RUTHFULLY YOURS

The month of Ramadan just begun for Muslims is not merely about the rigors of fasting and prayers, it is also about meditating on man’s responsibility in this world and accountability in the next. One of the most urgent issues for Muslims at the present time is take responsibility for those who commit violence against innocent people in the name of Islam, and unequivocally repudiate them and their theology that defiles Islam and makes a mockery of God’s revelation to Muhammad that first occurred, as tradition records, in the month of Ramadan.

But nearly fifteen years after 9/11 and counting, Muslims in America as elsewhere remain in denial of Islam’s role (or a perverse theological rendition of Islam) in the terrorist violence that spread from the Middle East around the world. This explains in part why any expectation that so-called “moderate” Muslims in sufficient numbers will publicly repudiate their religious compatriots who engage in terrorism as an act of religious obligation, or jihad (holy war), has not materialized yet and likely will not unless there is some significant change in majority American view of Islam that presses upon Muslims.

The emergence of Donald Trump as the Republican nominee for the presidential election in November could be the spur for a sufficient number of Muslims, if they have courage and imagination, to break from their past. A Trump presidency might well facilitate the making of an American Islam as an effective counterweight to political Islam, or Islamism, that has been ruinous for Muslims everywhere in modern times.

Trump’s call for a ban on Muslims last December “from entering the United States until our representatives can figure out what is going on” followed the Muslim rampage of terror and murder in San Bernardino, California, on December 2, 2015, and the horrific terrorist attacks several weeks earlier in Paris. This suggestion of Trump at a minimum is a prudent choice in defending Americans against those who wish to do them harm.

There is no sign of Islamist terrorism ebbing in the near future. Instead, in the Arab-Muslim world Islamist terrorism has become a daily occurrence, destroying whatever little remains of a culture and civilization that once rivaled that of ancient Rome and Persia.

It is beyond disquieting when warnings that have been issued for years are ignored, and as a consequence, innocent Americans are the sacrificial lambs for this evil disease known as Islamic jihad, or war against kafirs (infidels) to establish Islam’s sharia law.

The idea that politicians who receive briefings about terrorism profess to be shocked by the recent massacre in Orlando is disingenuous at best. As Bruce Bawer explains, “the only shocking thing about ISIS’s attack on a gay establishment is that it took this long.” After all, according to The Reliance of the Traveller which is the sharia manual “there is consensus among Muslims … that sodomy is an enormity. It is even viler and uglier than adultery,” which is “punished brutally, including by death.”

Three years ago, a Muslim phoned NY1, “a New York City TV news station and stated that all homosexuals should be beheaded.” Horrific videos are constantly posted showing gays being thrown from rooftops in Iran and other sharia-controlled countries.

Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, Steve Emerson, Andrew C. McCarthy, Raymond Ibrahim, Frank Gaffney, Walid Shoebat, Nonie Darwish, and a host of other prophets have been warning about the poisonous message of Islam for decades. Yet the leadership at the helm of this country invites Muslim Brotherhood operatives for consultation, hires people devoted to sharia expansion, and won’t acknowledge that Islam is behind these attacks on Western civilization even when the very attackers proudly proclaim their fealty to Islam.

Now that we are in the “highest threat environment since 9/11,” it is incumbent, yet again, to delineate the dastardly ideas integral to Islam. It is “a purely aggressive ideology, which teaches Muslims to hate the infidel.” Once Muslims grow in number, the attacks and abuse of locals begin and never end. It started in the U.K. with the grooming and rape of thousands of non-Muslim British girls. Now we have Londonistan.

Sweden is now the rape capital of the world since the admission of Muslim immigrants.

One year ago, Iranian ayatollah Ali Khamenei “encouraged Western youth to find out about Islam for themselves and not allow their image of it to be clouded by prejudice.” Youths were to “study and research and … receive knowledge of Islam from its primary and original sources.”

President Obama has run roughshod over Congress, and most of the media give him a pass. This has left the judiciary as the last check on executive abuse, and now even that may be falling away. That’s how we read Tuesday’s D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals decision propping up the new “net neutrality” rules to regulate the Internet like a 19th-century railroad.

A 2-1 panel in US Telecom Association vs. FCC upheld the Federal Communications Commission’s 2015 regulations that classify the Internet as a public utility under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934. The FCC has thrice tried to ram through regulation dictating what an internet-service company can charge for its services; the D.C. Circuit struck down earlier attempts. Now the court has endorsed the most legally and procedurally egregious iteration.

Judges David Tatel and Sri Srinivasan ruled for the FCC in large part by invoking Chevron deference, a 1984 Supreme Court doctrine that says courts should bow to agency rule-makings when the law is ambiguous. But the relevant 1996 statute says the internet shall remain “unfettered by Federal or State regulation,” which is not vague. The law further says that a service “that provides access to the Internet” may not be straddled with Title II.

The Supreme Court said in 2015’s King v. Burwell that agencies deserve no genuflection in matters of “deep economic and political significance.” This surely applies to reordering the most powerful commercial engine of the century.

There’s also last year’s Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA in which the High Court ruled that agencies can’t impose rules “unrecognizable to the Congress that designed it.” Newt Gingrich and friends ran Congress in 1996 and didn’t want central command of the internet. Yet the D.C. Circuit ignored these instructions and relied on one precedent involving a discrete transmission issue.

This abuse of Chevron is reason enough for the Supreme Court to overturn the circuit, but there’s more. The decision renders the Administrative Procedures Act meaningless: The FCC proposed one rule and then subbed in a different scheme after pressure from President Obama. No notice, no comment period. The circuit court calls the final draft a “logical outgrowth” of the proposal. This is an invitation for bureaucracies to publish obtuse drafts and finalize something else when convenient. CONTINUE AT SITE

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