RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

President Barack Obama’s tirade on June 14 was filled with angry passion. His rhetoric was not directed against the perpetrator of the Orlando attack and his ilk, however, but against the (unnamed) GOP nominee and others who do not subscribe to Obama’s fundamental views on the nature of Islam and his “strategy” of confronting the threat.

With great passion Obama lashed at those who have called him soft on terrorism, alleging that “loose talk” about Muslims has been detrimental to the U.S. action against militant groups in the Middle East and elsewhere. It is clear that Obama’s understanding of “loose talk” covers all attempts at critical scrutiny of what he, Hillary Clinton, and countless others in the Duopoly still insist is a peaceful and tolerant religion which should not be tainted by the violent actions of a tiny, aberrant and unrepresentative minority.

It should be noted that the original meaning of “loose talk”—as the term was extensively used in both world wars—is disclosing accurate and operationally useful information to unreliable persons who may pass it on to the enemy. If Obama and his speechwriters knew English and history, they’d realize that the meaning of his “loose talk” remark is not exactly what he had in mind: yes, we know the ugly truth, but we should not talk about it openly, because we don’t want them to know that we do know what they are all about.

Obama derided the demand by his critics that he call acts of terrorism the result of “radical Islam”: “We can’t get ISIL unless we call them ‘radical Islamists.’ What exactly would using this label accomplish? What exactly would it change? Would it make ISIL less committed to trying to kill Americans? Would it bring in more allies? Is there a military strategy that is served by this? The answer is, none of the above . . . ” Obama is spectacularly wrong. Calling a threat by its right name—which he dismisses as a mere “label”—is the key prerequisite to developing a meaningful strategy. His mandated label of long standing—“violent extremism”—he did not use in his address, however, thus implicitly acknowledging its irritating and politically damaging absurdity.

Obama’s deliberate attempt to create logical and semantic confusion about the nature of the threat is not immediately apparent to the unwary, and it is so dishonest as to bring into question his basic motives. He implicitly suggested that “the threat” is already clearly defined in all its key aspects, and that any debate over “the label” is therefore a mere “political distraction.” To understand the pernicious nature of Obama’s argument we need to revisit his address announcing his phony anti-ISIS campaign two years ago.

“ISIL is not Islamic,” Obama told the nation in September 2014. “No religion condones the killing of innocents, and the vast majority of ISIL’s victims have been Muslim.” Since making this surreal statement Obama has learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. Three weeks earlier earlier, in the aftermath of James Foley’s beheading by the Islamic State, he declared—also in the context of absolving Islam of any connection with the IS—that “no just God would stand for what they did yesterday and what they do every single day.” Since they did murder Foley, this meant that—in Obama’s world—there is no God, or that God is not just.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/radical-islam-will-win-unless-part-i

Actually I think Radical Islam will win. The team unfettered by rules usually wins. A boxer fighting under the Marquis of Queensbury rules will get his ass kicked by a cage fighter, or someone employing street boxing rules. Jihad thinks it is the virtuous party, protected by Allah, and with a thousand year tradition of ‘all is fair’ in the service of Islam, e.g. no holds barred fighting, they are a formidable adversary. Against such an adversary, we must recognize pesky details like rules will not get in their way. Good can lose to evil, unless willing to pay the price necessary to win. And sometimes the price is steep. But the cost of losing to evil is even greater.

Before we get too far into this article, let me be clear – God is in all of us; whatever religion we opt in order to share His love, whether Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Wiccan or Islam – I value and respect. But when a faith, any faith, uses itself as a tool for bloodshed, then the faith has to own up to a responsibility to clean its own house, and demonstrate not only a remorse, but commitment to prevent future acts of hatred and violence. The non Jihadists in Islam’s case have a responsibility to act. If as Islamists state the Jihadists represent as small minority of Moslems, then clearly there is an overwhelming number of good guys, right? So act like good guys! Such is my stance on 21st century Islam. And were I alive several centuries ago, it would be my stance against the Catholic Inquisition. Lest anyone decide to misrepresent me, or devolve into media inaccuracy by distorting my views, let me reiterate my stated and lifelong belief that all religions in their best forms allow us to reach our higher angels, and this includes Islam – a faith that is based upon 5 tenets, not the least of which is charity. I’ve experienced the kindness and generosity of Moslems, and worked with them on various philanthropies. But for better or worse the bloodthirsty members of their faith need to be reined in and stopped by the decent members of the faith. Closing ranks for the sake of Islam, crying Islamophobia or denying the evil exists does everyone a disservice.

