Never Forget – 16 Years On

Every year but this one I’ve done this post for September 11:

9/11/01

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9/11/12

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This year I’m a day late.  Intentionally.

I ended up thinking about how we’re 16 years now from an unprovoked terrorist attack that killed thousands, and that in those 16 years, so many people have forgotten, or were young enough to never understand.  Someone who’s 21 years old today was five when the WTC towers fell.  Someone who’s 18 today was 2 then.  They weren’t there to see what happened then, they weren’t around to follow what happened afterwards, they weren’t there to be aware of what was going on.

And it’s those younger Americans who will eventually lead the nation, those who never experienced anything and aren’t guilty of forgetting; but those who only learn what others tell them – what others choose to or neglect to teach.

For what amounts to a generation we’ve heard obfuscations and lies about the motivations of the WTC terrorists because it’s not politically correct to identify jihad for what it is.  Jihadi islamic supremacists have an ethos and an ideology they can communicate.  The opposition to Islamic theocratic tyranny by Western values have gotten harder and harder for the Western world to communicate as the Western world slowly deconstructs itself, judging the problems of the past (that were overcome) by shifting radical ideas and using radical judgement of history as a justification for judging the present must be destroyed so a new history can be rewritten.  That the Western public rejects it is immaterial, because the radicals have tools of power to coerce the public into tolerance, then acceptance, then embracing, what those radicals desire – lest those who reject it face ostracism or the laws of the state.

The only thing that may keep the Enlightenment West afloat is that the radical illiberal progressive dogma is a new thing to be questioned, and perhaps a cultural resurgence can throw off that enemy from within.  The enemies of the Enlightenment West don’t change their minds or approach.  They are still, 16 years later, fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, Africa and Asia, and bringing smaller attacks worldwide to Europe and the Americas.  There’s a saying from a terrible man about how people will naturally choose a strong horse over a weak horse.

After 9/11, the shoe bomber, the Boston Marathon bombers, the Pulse Nightclub massacre, San Bernadino, Charlie Hebdo, Brussels, 7/7, Fort Hood, and many, many, many more, the jihadi assault on the Western world (and Eastern world as well) should be as easy a thing to discuss and remember publicly as it is for individuals, rather than one that publicly gets increasingly difficult to address and increasingly hazy with time.

Field Day 8/24/17: Charlottesville and the Media

I’ll start with the fallout from the Charlottesville protest, counterprotest, and violence.  A couple nights ago, President Trump held a rally in Arizona where he spent around 20 minutes condemning the mass media for lying and misrepresenting him and the facts.  Most of it was warranted, some was him stretching the point.  (I heard various reports say it was 16 minutes of talking about the media, others that said 30.  I listened to it and it seemed longer – more like 25, but the consensus seems to be about 20 focused minutes.)

This is from the NYT yesterday, condemning Trump for going after the media.  The story itself isn’t much more than the usual media caterwauling we’ve come to expect in the last year, but it’s noteable for one thing buried in the middle of it that exemplifies the problem:

Its lead items on Wednesday were about attacks on journalists in Charlottesville from both white nationalists and counterprotesters aligned with the so-called antifa movement.

So-called?  (Screenshot in case it disappears.)  So-called?  No problem identifying the white national socialists, but the international socialists barely get mentioned and get the dismissive “so-called”, insinuating that they aren’t really a problem at all.

What seemed to particularly sting on Wednesday was the way that Mr. Trump had impugned journalists’ patriotism.

“Claim bias. Fine. Claim elitism. Fine,” Mr. VandeHei of Axios wrote on Twitter. “But to say reporters erase America’s heritage, don’t love America, turn off cameras to hide truth, are to blame for racial tension, is just plain wrong.”

Anyone with a passing interest in history knows that the founders viewed an independent press as essential to democracy. Talk about heritage.

Anyone with a passing interest in history knows that we don’t have a democracy.  We have a republic – if we can keep it.

Journalists aren’t patriotic.  They’ve been actively trying to get the president to fail since Trump was elected, and they want the country to suffer for it.  They actively believe that half the country are neo-Nazi reactionary racist hicks who are too stupid to be trusted to live and so they need to be beaten into submission, and they’ll do so with any story and any angle they can.

