RUTHFULLY YOURS

Sunday’s massacre in Orlando contradicts President Obama’s many attempts to downplay the risks that Islamic State poses to the U.S. homeland, so it’s no wonder he wants to change the subject to something more congenial. To wit, his disdain for Donald Trump and Republicans.

“For a while now the main contribution of some of my friends on the other side of the aisle have made in the fight against ISIL is to criticize this Administration and me for not using the phrase ‘radical Islam,’” Mr. Obama said Tuesday, using his preferred acronym for Islamic State. “That’s the key, they tell us. We cannot beat ISIL unless we call them ‘radical Islamists.’ What exactly would using this label accomplish? What exactly would it change?”

Since the President asked, allow us to answer. We’re unaware of any previous American war fought against an enemy it was considered indecorous or counterproductive to name. Dwight Eisenhower routinely spoke of “international Communism” as an enemy. FDR said “Japan” or “Japanese” 15 times in his 506-word declaration of war after Pearl Harbor. If the U.S. is under attack, Americans deserve to hear their President say exactly who is attacking us and why. You cannot effectively wage war, much less gauge an enemy’s strengths, without a clear idea of who you are fighting.

Mr. Obama’s refusal to speak of “radical Islam” also betrays his failure to understand the sources of Islamic State’s legitimacy and thus its allure to young Muslim men. The threat is religious and ideological.

Islamic State sees itself as the vanguard of a religious movement rooted in a literalist interpretation of Islamic scriptures that it considers binding on all Muslims everywhere. A small but significant fraction of Muslims agree with that interpretation, which is why Western law enforcement agencies must pay more attention to what goes on inside mosques than in Christian Science reading rooms.

Mr. Obama’s refusal to speak of “radical Islam” leads to other analytical failures, such as his description of the Orlando terrorist as “homegrown.” The Islamic State threat is less a matter of geography than of belief, which is why it doesn’t matter whether Islamic State directly ordered or coordinated Sunday’s attack so long as it inspired it. This, too, is a reminder of the centrality of religion to Islamic State’s effectiveness.

No wonder the Administration seemed surprised by the Islamic State’s initial success in taking Mosul in 2014—soldiers of faith tend to fight harder than soldiers of fortune—and by its durability despite the U.S.-led air campaign. Last November Mr. Obama boasted that Islamic State was “contained” a day before its agents slaughtered 130 people in Paris. Days later, White House factotum Ben Rhodes insisted “there’s no credible threat to the homeland at this time.” Then came San Bernardino. CONTINUE AT SITE

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?

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.

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.”

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

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/436484/print

The federal government collects accurate data on the number of pigs in Iowa, on milk cows in New York, and on turkeys in Delaware but none whatsoever on the number of people with schizophrenia. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention keeps a long list of diseases that must be reported, including cryptosporidiosis, chlamydia, and cancer, but not schizophrenia.

This is remarkable, since schizophrenia is among our most consequential and expensive diseases. In a 2013 study, the annual economic burden of schizophrenia was estimated to be $156 billion. Three studies have reported that individuals with schizophrenia are responsible for 10 percent of all homicides in the United States; other studies suggest that people with schizophrenia — such as Jared Loughner in Tuscon, Aaron Alexis at the Washington Navy Yard, and James Holmes in Aurora, Colo. — are also responsible for up to one-third of mass killings. Even Adam Lanza in Newtown, Conn., had had a diagnosis of schizophrenia, in addition to autism spectrum disorder.

Other developed nations believe that it is important to ascertain the prevalence of schizophrenia and whether it is increasing or decreasing. For example, recent European studies have reported that schizophrenia is twice as common in England and the Netherlands as in Italy or Spain, that it has been steadily increasing in south London over three decades, and that early-onset schizophrenia is increasing in Denmark.

And what do we know about the United States? Nothing. Could an increasing incidence of schizophrenia be partly responsible for the sharp increase in the number of homeless who are mentally ill? We have no idea. Or the increase in mentally ill persons in jails and prisons? Or the startling increase in the number of mentally ill individuals who now receive psychiatric disability benefits, and are therefore eligible for Medicaid, under the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) programs? We know nothing. Our last prevalence study of schizophrenia was in 1980–84, when four cities and one rural area were studied and, from the results, a national prevalence was estimated. The last complete enumeration of “insane” persons in the United States was in the 1880 census.

One of the great problems we face in our ongoing confrontation with Islamic fundamentalism is that our enemies are rational and we are not.

It is a mistake — one that we insist on repeating — to tell ourselves that the jihadists and ISIS groupies who perpetuate terrorist spectaculars such as the attack on the Pulse nightclub outside Orlando are irrational, that they are mentally disorganized lunatics of the familiar-enough sort exemplified by Jared Lee Loughner and John Salvi, who may or may not believe themselves to be acting in the service of a particular cause. (Salvi was an abortion opponent who believed that a Vatican-based currency-manipulation scheme was shaping world affairs, and who believed himself to have been targeted by, among others, the Cosa Nostra and the Freemasons. Loughner, too, was obsessed with a currency-manipulation conspiracy.) Lunacy is not what we are seeing with domestic jihadists. What we see instead is the pursuit of specific cultural and political ends through acts of violence directed at symbolically important soft targets.

We speak of “lone wolf” jihadists as though this phenomenon were somehow independent of the wider Islamist project. It is not. The model of “leaderless resistance” in the service of terrorist projects is not new, and it has not been employed by the Islamists at random. Leaderless resistance has long been a part of the thinking of neo-Nazi groups such as Brüder Schweigen, and the Islamists have had a great deal of opportunity to develop that approach in various insurgencies around the world. Equally important, the emergence of the Internet as a worldwide medium for political communication and cultural expression has provided 21st-century terrorists with opportunities that were far out of the reach of their mimeograph- and fax-dependent predecessors a generation ago. If Omar Mateen turns out, as expected, to have had little or no substantive contact with organized Islamist groups, that fact will demonstrate the success of their communication strategy rather than the limitations of their reach.

We must be honest with ourselves about the enemy and his characteristics. He is not crazy. He has goals, and we know what they are and how he goes about pursuing them.