Fact remains radical Islam is a jihadist movement based upon Islam. There is no way around it. If Jihadists were claiming to kill in the name of John the Baptist, or North American Baptists, I would say their movement is based upon the Baptist faith. A distortion, but nevertheless still invoking it. If the moderate Moslems can get the Jihadists to name a different set of marching orders, I would gladly drop the term radical Islam, but until that occurs, we must familiarize ourselves with the very ideology that serves foundationally for the folks who are inspired to challenge our culture, and bring death into our communities from Paris and Brussels, to Glasgow and London, from San Bernardino to Boston, and NY, the Pentagon and Orlando.

American Muslims must use the time they have left to unleash a transformation within their community.

The despicable conduct of Omar Mateen’s wife, Noor Zahi Salman, is the latest example. The Orlando shooter’s wife allegedly knew of his plan and accompanied him to buy ammunition, yet did nothing to stop him.

Then there was Tashfeen Malik, the obedient jihadist Bonnie Parker, who helped her husband Syed Farook gun down fourteen in San Bernardino.

Days before the killing in Orlando, the Husseini Islamic Center in Sanford, Florida, hosted Sheikh Farrokh Sekaleshfar. The Islamic scholar had previously preached to a crowd of American Muslims in Michigan about gays:

Death is the sentence. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about this. Death is the sentence.

For this? Skaleshfar earned invitations to speak elsewhere.

Time is running out for American Muslims. Mainstream America can connect the dots from Skaleshfar’s bloodlust to San Bernardino to Fort Hood to Seattle to Garland to an empty field in Somerset — and finally to Pulse. All of these murderers thought they were acting according to their professed Islamic faith.

I’ll leave it to others to debate the text of the Koran and what it says or does not say. But American Muslims are running out of time because Americans are running out of patience.

With each new slaughter by a jihadist, the American Muslim community exhausts a bit more patience and goodwill of Americans. No matter how many rainbow-colored burkas are posted on Instagram, or how much rhetoric comes from the diminishing president, the message does not match reality.

Goodwill and mercy is an ablative thing. When jihadist after jihadist destroys our treasured domestic tranquility, they will eventually awaken an American resolve that will sweep away these distractions and confront the problem head-on.

It’s why Donald Trump has tapped into a silent mainstream fury. If the attacks by jihadists continue against innocents, what Donald Trump is proposing might not go far enough to many Americans.

I’m not suggesting this is a good thing. This is merely the human condition. It’s what civilizations have done for thousands of years when faced with similar circumstances.

And contrary to the progressive utopian ideal, history hasn’t stopped.

All of those primal impulses can’t be extracted out by four years of Wellesley and the Sunday New York Times, especially when few Americans read the Times anymore. Hopefully any response from an exhausted America would manifest itself through law instead of pitchforks. But the American Muslim community needs to understand they lose support with every single attack, until they do something about it.

Speaking of Wellesley and the New York Times, it’s been predictable and boring to see the enablers attempt to compare the jihadists to Christians. Every religion has its extremists, they tell us:

CONTINUE AT SITE

I had planned to weigh in on the slaughter in Orlando right after it happened, but a sense of nausea intervened.

There was plenty of nausea to go around. You might think that the chief catalyst would be the scene of slaughter itself: the nearly fifty revelers at a gay nightclub dead, and scores more wounded by a single jihadist.

In a normal world, the spectacle of that carnage would have been the focus of revulsion. I confess, however, that the repetition of such acts of theocratic barbarism these past few decades has left me somewhat anesthetized.

The long, long list of “Islamist terrorist attacks” that Wikipedia maintains comes with this mournful advisory:

This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness.

Indeed, and alas. Take a look at that list: one thing you will note — apart from the fact that the terrorist attacks are correctly denominated as “Islamist” terrorist attacks — is that most years include more attacks than the years before.

There were some 35 in 2014. I stopped counting at 100 for 2015.

So my initial reaction to the news from Orlando was a mixture of anger, outrage — and weariness. “Here,” I said to myself, “we go again.”

First came the casualty figures. Twenty dead. No, make that 30. Wait, it’s 40, no, 50 dead and scores wounded, many gravely. And the murderer? The world held its breath and the media prayed: Please, please, please make him a white Christian NRA member, or at least a crazed white teenager.