They just spent the last year ranting about how Russia (which Hillary did favors for in a cash for uranium deal, lest we forget how they were Democrat friends two years ago), right up until it was basically proven the story was nonsense.  Even hard-left Salon.com came to the realization that the subject was being changed because the “Russia collusion” story was BS and independent analysts have come to the conclusion it had to be an inside source – namely someone like the murdered Seth Rich.

Last week the respected left-liberal magazine The Nation published an explosive article that details in great depth the findings of a new report — authored in large part by former U.S. intelligence officers — which claims to present forensic evidence that the Democratic National Committee was not hacked by the Russians in July 2016. Instead, the report alleges, the DNC suffered an insider leak, conducted in the Eastern time zone of the United States by someone with physical access to a DNC computer.

The Russia collusion story, despite being thrown on the front page of every leftist rag for the last year, turned out to be, as communist and CNN personality Van Jones called it – a “nothingburger”.  Meanwhile asking about Seth Rich’s unsolved murder is decried by the media as “right wing conspiracy”… that’s been debunked by… Snopes.  Y’know, two leftists, their cats, and a spam server to keep urban legends circulating to generate traffic.

At Charlottesville, the media went out of their way to ignore that there was violence on both sides, exactly as President Trump stated.  We have video of it.

The white racist identitarian national socialists – and yes, that socialism part puts them on the left, whether they like it or not – had a permit to march.  They were legally entitled to go make fools of themselves, but then Antifa decided to attack them, as Antifa does.

Antifa has the wonderful self-made justification that any violence they do, especially attacks they make, are completely righteous and absolutely correct, because they call themselves “Anti-Fascist”, and everyone knows fascists are bad, so ergo they can attack anyone they view as a fascist.  And anyone who opposes them must be a fascist, because they exist as a force solely to oppose fascism.  It’s a wonderful circular logic that completely ignores their roots as communist rioters that go back nearly a hundred years.

One thing both sides commented on was the lack of police presence.  Like we’ve seen in Berkeley over and over and over in the last year or so, the police are ordered to stand down by appointed police chiefs on leftist mayors’ orders.  In the case of Charlottesville, VA, the mayor is a leftist Democrat and pal of Obama and Podesta who works with the hard leftist Center for American Progress.  He’s horribly left.  His vice mayor, also a Democrat, is more entertainingly terrible, in that he’s a sexist racist homophobe.

These are the kind of people who tell the police to stand down because they identify with Antifa.

CNN did an accidentally honest piece on Antifa that they had to go back and edit.  This is the unedited version, still around on the Wayback Machine:

And this is the edited version, to delete the whole “they start violence everywhere they go” part:

The video story actually shows that the reporter doesn’t unmask Antifa at all.  In fact, the Antifa terrorists (because they use violence for political ends and are thus the very definition of terrorists) keep their masks, hoods, and glasses on while talking about how they have to be able to commit crimes with impunity in the name of “social justice”.

Or, y’know, so they can stab people for having the wrong haircut.

A “confused anti-fascist” swung a knife towards the face of a man with a haircut similar to the one popular with white nationalists.

Joshua Witt, 26, was getting out of his car at Steak ’n Shake in Sheridan, Colorado when a man ran over to him yelling, “Are you one of them neo-Nazis?”

The man aimed for his head over his car door, but Witt blocked the blow with his hand, which needed three stitches.

“I threw my hands up and once the knife kind of hit, I dived back into my car and shut the door and watched him run off west, behind my car.”

Witt, who is in no way a neo-Nazi, joked that he believes it was indeed his haircut that confused the anti-fascist, and said he’s considering changing his style. He has no other marks that would make his attacker mistake him for a white nationalist, he said.

But it’s not really a surprise that a bunch of violent socialist revolutionaries would begin attacking people who look like their racial and political enemies.

For those who haven’t seen what Antifa actually stands for (hint: mostly communist Anti-American violence and racism against anyone who’s not in lockstep with them), here’s some examples of their propaganda and events:

Did I mention Antifa was racist?

Antifa really seems to like hitting black people who disagree with them.  Seeing as how Antifa are collectivist identitarian racists, that makes sense, because someone who disagrees with them and is of a different skin-color is the kind of person who is a visual affront to their violence and stupidity just by existing.

Basically, Antifa is this:

Never Forget

9/11/01

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9/11/12

Where Did The Orlando Terrorist’s Co-conspirator Wife Go?

