RUTHFULLY YOURS

With the recent release of another exhaustive report by the National Academies of Sciences attesting to the safety of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, it is time for the food industry and advocates of genetically engineered crops to stand up for their products and put a label on them.

This could be the best way to make consumers confront their irrational fears, to stamp out public ignorance and to save an important technology that is too easily demonized by companies—like Whole Foods and Chipotle—that exploit consumer ignorance to seek competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Despite the scientific evidence, polls continue to show that most Americans fear that GMOs may harm their health. A 2015 report by the Pew Research Center, for instance, found that 57% of American adults think GMOs are generally unsafe whereas 88% of scientists think they are generally safe.

Statistics like these scare farmers and food manufacturers who have opposed mandatory GMO labeling laws like the one soon to be implemented in Vermont. Some have even pre-emptively pulled products from grocery shelves or replaced GMO ingredients.

But food producers may be more worried than they need to be. Studies that indicate popular aversion to GMOs do so in highly stylized experimental settings that highlight GMO attributes and do not resemble typical grocery shopping experiences. They reveal consumers to be poorly informed about the foods they eat and to have inconsistent preferences that vary depending upon how studies are conducted.

For instance, 90% of Americans want GMOs labeled if that question is posed to them, according to a 2013 survey by Rutgers University. But when researchers ask them to list the food characteristics they want labeled, only 7% name GMOs. And a 2015 survey by Oklahoma State University found that 80% of respondents would require labels on foods containing DNA—even though all foods contain DNA. CONTINUE AT SITE

It’s a leap year, which means it’s even more important than usual for the Obama administration to deny the threat of Islamic terrorism. In September 2012, it fell to Susan Rice, then ambassador to the U.N., to make the rounds on the Sunday-morning talk shows and peddle the falsehood that the attack at Benghazi, Libya, was just a high-spirited reaction to an amateur video.

Yesterday—a week after the biggest terror attack on American soil since 9/11—the Rice role fell to Attorney General Loretta Lynch. This time, the administration didn’t even bother pretending it was going to tell the truth.

Here’s the transcript, from NBC’s “Meet the Press”:

Lynch: What we’re announcing tomorrow is that the FBI is releasing a partial transcript of the killer’s calls with law enforcement, from inside the club. These are the calls with the Orlando PD negotiating team, who he was, where he was . . . that will be coming out tomorrow and I’ll be headed to Orlando on Tuesday.

Host Chuck Todd: Including the hostage negotiation part of this?

Lynch: Yes, it will be primarily a partial transcript of his calls with the hostage negotiators.

Todd: You say partial, what’s being left out?

Lynch: What we’re not going to do is further proclaim this man’s pledges of allegiance to terrorist groups, and further his propaganda.

Todd: We’re not going to hear him talk about those things?

Lynch: We will hear him talk about some of those things, but we are not going to hear him make his assertions of allegiance and that. It will not be audio, it will be a printed transcript. But it will begin to capture the back and forth between him and the negotiators, we’re trying to get as much information about this investigation out as possible. As you know, because the killer is dead, we have a bit more leeway there and we will be producing that information tomorrow.

Michael Del Moro, who worked alternately at the Obama White House and ABC News (and is currently with the latter), tweeted the transcript as released this morning by authorities (which we are quoting verbatim, including the bracketed portions):

To stop future terrorist attacks, we need solutions from all sides: better security and surveillance at home, a vigorous fight abroad and the support of Muslim moderates everywhere

The massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando—the worst act of terrorism on American soil since the attacks of 9/11—had barely ended when the debate over its significance began. As usual, the political class divided into competing camps, with liberals predictably claiming that the real issue is gun control and conservatives just as predictably claiming that the real issue is radical Islam. There wasn’t even agreement over whether this was a hate crime or an act of terrorism. (Why couldn’t it be both?)

Faced with the cacophony of competing sound bites, it is tempting to throw one’s hands up in despair and simply bemoan the debased state of political discourse. But we don’t have that luxury, because terrorism remains a real and growing danger. So how should we combat it? By adopting the best ideas from the left and the right on how to improve security at home and by going after terrorists abroad. In dealing with such a complex threat, no part of the political spectrum has a monopoly on the truth.

Start with domestic security. The state of our homeland defenses has improved since 9/11, thanks to greater awareness of the terrorist threat, greater resources devoted to stopping it and greater cooperation among law enforcement and intelligence agencies. But it is hard to stop a violent fanatic from walking into a nightclub and opening fire—and always will be.