No such luck. Omar Mateen was the 29-year-old scion of Afghan immigrants. Nothing wrong with that, of course. Right off the bat his father assured the world that he was “saddened” by the massacre (wasn’t that nice?) and that Omar was “a good son.” Religion, he said, had “nothing to do with” his son’s rampage. He was just “angry” at gay people. So he suited up and headed down to the Pulse nightclub where he methodically shot some 100 people. Oh, and Mateen père has supported the Taliban, and claims to be running for the presidency of Afghanistan. (Cue the theme music from The Twilight Zone?)

There are few more rewarding sights than a bully scorned, so let’s hear it for the recent laments of Attorneys General Claude Walker (Virgin Islands) and Eric Schneiderman (New York), two ringleaders of the harassment campaign against Exxon and free-market think tanks over climate change.

Consider Mr. Walker’s recent retreat in District of Columbia superior court. In April he issued a sweeping subpoena to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, demanding a decade of emails, policy work and donor names. The goal is to intimidate anyone who raises doubts about climate science or the policy responses.

CEI fought back. It ran a full-page newspaper ad highlighting the Walker-Schneiderman effort to criminalize speech, and it counter-sued the Virgin Islands, demanding sanctions and attorneys fees.

The District of Columbia has a statute to deter what is known as a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP). The law exists to curb malicious lawsuits that are designed solely to chill speech, and they put the burden on filers like Mr. Walker to show why their actions are likely to succeed.

Mr. Walker quietly withdrew his subpoena on May 20 (though retaining the right to reinstate it). CEI is pressing ahead with its suit anyway, and in an extraordinary filing on June 2 Mr. Walker essentially said “never mind.” He asked the court to dismiss CEI’s motion for sanctions and fees, writing that the think tank had “wasted enough of [his office’s] and the Court’s limited time and resources with its frivolous Anti-SLAPP motion.”

So having violated CEI’s First Amendment rights, subjected the group to public abuse and legal costs, and threatened its donors, Mr. Walker blames CEI for burdening the courts.

Mr. Schneiderman is also on defense for his subpoena barrage and claim that Exxon is guilty of fraud on grounds that it supposedly hid the truth about global warming from the public. The AG felt compelled to devote an entire speech at a legal conference to justify his actions. He accused Exxon and outside groups of engaging in “First Amendment opportunism,” which he said was a “dangerous new threat” to the state’s ability to protect its citizens. So exercising free speech to question government officials who threaten free speech is a threat to free speech. CONTINUE AT SITE

In security matters, Republicans are from Mars and Democrats are from Venus.
The day after Donald Trump accused Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton of refusing to say “radical Islamic terrorism,” President Obama called Mr. Trump’s charge a “distraction” from fighting terrorism. Possibly so, but it wasn’t the only distraction.

Within hours of Omar Mateen verbally dedicating his slaughter of 49 people to Islamic State, terrorism got drowned out by an outpouring of other subjects.

Here, for example, is the New York Times editorializing on the “many factors” that caused the Orlando massacre: “a vicious and virulent homophobia; a failure to identify and intercept those with histories of domestic abuse or threats of violence; a radicalized strain of Islam . . . .” The Times editors then added to this list “one other factor,” which of course is “easy access to guns.”

Hard as it may be to focus, the subject this week is, once again, just terrorism. Back in February after the New Hampshire presidential primaries, something in the exit polls caught my eye. It was that of the four “most important” issues facing the country, Democratic voters put terrorism fourth, at 10%. For Granite State Republicans it was 23%.

At the time, the 10% figure struck me mainly as an intriguing result from a small state early in the primary season. Still, the terrorist attack in San Bernardino had just occurred in December and the horrific Paris massacres a month before.

But that pattern—Democrats ranking terrorism fourth at 10%—held throughout the 2016 primary season. Even in military-minded South Carolina, terrorism registered at 10% with Democrats. For South Carolina Republicans, terrorism was the top issue at 32%.

In April, a study by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations of the primaries’ exit polls noticed the phenomenon: “Terrorism has been named as the top issue on average by one in ten (Democratic) voters, far behind the economy/jobs, income inequality, and health care.”

Does this mean Republicans are from Mars and Democrats are from Venus? Yes it does, and the Democrats know it.

A Wednesday Washington Post article titled “A Fight Over Nation’s Values” said: “Both Clinton and Obama were eager to shift the focus away from terrorism and the battle against Islamic State, an area of relative weakness for Democrats.”

The article itself was about an effort by Democrats to transfer the post-Orlando political conversation to Donald Trump’s “values.”