While there’s a big story going on in Dallas now (which is going to require more info before there’s much else to say about it), isn’t it odd that the Orlando terrorist’s wife disappeared?  After the jihadi attack in Orlando with 49 people murdered, she was involved, and then suddenly she disappeared, and nobody knew where she was anymore, and nobody knew anything about her. From LittleMissRightie:

Where is Noor Salman? More importantly, where is the media on her overnight disappearance in the wake of her husband’s terrorist attack on the Pulse nightclub?

Three week ago today, the nation woke up to the news about the worst terrorist attack to hit U.S. soil since 9/11. The one woman who may hold answers (and who may also share responsibility for the attacks) is “missing” according to government officials and no one in the media is asking about her whereabouts. It was obvious given the facts of the case the media was going to bury this story as quickly as possible. But there is a woman missing who may be a co-conspirator and not one inquiring journalist asks about her whereabouts? What a sad state of affairs for that dying profession.

The last update on Noor Salman, second wife to Omar Mateen, was that a grand jury convened to deliberate 49 counts of being an accessory to murder, 53 counts of attempted murder, failure to notify law enforcement of a pending terrorist attack, and lying to investigators. A Google search on the update on these proceedings yields no results since June 15th. The Google search results are all the same: “Sources: Grand Jury to Investigate Noor Salman, Orlando Shooter’s Wife”. That information too is fuzzy. A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney General’s Office for the Southern District of Florida won’t comment on the proceedings or where they are taking place, however, that is not uncommon. Grand jury proceedings, especially at the federal level and for high-profile cases are sealed. At least the contents are sealed. It’s also not uncommon for the location and dates of said proceedings to be sealed. Those caveats aside, it has been three weeks since it was announced a grand jury was convened, therefore, isn’t it peculiar no one in the media thought to ask about the outcome of the grand jury proceedings?

Around the same time, the last update from federal authorities on Salman’s whereabouts was June 20th when Attorney General Loretta Lynch stated, when asked if Salman was still in the state of Florida, “I believe she was going to travel but I do not exactly know her location now”.

Pardon? Federal authorities have “lost” the wife who texted “I love you” to her husband as he was carrying out Jihad at the Pulse Nightclub. This is also the same woman who admitted she bought ammunition with him and drove him to the club to scope out the location and other details as he planned his attack. And authorities have lost track of her? Is anyone buying what they’re selling here?

Yes they have lost track.  And no one is buying it.

LMR suggests that she may be in federal protection somewhere, but that’s a best-case scenario that still relies on trusting that “top men” are on the case.

It would be nice to know WTF happened to a terrorist co-conspirator from the deadliest mass shooting terrorist attack in US history.

Bill Whittle’s Firewall: Guns, Islam, and Orlando

Spot on as always.

The Orlando Attack and the Failure to Enforce Existing Laws – The Lautenberg Amendment and 8 USC 1481

As we’ve seen in the last week, with the Democrat’s 15-hour not-really-a-filibuster stump speech about how we need to ban the right to due process, there’s a press on for new gun laws and restrictions and regulations that aren’t infringements in much the same way that getting punched in the face isn’t the same as getting struck in the face with a fist because won’t someone think of the children.

Specifically, we’ve even heard the main proponent of these new infringements say they wouldn’t have worked to prevent the Orlando terrorist attack.

What would have worked, you ask?

Enforce existing laws.

Currently, if you want to buy/possess/own/purchase a firearm, there are some prohibitions.  Namely, you can’t be a felon, a drug addict, an illegal alien, and due to the Lautenberg Amendment, you can’t have been convicted of a crime of domestic violence or have a restraining order placed on you by a domestic partner.

This is from the 4473, the background check form that you do every time you buy a gun from a dealer or store and any time you transfer a handgun between states:

The so-called “gun show loophole”, which is not exclusive to gun shows, nor a loophole, is that in most states, if you want to sell a gun to a private citizen from your own state, you can.  You also have to be sure they’re not prohibited from owning a firearm, because otherwise you’re committing the crime of providing a prohibited person with a firearm.

