking heads and the rest of the mainstream media. Trump did himself no favors during what was touted as a major speech focusing on education and lifting up America’s inner cities. Instead of diving right in, he devoted the first 18 minutes to attacks on Hillary Clinton over national security issues and the war on the Islamic State that had nothing to do with America’s inner cities and the decades that corrupt big city Democrats have spent oppressing inner-city children.

In short Trump’s revolutionary call to arms against the public school monopoly was effectively buried by the candidate’s lack of discipline. Consequently, few people are aware of Trump’s unprecedented proposal for a $130 billion plan to bail poor inner-city kids out of schools that don’t teach them, who are thus condemned to lives of grinding poverty.

The speech that unveiled a modern-day Marshall Plan to rescue poor kids in low-income neighborhoods from failing public schools barely caused a ripple. But if the lives of the poor in our inner cities are to change, Americans need to know about Trump’s plan.

What’s especially refreshing about the Trump proposal is that it is not half-hearted or drawn up in a way to placate Democrats, who now are not going to relinquish their control of the failed urban public school system. Republican politicians have in the past advocated relatively timid, innocuous-sounding school choice proposals but Trump’s plan is a blazing thunderbolt hurled at the education establishment that puts previous school choice proposals to shame.

Trump’s plan, which he laid out at Cleveland Arts and Social Sciences Academy, an inner-city charter school, drives home the point that Democrats are the true enemies of inner-city residents. They have a monopoly control of America’s major inner cities that goes back 50 to 100 years. Democrats want poor blacks and other inner-city inhabitants to stay exactly where they are – and keep on voting Democrat until the end of time.

Everyone with eyes knows that the urban public school system in America is a travesty. Over decades the Left took a basically good system that churned out good citizens, entrepreneurs, and employees, and transformed it into a jobs program for adults, especially Democratic Party supporters and labor bosses. It amounts to a gigantic partisan slush fund that everyone who pays taxes in America is forced to support. And no matter how much money gets spent, things never seem to improve.

A Black Sergeant Brings Obama and Black Lives Matter to Justice “Obama has conspired to incite violence, looting, arson, assault against law enforcement.”Daniel Greenfield

“Obama has conspired with all Defendants and others to incite violence, looting, arson, assault against law enforcement and helpless communities with the purpose of making a new ‘fundamentally transformed America’ appear preferable to the crime waves and chaos they themselves are creating.”

These words come from a shocking lawsuit filed by an African-American police sergeant.

Obama’s war on cops has cast a fearful shadow over police forces across the country, but no single force has suffered as much as the Dallas Police Department which buried five of its own. Now a lawsuit takes on not only the racists and bigots of Black Lives Matter but their backers all the way to the top.

On a hot night in July, five police officers were murdered at a Black Lives Matter anti-police rally.

Chief David Brown stated that, “The suspect said he was upset about Black Lives Matter. He said he was upset about the recent police shootings. The suspect said he was upset at white people. The suspect stated that he wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.”

Some Black Lives Matter supporters celebrated the murders by Micah X. Johnson. Others claimed that the murdered officers had brought their deaths on themselves. A Black Lives Matter supporter brandished a sign, “Killer Cops Create Cop Killers”. Below it was the hashtag #FTP which stands for “F___ the Police.” #FTP is a hashtag often associated with the hate group’s anti-police activism.

Black Lives Matter draws its inspiration from cop-killer and domestic terrorist Assata Shakur. The recent manifesto of the Movement for Black Lives named her and other racist cop-killers as “political prisoners”. It also complained about the way that Dallas police took out Micah X. Johnson.

But the whitewashing of Black Lives Matter began before the bodies of its latest victims were even cold.

The media fussed over the impact on the hate group and a “backlash” against the “shell-shocked Black Lives Matter community in Dallas”. It wasn’t as concerned about the “shell-shocked” Dallas police officers who were targeted for death by this racist “community” of racists and left-wing radicals.