Donald Trump can certainly tweet for himself about his values. But Islamic State and its horrors, which do include San Bernardino and Orlando, began and metastasized while Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton presided over national security. Voters may reasonably ask themselves in November: Can the post-Obama Democrats be trusted to do what needs to be done to shut down you-know-who in their homicidal havens across the Middle East? Put differently, why is fighting terrorism recognized as “an area of relative weakness for Democrats”? CONTINUE AT SITE

Someone was shot in Chicago every 150 minutes during the first five months of 2016. Someone was murdered every 14 hours, and the city saw nearly 1,400 nonfatal shootings and 240 fatalities from gunfire. Over Memorial Day weekend, 69 people were shot, nearly one an hour, topping the previous year’s tally of 53 shootings. The violence is spilling from the Chicago’s gang-infested South and West Sides into the business district downtown. Lake Shore Drive has seen drive-by shootings and robberies.

The growing mayhem is the result of Chicago police officers’ withdrawing from proactive enforcement, making the city a dramatic example of what I have called the Ferguson effect. Since the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in August 2014, the conceit that American policing is lethally racist has dominated media and political discourse, from the White House on down. Cops in minority neighborhoods in Chicago and other cities have responded by backing away from pedestrian stops and public-order policing; criminals are flourishing in the vacuum.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel warned in October 2015 that officers were going “fetal” as the violence grew. But 2016 produced an even sharper reduction in proactive enforcement. Failures in city leadership after a horrific police shooting, coupled with an ill-considered pact between the American Civil Liberties Union and the police department, are driving that reduction. Residents of Chicago’s high-crime areas are paying the price.

Most victims in the current crime wave are already known to police. Four-fifths of the Memorial Day shooting victims were on the Chicago Police Department’s list of gang members deemed most prone to violence. But innocents are being attacked as well: a 6-year-old girl playing outside her grandmother’s house earlier this month, wounded by gunfire to her back and lungs; a 49-year-old female dispatcher with the city’s 311 call center, killed in May while standing outside a Starbucks a few blocks from police headquarters; a worker driving home at night from her job at FedEx, shot four times in the head while waiting at an intersection, saved by the cellphone at her ear.

Police officers who try to intervene in this disorder often face virulent pushback. “People are a hundred times more likely to resist arrest,” a police officer who has worked a decade and a half on the South Side told me. “People want to fight you; they swear at you. ‘F— the police, we don’t have to listen,’ they say. I haven’t seen this kind of hatred towards the police in my career.”

Antipolice animus is nothing new in Chicago. But the post-Ferguson Black Lives Matter narrative about endemically racist cops has made the street dynamic much worse. A detective told me: “From patrol to investigation, it’s almost an undoable job now. If I get out of my car, the guys get hostile right away.” Bystanders sometimes aggressively interfere, requiring more officers to control the scene.

In March 2015, the ACLU of Illinois accused the Chicago PD of engaging in racially biased stops, locally called “investigatory stops,” because its stop rate did not match population ratios. Blacks were 72% of all stop subjects during a four-month period in 2014, said the ACLU, compared to 9% for whites. By the ACLU’s reasoning, with blacks and whites each making up roughly 32% of the city’s populace, the disparity in stops proves racial profiling.

This by now familiar and ludicrously inadequate benchmarking methodology ignores the incidence of crime. In 2014 blacks in Chicago made up 79% of all known nonfatal shooting suspects, 85% of all known robbery suspects, and 77% of all known murder suspects, according to police-department data. Whites were 1% of known nonfatal shooting suspects in 2014, 2.5% of known robbery suspects, and 5% of known murder suspects, the latter number composed disproportionately of domestic homicides. Whites are nearly absent among violent street criminals—the group that proactive policing aims to deter.

Despite the groundlessness of these racial-bias charges, then-Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy and the city’s corporation counsel signed an agreement in August 2015 giving the ACLU oversight of stop activity. The agreement also created an independent monitor. “Why McCarthy agreed to put the ACLU in charge is beyond us,” a homicide detective told me.

On Jan. 1 the department rolled out a new form for documenting investigatory stops to meet ACLU demands. The new form, called a contact card, was two pages long, with 70 fields of information to be filled out. This template dwarfs even arrest reports and takes at least 30 minutes to complete. Every card goes to the ACLU for review.

The arrangement had the intended deterrent effect: Police stops dropped nearly 90% in the first quarter of 2016. Criminals have become emboldened by the police disengagement. “Gangbangers now realize that no one will stop them,” says a former high-ranking official with the department. People who wouldn’t have carried a gun before are now armed, a South Side officer told me. Cops say the solution is straightforward: “If tomorrow we still had to fill out the new forms, but they no longer went to the ACLU, stops would increase,” a detective said. CONTINUE AT SITE