RUTHFULLY YOURS

Frank Luntz, political strategist and CBS News Contributor spoke to a group of Muslim-Americans last week about the “anti-Muslim” sentiment in America.

In the focus group, Muslim-Americans explained to Luntz why the don’t fear ISIS. He also asked the participants if they had a problem with the government bombing ISIS.

“It’s not going to solve anything,” one female panelist said on bombing ISIS. “I was born in ’93. My whole entire life we have been in a time of war … ISIS does not have the capabilities to destroy America. Our military spending is better than the next 7 or 10 countries combined. I am not scared of ISIS, I’m not. I am scared of my government actually. I am more scared of my government than I am of ISIS.”

Luntz asked another participant if he was afraid of the U.S. Government more than ISIS.

“…I feel like every morning when I wake up, am I going to be mad because I am black in America? Or am I going to be mad because I am Muslim in America?” the panelist answered, to which fellow panelists clapped.

For decades, discussions about the failures of the immigration system focused almost exclusively on securing our southwest border but ignored not only the legal entry system, but the solution to the failures of both the legal and illegal means by which aliens – including terrorists and transnational criminals – enter the United States: the enforcement of our immigration laws from within the interior of the U.S.

Let’s be blunt. There is no way to prevent all illegal entries of aliens. Our nation’s southwest border is 1,900 miles long, and the border that separates the U.S. from Canada is more than 5,000 miles long. Our coastline runs approximately 95,000 miles.
border

The vetting process conducted by consular officials who issue visas will always suffer failures. The Visa Waiver Program further erodes the ability to vet aliens who enter the U.S.

Finally, politicians and journalists now are acknowledging that failures of the immigration system are not limited to the millions of illegal aliens in the U.S. but that there is a threat posed by aliens who were admitted through the legal process, but not adequately vetted. In fact, the 9/11 Commission noted that the great majority of terrorists entered the U.S. through international airports.

Nezar Hamze is a leader in the Hamas-related Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). He is also a Deputy Sheriff in the Broward Sheriff’s Office (BSO), in Broward County, Florida. This background has given him the opportunity to exploit his position in law enforcement to assist his Islamist friends in their desire for weapons training. This month, he did so at a Tampa Bay, Florida mosque that partners with designated terrorist organizations.

CAIR was established in June 1994 as part of the American Palestine Committee, a terrorist umbrella group headed by then-global head of Hamas, Mousa Abu Marzook. Marzook is currently residing in Egypt as second in command of Hamas. In 2007 and 2008, CAIR was named by the US Justice Department a co-conspirator for two federal trials dealing with the financing of millions of dollars to Hamas. Since its founding, a number of CAIR representatives have served jail time and/or have been deported from the US for terrorist-related crimes.

Nezar Hamze is the CEO and Regional Operations Director for the Florida chapter of CAIR or CAIR-Florida. In July 2014, CAIR-Florida co-sponsored a pro-Hamas rally in Downtown Miami, where rally goers shouted, “We are Hamas” and “Let’s go Hamas.” Following the rally, the event organizer, Sofian Abdelaziz Zakkout, wrote, “Thank God, every day we conquer the American Jews like our conquests over the Jews of Israel!” In August 2014, CAIR-Florida Executive Director Hassan Shibly wrote, “Israel and its supporters are enemies of G-d…”

When Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik murdered 14 people in San Bernardino on December 2, the first response of the White House was to invoke “workplace violence.” Two days later, against pressure from the Justice Department, the FBI declared the attack a case of terrorism. Now another 2015 terrorist attack is being properly labeled, and the victims at last gaining recognition.

On July 16, Kuwaiti-born Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez, 24, attacked a Navy Operational Support Center in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The attacker fired 35-40 shots from an AK-47, killing five members of the U.S. military: Carson Holmquist, Randall Smith, Thomas Sullivan, Squire Wells, and David Wyatt, 37. Abdulazeez also wounded Marine recruiter Demonte Cheely and police sergeant Dennis Pedigo.