At the memorial, Obama spent more time praising Black Lives Matter than its victims. The bodies were buried and the racist agitators got back to their business of inciting the murder of more police officers backed by $130 million in left-wing cash from big bucks leftists like Soros and the Ford Foundation.

A Weekend of Coincidences Incidents in NYC, New Jersey and Minnesota look an awful lot like jihad, but the denial is as thick as ever. September 19, 2016 Robert Spencer

It was a weekend of coincidences: acts declared not to be terrorism that just happened to look a great deal like…terrorism.

After a bomb went off at 23rd Street and 6th Avenue in Manhattan and another bomb was found four blocks away, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said: In a press conference in the aftermath, New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio said, “This was an intentional act.” However, he added that he didn’t think it was terrorism, and refused to agree with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who said that the bombing was “obviously an act of terrorism.”

De Blasio’s position was entirely incoherent: what is an intentional bombing if it isn’t terrorism? Cuomo made a bit more sense as he explained that while it was obviously terrorism, “it’s not linked to international terrorism. In other words, we’ve found no ISIS connection.”

Very well. So he was leaving the door open to it being “right-wing extremists.” But was it an act of jihad? Both de Blasio and Cuomo were committed to denying that there is any jihad that has anything to do with terrorism in the first place, so they would never answer (or, given the state of the mainstream media, be asked) that question, but just to assert that the bombing was not terrorism, or international terrorism, did not entirely rule out that it may have been an act of Islamic jihadis. Yet De Blasio remained mystified: “We know it was a very serious incident, but we have a lot more work to do to be able to say what kind of motivation was behind this. Was it a political motivation? Was it a personal motivation? We do not know that yet.”

A Tumblr page entitled “I’m the NY Bomber” professed to offer a clue. It said: “You probably have all seen the news by now, the explosives detonated in New York City, that was me. I did it because I cannot stand society. I cannot live in a world where homosexuals like myself as well as the rest of the LGBTQ+ community are looked down upon by society.”

The Politics of Weather by Roger Kimball

Since colleges and universities are engaged in an orgy of renaming things—buildings, programs, maybe even the institutions themselves—I’d like to offer a suggestion about an important renaming opportunity. The University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, for example, really ought to rename itself “Indoctrination U.” As a recent report on The College Fix revealed, that campus of UCCS is offering to indoctrinate students about the dangers of anthropogenic climate change (formerly known as “global warming”). Only one perspective on this subject will be tolerated.

The three professors teaching the class—Rebecca Laroche, Wendy Haggren and Eileen Skahill—I include their names in case you have the misfortune of attending UCCS so that you can avoid them—announced in an email that “We will not, at any time, debate the science of climate change, nor will the ‘other side’ of the climate change debate be taught or discussed in this course.”

Love those scare quotes around “other side,” Comrade! “Opening up a debate that 98% of climate scientists unequivocally agree to be a non-debate,” they continue “would detract from the central concerns of environment and health addressed in this course.”

Gee, and I thought it was only 97% of climate scientists were we (wrongly) said to agree with Al Gore.

I feel sorry for students trapped in those reeducation camps. I’d like to do something to help. One thing I can offer is the alternative that Profs. Laroche, Haggren, and Skahill want to deprive their students of. So, to all students at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, help is on the way. Just head over to The New Criterion and for an extremely modest consideration you can download a PDF of our recent pamphlet called The Climate Surprise: Why CO2 is Good for The Earth. (You can also get a hard copy of the pamhlet here.)

THE CLIMATE SURPRISE coverPAMPHLET—Kimball

The pamphlet is based on a conference The New Criterion hosted in March in collaboration with The CO2 Coalition, whose data those UCCS profs should study but won’t. The pamphlet includes essays by six distinguished scientists, William Happer, Craig Idso, Roy W. Spencer, Richard S. Lindzen, Patrick Moore, and Bruce M. Everett. You can also see a clip of an interview we conducted with the great Mark Steyn, who is being sued by the climate fraudster Michael Mann, here. Finally, as a teaser, here is my introduction to the pamphlet, “The Politics of Weather.” Just don’t let Profs. Laroche, Haggren, and Skahill catch reading such dangerous literature:

Are you weary of the weather wars? Are you alarmed by the extensive beachhead that “pro- gressive” culture warriors, clad in the (borrowed) raiment of science and fired by a moral fury wor- thy of an early-twentieth-century temperance campaigner, have secured in the public debate? You will be grateful, then, for Mark Twain’s 1892 novel The American Claimant, which be- gins with an advisory about “The Weather in This Book.” “No weather will be found in this book,” Twain explains. “This is an attempt to pull a book through without weather.” What a relief! For it is impossible to turn anywhere in our enlightened, environmentally conscious world without being beset by lectures about one’s “carbon footprint” and horror tales about “global warming,” “rising seas,” and imminent ecological catastrophe.

It was with this in mind that The New Criterion partnered this spring with the CO2 Coali- tion, a Washington-based think tank dedicated to combatting misinformation about the effects of CO2 and fossil fuels, on a conference to pon- der The Climate Surprise: Why CO2 Is Good for the Earth.1 We might have added “and for you, your loved ones, and the economy,” but we did not wish to appear gratuitously provocative.

Forget the Economy—It’s the Jihad, Stupid! By Roger L Simon

In presidential elections, traditionally it’s the economy, stupid. But if there’s one thing that trumps the economy, it’s whether you live or die. And as events play out in New York, New Jersey and Minnesota (not to mention Iran, Syria, Libya, etc., etc.), it seems more than ever that for 2016—it’s the jihad, stupid.

There’s little question the Obama administration has done an horrendous job dealing with Islamic terrorism. The rise of ISIS is significantly on the president’s hands, not just because he inanely called the mega-terrorists a JV team, but because his failure to keep sufficient U.S. troops in Iraq gave the Islamic State the opportunity to grow and thrive.

The success of the Islamic State has given rise to a worldwide epidemic of so-called “lone wolves” who aren’t really alone, but local players (sometimes banded together) who take their inspiration from ISIS. They don’t care whether the Islamic State is controlling Mosul or even Raqqa. They care about jihad. And there seem to be more of them every day, in all corners of the world.

As I write this, five men have been taken into custody near the Verrazano Bridge. Are they jihadists? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t bet against it. Meanwhile, after Saturday’s IED explosion on 23rd Street and the near tragedy at a Marine charity run in Seaside Park, New Jersey, more pipe bombs have been found near the train station in Elizabeth, New Jersey. (Are there pipe bombs everywhere now?)

By all rights Hillary Clinton, an obvious principal in the development of this ongoing disaster, should have no chance at the presidency in a rational world. But an extraordinarily biased and morally narcissistic media, unable to face their own inadequacies or change a narrative seemingly set in stone, apparently will do anything to see her elected.

Coming soon is an electoral showdown the likes of which we have never seen—and it will largely be over how our country handles the jihad. Do we want to live like this for the rest of our lives? Do we want ongoing terror attacks, large and small, to be the new normal for us, our children and our children’s children?

The time has come to take a serious look at Donald Trump’s “extreme vetting” of Muslim immigrants. So far it is the only proposal that would have much of effect on the status quo. I haven’t seen a single other suggestion of much relevance, especially since there is little appetite for a full-scale war in the Middle East. You can “see something, say something” until you’re blue in the face, but there’s no way everything can be caught.

Unfortunately, “extreme vetting” is, as we are constantly reminded by that same media, a form of discrimination against Muslims. The problem is, allowing a free flow of immigration, or anything close, is discrimination against everyone else.

I could fill the rest of this page and a half-dozen more with all the nationalities and religions that are not waging jihad. There is only one that is.

Until that ends, they must be stopped. We simply have no other choice. Otherwise we will be like Europe before we know it—and the European situation has become almost untenable. We may already be untenable ourselves. The sad events in St. Cloud attest to the great resistance their Somali community has to assimilating. We cannot have more of this. We must shut it down before it overwhelms us. CONTINUE AT SITE

Bomb Explodes in Elizabeth, New Jersey as Robot Tries to Disable It

Early Monday morning, a device found near the Elizabeth, New Jersey Amtrak train station blew up while a robot was trying disable it.