The fact that there are more than 300 million firearms in private hands in the U.S. compounds the danger, because it means that anyone with a grudge can acquire the means to commit mass murder. Terrorists are aware of this vulnerability and seek to exploit it. As the American-born al Qaeda spokesman Adam Gadahn said in a 2011 video, “America is absolutely awash with easily obtainable firearms. You can go down to a gun show at the local convention center and come away with a fully automatic assault rifle without a background check and most likely without having to show an identification card. So what are you waiting for?” (You can’t buy a fully automatic weapon, but otherwise he was correct.)

Omar Mateen did not wait. Possibly inspired by a recent message from Islamic State urging its followers to turn Ramadan into “a month of suffering,” he marched into the Pulse nightclub and opened fire. The fact that he was able to work as a licensed security guard and to legally purchase firearms, despite having been investigated twice by the FBI for potential terrorist ties, suggests a fundamental breakdown in our safeguards.

There is no reason why the American public should be able to purchase military-style semiautomatic weapons such as the AR-15, which has become a favorite of mass shooters. As retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, one of the leaders of a new veterans’ group for gun control, notes, the purpose of the AR-15 is to kill a great many people as quickly as possible. It is also important to ban high-capacity magazines, which allow a killer to keep killing without reloading. Mateen used a Sig Sauer MCX semiautomatic rifle (similar to the AR-15) with a 30-round magazine.

Even if bans on assault weapons and high capacity magazines aren’t politically possible, Congress should, at a minimum, prevent suspects on terrorism watch lists from purchasing firearms legally—something that they were able to do 223 times in 2015, according to the Government Accountability Office. (Only one transaction in 10 was denied.)CONTINUE AT SITE

I hate flying, and have hated it for years ever since 9/11, and have sworn never to fly again. It’s for my blood pressure. I hate it not only because of the airlines’ treatment of passengers or customers as faceless widgets to be squeezed together as much as possible in an airport, but also on the planes, forcing one to come in physical contact with other passengers, many of whom one would not otherwise wish to touch. I hate it also because of the role of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).

The typical large airport is a microcosm of a regulated, controlled society, an experiment in Progressivism. The miasma of the environment is repellent if not dulling to the senses. Modern, post-9/11 airports are intended to be soul-destroying because the only way to exercise the government’s power is to hold one’s business and purposes hostage and extort soul-destroying submission to the state’s will. “You have to go there?” says the TSA. “Well, you have to get past me first. Drop your drawers.”

All American airports have been turned into microcosms of totalitarianism. It’s not a hard concept to grasp, once one has passed through – or rather endured – being molested, fondled, spindled, stamped, x-rayed, bar-coded, ordered from here to there, stripped bare to reveal one’s secrets or shames, approved or disapproved, and made to conform to the government’s measure of good and acceptable behavior. The milieu demands total submission to the state’s will and ends. There is certainly no ambience left to an airport, except one of nonstop dread and mental numbness.

Everything seems to be designed and planned to distract one from observing that once one is in the clutches of the government, and also of the airlines, one has been reduced to the status of of an assembly line cog to be processed and dispatched as speedily as possible – speedily in terms of bureaucracy.

I remember the time when flying was somewhat romantic, something to look forward to with some excitement. I remember being greeted by a throng of friends when I stepped off a plane. Today, anyone not flying isn’t even allowed in most of the spaces and byways of an airport. One’s friends, family, and well-wishers have been banned from having any business inside an airport. One’s greeters are confined to an area outside of the processing center.

An official media affiliate of the Islamic State released a new video this weekend praising the Orlando attack, calling for similar attacks in multiple languages and portraying a suicide bomber striking Times Square.

Titled “You Are Not Held Responsible Except for Yourself,” the Al-Furat Media Foundation release was distributed online with a promotional banner featuring President Obama, Omar Mateen and scenes from the previous weekend’s carnage.

Al-Furat specializes in Russian-language messages to Muslims in the Caucasus and beyond. Earlier this year, for example, the media wing released the Philippine terrorist group Abu Sayyaf’s video pledging allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

The video opens with the tag “USA” in the upper corner and shots of an unseen person assembling a bomb to put in a suicide vest. The person buttons up a blue shirt, straps on the bomb belt, and zips up a dark brown leather jacket to conceal it. He’s wearing a stainless steel wristwatch that reads 9:25.

That’s followed by scenes of Times Square and the torso of the leather-jacketed man walking along the street. A TGI Friday’s sign is shown.

In a close-up of the man with no location shown, he’s pulling the ring on his detonator.

It appears to be mock-up footage from an Al-Jazeera segment, with the network’s logo fuzzed out but still discernible.

News footage is then shown of the ABC News building banner in New York scrolling a headline about the November Paris attacks.

Then, pictures of Mateen along with closeups of the weapons he used in the June 12 attack on the Pulse nightclub: a Sig Sauer MCX .223 caliber rifle and Glock 17 9 mm.

Footage of the attack from American and Arabic TV is shown.