The Orlando terrorist beat his ex-wife.  Had he been charged, he would have been convicted (or plead out, which is the same as a conviction for gun ownership purposes), and he’d have been prohibited.  It’s the same way US citizens every day are denied arms – because they’ve committed a crime in the past that bars them from firearms ownership (like the wife-beating alcoholic Chicago journalist denied a gun recently).

If for whatever reason the ex-wife didn’t go to the police, or no one enforced the law in that instance, there were other potential blocks already set up that no one bothered to utilize.

Namely, 8 USC 1481.

The FBI had investigated the Orlando terrorist numerous times for his suspected terrorism involvement.  He was on and off the terror watch list.  A friend of his went to the Middle East as an American suicide bomber.  The FBI interviewed him numerous times, but couldn’t figure out how to make anything stick.  Yet the Orlando terrorist went off and murdered 49 people and swore his allegiance to the Islamic State.

And that’s where 8 USC 1481 comes in:

8 U.S. Code § 1481 – Loss of nationality by native-born or naturalized citizen; voluntary action; burden of proof; presumptions

(a) A person who is a national of the United States whether by birth or naturalization, shall lose his nationality by voluntarily performing any of the following acts with the intention of relinquishing United States nationality—
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(2) taking an oath or making an affirmation or other formal declaration of allegiance to a foreign state or a political subdivision thereof, after having attained the age of eighteen years; or
(3) entering, or serving in, the armed forces of a foreign state if (A) such armed forces are engaged in hostilities against the United States, or (B) such persons serve as a commissioned or non-commissioned officer; or
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(7) committing any act of treason against, or attempting by force to overthrow, or bearing arms against, the United States, violating or conspiring to violate any of the provisions of section 2383 of title 18, or willfully performing any act in violation of section 2385 of title 18, or violating section 2384 of title 18 by engaging in a conspiracy to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, if and when he is convicted thereof by a court martial or by a court of competent jurisdiction.

He joined a terrorist movement.  He said so at the end.  In all probability – especially as more of his past comes to light, he said the same thing beforehand, but no one would address it.

If 8 USC 1481 had been applied, he could’ve been stripped of his citizenship – with due process – as someone swearing allegiance to and/or conspiring to bear arms against the United States as a terrorist by committing terrorist acts.

Once his citizenship is stripped, he couldn’t legally buy a gun.  Once stripped of his citizenship, he could’ve been deported and sent off to the nation he wanted to be a part of.  The US would’ve gotten rid of a terrorist, he would’ve gotten to go join the nation he wants to join.

Problem solved.  Enforce existing laws.

Moderate Muslims on Islamic Nations’ Problems

Via Jawa Report:

She’s got a lot to say, and it’s not what’s commonly heard from the Middle East.

From the description (albeit a few months old):

Saudi-born singer Shams Bandar, also known as “Shams the Kuwaiti,” recently declared that she was renouncing her Saudi and Kuwaiti nationalities for the sake of European citizenship. In a September 22 interview with the Egyptian Dream TV channel, she defended her decision, saying: “What can these wretched [refugees] do with their Arab citizenship?” “All the Arab countries have closed their borders to them.” Shams further said: “Why do we pin all our problems on the West? For 1,400 years we have been slaughtering one another, just because one of us prays one way and another prays a different way.”

And Nadine Al-Budair gives a similar recounting of problems after the Brussels terrorist attack:

Perhaps the bigger question is why they can understand it and address it but it can’t be addressed here in the US, where instead of naming the problem and beginning to handle it, instead we’re looking for end runs around the 2nd and 5th Amendments in the form of secret lists, secret courts, and secret enforcers.

ISIS’s Orlando Attack

50 killed at a gay nightclub in Orlando, FL, by an Islamic State terrorist.

That’s about what the headline should read everywhere.  And at least a few places, it does.

Still, spin is being applied.  From NBC:

His father told NBC News his son was enraged after recently seeing a same-sex couple kissing in front of his family, an event that could have set him off.

In 2013, Mateen was interviewed twice by federal agents after coworkers reported that he made “inflammatory” comments to them about radical Islamic propaganda. The following year, the FBI looked at him again because of ties with an American who traveled to the Middle East to become a suicide bomber.

Law enforcement sources told NBC News he swore allegiance to the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in a phone call to 911 moments before the rampage at Pulse.

There’s no indication that Mateen was in touch with terrorists overseas or that the attack was directed by someone else, a law enforcement officials told NBC News. Nor is there evidence that anyone helped or encouraged him, several officials said.