Police killed Abdulazeez, who also deployed a 9mm handgun and attacked a second recruiting station. Despite the profile of the shooter, the nature of the target, and the multiple fatalities, federal authorities declined to call the attack terrorism. That changed on December 16, two weeks after the San Bernardino attacks.

This is getting to be old hat for the Obama administration and its utter disdain for American cybersecurity:

A major breach at computer network company Juniper Networks has U.S. officials worried that hackers working for a foreign government were able to spy on the encrypted communications of the U.S. government and private companies for the past three years.

The FBI is investigating the breach, which involved hackers installing a back door on computer equipment, U.S. officials told CNN. Juniper disclosed the issueThursday along with an emergency security patch that it urged customers to use to update their systems “with the highest priority.”

The concern, U.S. officials said, is that sophisticated hackers who compromised the equipment could use their access to get into any company or government agency that used it. One U.S. official described it as akin to “stealing a master key to get into any government building.”

How will the country wake up from its coma in 2016 to reality in 2017?

Next year the lame-duck, legacy-starved Obama administration will double down on its executive orders, bureaucratic fiats, and circumvention of the law. Obama will seek to fundamentally transform America, contrary to law, effecting change in ways he was not able to by adhering to the law.The media, as it has the past seven years, will not only ignore the illegality, but also rationalize and commend it.

Then comes 2017.

If a Republican is elected president, what will the media and its liberal sympathizers do should the next chief executive decide to follow the Obama modus operandi?

Consider a number of issues, starting with immigration.

Obama, when facing midterm and general elections, warned that executive-order amnesty and non-enforcement of immigration laws were simply out of bounds for a constitutionally elected president. Then he pursued both, and became exactly the constitutional monster that he had warned us about.

Barack Obama continues to fundamentally transform and tilt our nation to favor one of his favorite groups – Muslims — at the expense of everyone else.

Early in his presidency, Barack Obama’s plans to control the Census Bureau unleashed a firestorm of criticism. The White House in a radical move ordered the Census Bureau to work directly with Barack Obama aides. Since the 2010 census would play a key role in drawing House districts and electoral votes at least until 2020 there was criticism that Obama’s moves, supported by other Democrats, would be used for partisan purposes to empower Democrats.

But there may have been ulterior motives, as there so often are when it comes to Democrat machinations. The Wall Street Journal reports that moves are afoot to create a new way to empower Muslims who live in America:

The U.S. Census Bureau has opened the door to counting people of Middle Eastern descent for the first time, setting off an intense debate about who fits in the category and whether they will also divulge their ethnicity to the government.

The hysterical, politically correct outburst following Donald Trump’s idea of barring Muslims from abroad produced much emotion and wacky claims, including the protest that barring someone based on his religion is unconstitutional according to the 1st Amendment.

The ignorance here is shocking. The rights, privileges and obligations of a U.S. citizen are simply inapplicable to non-citizen foreigners.

But this is hardly the first time the 1st Amendment has been misunderstood. It may be, in fact, the most misunderstood, starting with its first words: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”

In our time, these words have been used to bar school prayer, prevent football coaches from presiding over collective team prayer, disallow references to God in high school graduation speeches, buttress the demand that “Merry Christmas” be deleted from American speech in exchange for “Happy Holidays,” etc. Today’s standard, politically correct interpretation is that the purpose of the 1st Amendment was to make of the new United States an irreligious republic when that was nowhere near its original intent.

The massacre in San Bernardino, Calif., came a few days after a law went into effect banning access by intelligence agencies to key digital communications. It is time for the U.S. to get ahead of terrorism by finally allowing its intelligence agents to use digital tools before the next attack.

Soon after the San Bernardino massacre, law-enforcement agents discovered digital records left behind by Syed Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik. If intelligence agencies had been allowed access to the information in real time, the terrorist attack might have been prevented.

Politics forces the National Security Agency to operate with blinders. The Obama administration blocked the agency from its post-9/11 practice of collecting metadata—tracking digital data on an anonymous basis, and then seeking a court order if Americans are involved—for emails and other digital communications. The law that went into effect just before the San Bernardino killings ended direct NSA access to historic phone records.