A black jihadist in fatigues with an outdoor backdrop that looks like IS territory in the Middle East is identified as Abu Isamil al-Amriki; he speaks perfect English and is referred to as an American, yet he speaks with a slight accent.

“Do you think you are at war with a small group of mujahideen in Iraq, Syria, Libya and other places? You are sadly mistaken. And do you think you will defeat us by bombing our homes with your drones and F-16s?” Abu Ismail says.

“O America, indeed you are at war with … sincere Muslims around the world who yearn and desire to see the honor of Islam returned,” he adds. “And O America, indeed you are at war with the people who wish to be killed and slain for the sake of Allah… you are at war with the holy Quran.”
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To this day, Lisa Nelson refers to it as the “corporate blackmail” letter. It arrived in the early spring of 2012 at her Visa office in Washington, D.C. Ms. Nelson at the time was in the government-relations department for the credit-card company and had seen her share of bare-knuckle political activism. But this letter was bigger, meaner, scarier.

The letter was officially addressed to Visa CEO Joseph Saunders and every member of Visa’s board; Ms. Nelson had been cc’ed. It came from a black advocacy group known as Color of Change, co-founded by liberal activist Rashad Robinson and by onetime Obama adviser Van Jones.

The month before, a 17-year-old African-American in Sanford, Fla., Trayvon Martin, had been fatally shot by a neighborhood-watch volunteer named George Zimmerman. The circumstances of the altercation proved confusing, but the black community instantly became angry over the police’s decision not to arrest Mr. Zimmerman. Florida has a “stand your ground” law, which authorizes a person to protect against a perceived threat. Within a few weeks, Color of Change was blaming this law on a center-right organization known as the American Legislative Exchange Council.

Visa was among a number of companies that gave money to ALEC, in support of its efforts to foster a pro-business environment in state legislatures. Color of Change’s letter was direct: Visa’s board must immediately pull all money from ALEC. If it did not, the advocacy group would air radio ads in the hometowns of Visa board members, holding them accountable for the death of a young black man.

The Visa board members weren’t alone. More than a few Fortune 500 companies had made the mistake of revealing, at an event here or there, that they donated to ALEC. The threatening letters flew out to board members at McDonald’s, John Deere, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Amazon, Wendy’s, Procter & Gamble.

Ms. Nelson, whom ALEC hired as its CEO in 2014, recalls thinking that “I needed to keep making the case that, as a company, we could not be put in a position where we could be told who we could work with.” Her boss agreed. Visa kept on with its ALEC donations. At least for a time. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Left is attempting to paint the Orlando massacre as primarily an attack on the gay community, made possible by easy access to guns. That is, according to the Left’s narrative, homophobia and gun violence are the ingredients that lit the fuse. Typical of this distorted way of thinking was the New York Times lead editorial on June 14th, which claimed the United States was being “terrorized again – and again, and again, and again – by the uniquely deadly combination of twisted hatred and weapons of mass destruction as easily available as cough medicine.”

This gross oversimplification plays down the role of ISIS-inspired jihad in fueling the massacre. The shooter, Omar Mateen, pledged allegiance to ISIS, drawing on its strict interpretation of sharia law to justify his rampage.

Some have attributed Mateen’s choice of a gay nightclub as his target to self-loathing for his own possible homosexual tendencies. However, that would not explain why he and his wife cased a Disney theme park in April as a possible location for his attack. Disney reportedly informed the FBI of what their surveillance had picked up, to no avail. Is it just a coincidence that, last January, a Muslim with two handguns and copy of the Koran was arrested at Disneyland Paris? More likely, it demonstrates how jihadists are targeting soft targets popular with tourists for maximum effect, especially those associated with “decadent” Western consumerism.

Moreover, there is the timing of Mateen’s attack. It came just three days after it was revealed that a pro-Isis group had issued a threat against U.S. civilians, including specifically in Florida. And last month, an ISIS spokesman called for lone wolf attacks by its sympathizers in Europe and the U.S. during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan “to win the great award of martyrdom.” Ramadan started a week before Mateen’s attack. If, as has been reported, Mateen had been a frequent visitor to the nightclub for whatever reason, he evidently skipped multiple opportunities to conduct his killing spree and waited for the start of Ramadan, as ISIS leaders had instructed.

Mateen was responding to the same radical Islamic ideology that led two illegal immigrants from Tunisia, who were ISIS followers, to stab a 26-year-old transgender man in Brussels the day before the Orlando attack. And it was the same radical Islamic ideology that led a man claiming allegiance to ISIS to stab a police official and his companion to death in France a day after the Orlando attack, while repeating ISIS’s call to turn the Euro 2016 football tournament being held in France into “a graveyard.”

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.