He had ties with a suicide bomber, but didn’t have ties overseas.  Possibly technically true, but it’s also a way to try and distance him from who and what he is.

ISIS doesn’t have to issue a membership card.

With that information, investigators are looking into whether religious extremism motivated the attack and are piecing together what triggered Mateen, who lived roughly two hours south of Orlando in Fort Pierce and worked as a security guard.

Mateen didn’t appear to have any direct ties with ISIS, sources said, although he was a follower of ISIS propaganda and referenced the Tsarnaev brothers, who carried out the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013, at the scene of the shooting.

What motivated them again?  Oh, yeah, they were “lone wolves” or something, motivated by… uh… stuff.  Probably anti-marathon screeds put out by the rabid right-wing National Pressure Cooker Association.

But while law enforcement delves into what may have radicalized Mateen, who was born in New York and lived in Florida for at least the past decade, his family believes he was fueled by pure hate against the LGBT community.

He just hates them to hate.  Most people have a motivation to hate someone or something.  I wonder what that motivation was.

His father told NBC News that his son was affected by a recent incident involving two men showing each other affection.

“We were in Downtown Miami, Bayside, people were playing music. And he saw two men kissing each other in front of his wife and kid and he got very angry,” Mateen’s father, Seddique Mir Mateen, told NBC News on Sunday. “They were kissing each other and touching each other and he said, ‘Look at that. In front of my son they are doing that.’ And then we were in the men’s bathroom and men were kissing each other.”

“This had nothing to do with religion.”

Well that’s cleared up, then.  Glad it has absolutely nothing to do with religion and that there’s nothing to see here, otherwise people might start wondering about the “Islamic” part of the Islamic State.  Or they might start asking about his father’s support of the Taliban (scroll waaay down at the link).

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Now how did he get those evil guns that he used to kill those gay people out of clearly-unrelated-to-Islam hate?

His job in security, meanwhile, gave him access to his weapons; police say he used a handgun and AR-15-type rifle in the shooting spree.

ATF officials tweeted Sunday that he legally purchased the firearms within the last week.

Yeah, about that last part…

An ex-wife of Mateen told The Washington Post that he was prone to violent behavior and beat her. They had met online eight years ago and she moved to Florida to be with him.

“He was not a stable person,” the unidentified ex-wife said. “He beat me. He would just come home and start beating me up because the laundry wasn’t finished or something like that.”

Well if that were true and she did anything about it, the Lautenberg Amendment would’ve kept him from buying guns legally.  For those who’ve never seen a form 4473 (the background check paperwork you fill out to buy a gun), this is the important part for this case:

So she didn’t bother to tell the police, and they didn’t bother to investigate, and no one bothered to arrest him for spousal abuse, and thus someone who was prohibited from legally buying a gun was able to buy a gun.

He also wouldn’t have had the job he did, because to be armed security requires being able to pass the equivalent of a 4473.

Also from NBC, because it’s never too early for the left to beat those gun control drums, especially if it can be leveraged with special victim identity groups:

Mass shootings often reignite the policy debate over access to guns, and hate crimes present another fault line in that debate.

In most states, people convicted of misdemeanor hate crimes may still legally purchase guns.

The majority of states “have not enacted laws to prevent convicted misdemeanant hate criminals from having easy access to guns,” according to a 2016 report, “Hate and Guns,” by the Center for American Progress.

As for Mateen, he was able to legally purchase firearms within the past week, according to the ATF. Federal authorities had twice investigated him for potential links to terrorism, the FBI said, but no ties were confirmed.

Under federal law, it takes far more than a terror review to bar someone from legally purchasing guns.

He beat his wife.  If anyone had bothered to prosecute, he’d have been convicted and couldn’t have bought guns legally or had access to them legally.  Making a thought police law that applies to one group over another not only makes an unequal justice system (which is the social justice point), but in this case it clearly would have made zero difference.

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I wonder how long until the American media starts lecturing the gay community on how it should avoid being Islamophobic.

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This reminds me of Mark Steyn’s many prescient comments as Islamic terrorists have attacked in Europe.