The device in Elizabeth, a city south of Newark, had been left in a backpack placed in a trash can near a train station and a bar, Mayor Christian Bollwage told reporters.

As many as five potential explosive devices tumbled out of the backpack when it was emptied, Bollwage said. After cordoning off the area, a bomb squad used a robot to cut a wire to try to disable the device, but inadvertently set off an explosion, he said.

FBI Bomb Squad is on scene and continuing the investigation at the train station in Midtown Elizabeth. pic.twitter.com/qvmzsgisjC

— Chris Bollwage (@MayorBollwage) September 19, 2016

“I can imagine that if all five of them went off at the same time, that the loss of life could have been enormous if there was an event going on,” Bollwage said.

There was a suspicious package with multiple improvised explosive devices this evening at the Elizabeth Train Station in NJ. #Elizabeth

— FBI Newark (@FBINewark) September 19, 2016

“In the course of rendering one of the devices safe, it detonated. There are no injuries & law enforcement personnel are at the scene processing evidence,” according to a tweet from FBI Newark account.

The device was detonated in a controlled setting, Bollwage said. The sound of the explosion reverberated loudly as heard on video filmed by local media.

“The robots that went in to disarm it, cut a wire and it exploded. I know there are other devices, I don’t know what they’re made up of but they’re going to have to be removed,” Bollwage said.

Authorities are not certain if the bomb was placed at the New Jersey location or if it was discarded to elude investigators. Law enforcement are working to disable the other devices found in the backpack.

The New Jersey backpack was found in the garbage by two men who were looking through the garbage. They reported the backpack to police when they “saw wires and pipes” coming from the pack.

Train service has been suspended in the immediate area. Amtrak released a statement:

Minneapolis Star Tribune Blames ‘Anti-Muslim Tensions’ for St. Cloud Mass Stabbing by ‘Soldier of the Islamic State’ By Patrick Poole

Just hours after a young Somali immigrant stabbed nine people at a shopping mall in St. Cloud, a mid-sized town in central Minnesota, the far-Left Minneapolis Star Tribune published an article hinting that the suspect may have been inspired by “anti-Muslim tensions.” The article was later scrubbed and replaced with a new article that directly raised the question of whether the attack by Dahir Adan was motivated by previous anti-Muslim incidents in the city.

Last night I reported here at PJ Media on the stabbing attack and the reports from local St. Cloud police that the suspect, who at that time hadn’t been named, had made references to “Allah” and asked at least one victim whether they were Muslim.

Earlier today, family members named Dahir Adan, a local Somali man who came to the United States 15 years ago and was a junior at St. Cloud State University, as the attacker.

But at 2:42 p.m. today, Pat Pheifer of the Star Tribune published an article, now removed and replaced on the newspaper’s website, titled “Anti-Muslim Tension Isn’t New in St. Cloud.”

I screen captured the article before it was scrubbed and replaced.

In the opening paragraphs, Pheifer writes so ambiguously that one could easily conclude that someone motivated by anti-Muslim beliefs was responsible for the attack:

A cloud of anti-Muslim sentiment and tension has hung over St. Cloud for the past seven years, with incidents ranging from bullying Somali and other East African immigrants at St. Cloud Technical High School, to women being screamed at in grocery stores, pig intestines wrapped around the door handles of a halal grocery store, and offensive billboards and license plates.

The most physically injurious incident came Saturday evening when a man stabbed nine people at the city’s Crossroads Center before the attacker was killed inside the mall by an off-duty police officer. No one but the attacker was killed.

Authorities said the man reportedly asked at least one victim whether they were Muslim before assaulting them and referred to Allah during the attacks.

So after a recitation of previous anti-Muslim incidents, Pheifer introduces “the most physically injurious incident” — the mass stabbing at Crossroads Center. A reader could understandably think that this new incident was similar in nature to those just recounted.

And the ambiguous description of the incident might lead one to conclude that it was anti-Muslim in nature.