~What’s the next phase? Well, Brussels is currently about 25 per cent Muslim and they’re mostly young. Conversely (as I pointed out in America Alone), the Flemings and Walloons are getting a bit long in the tooth. In any society, who provides the policemen and soldiers and security guards? The fit and healthy – ie, the young, the ones who can pass the physical. So increasingly the chaps responsible for keeping an eye out for Muslim terrorists will themselves be Muslim.

SSDD.

After 9/11, it was the fashion among the western left to demand that we ask ourselves: “Why do they hate us?” As I wrote in America Alone all those years ago:

‘Why do they hate us?’ was never the right question. ‘Why do they despise us?’ is a better one.

Just in case our enemies needed another reason to despise us, today the inactivist group Somnolent Tilty-Headed Wankers for Peace launched an exciting new graphic: the same old clapped-out hippie peace symbol but incorporating the Eiffel Tower (right)! Isn’t that a cool, stylish way of showing how saddy-saddy-sadcakes you are about all those corpses in the streets of Paris? It’s already gone viral! And that’s all that matters, isn’t it?

Our enemies use social media to distribute snuff videos as a means of recruitment. We use it to confirm to them how passive and enervated we are: What was it the last time blood ran in the streets of Paris? Oh, yeah, a pencil – for all those dead cartoonists. But, given that blood in the streets of Paris looks like becoming a regular event, it helps to have something of general application. What about, ooh, a tricolor with a blue tear at the end? No, better yet: a peace symbol with a croissant in the middle. No, wait…

What’s that? All you are saying is give peace a chance? But what, in fact, are the chances of peace for Paris and France? What are the odds?

Oh, sorry. All they were saying is give peace a chance. And, having said it, they’ve gone back to sleep until the next atrocity requires another stupid hashtag or useless avatar.

Really, SSDD.  Just stateside this time.

Want an avatar but you’re unsure about the tricolor of whichever European country’s been bombed today? Need a quickie illustration of Tintin, Manekin Pis, Asterix, Topo Gigio, the Little Mermaid, the blonde from Abba, etc, with their heads at an angle and a tear running down? Maybe a Belgian chocolate melting from a broken heart, or a frite in mayonnaise tinged with regret? How about the all-in-one hashtag that instantly updates to each new slaughter? #JeSuisParis, #JeSuisBruxelles, #JeSuisYourTownHere! Call Sad-Mart, the one-stop shop for all your useless solidarity gestures! #NousSommesEverywhere!

And a quote that he brings back quite often, because it encapsulates, broadly speaking, the loss of the West to fight for its own principles:

Mr van den Boogaard is a Dutch gay “humanist”, which is pretty much the trifecta of Eurocool. He was reflecting on the accelerating Islamization of the Continent and concluded that the jig was up for the Europe he loved. “I am not a warrior, but who is?” he shrugged. “I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.”

We’re going to go through the hashtags and the buttons and the flagwaving and there will be nothing done about it.  The enemy won’t be identified except as “hate”, which will make for an interesting time when we declare a “War on Hate” if one hasn’t been called already.   People who don’t know how to deal with enemies, who won’t even name them for fear of offending their own moral socjus rectitude, will point fingers at people who didn’t do anything, from the NRA to video games to Republicans to any of the usual cultural suspects.

From that same post a three months ago from Steyn:

You can’t say our enemies don’t have our measure. A new ISIS poll:

What colour will the Eiffel Tower be next?

Whatever terrorists bet the long shot on “rainbow flag” probably won that.

The San Bernadino Terrorist Attack and Gun Control Response

They already have a lot of these things waiting in a drawer to be cranked out the next time the have to push their agenda.  The NYT did a page 1 editorial on how we must ban guns for the children to prevent terrorism.  It’s full of the same things we expect to see every time they crank out their gun control screed, full of the same “no rights are without regulation so we can infringe them even if they say ‘shall not be infringed'”, etc. etc.

Obama went out saying that the ability of US citizens who are convicted of no crimes to buy guns is “an insane loophole”. Of course he’s talking about the terrorist watch list/no fly list, which as we’ve noted before has erroneously included people like the late Democrat Senator Ted Kennedy, who spent months trying to get it fixed – and when you’re a former president’s brother and one of the most powerful Democrats in the country and it takes months… what does that leave for the common man?  Even the leftist ACLU opposes the no-fly list.  Meanwhile, there are at least 72 people on the no-fly terror watch list who work for DHS or TSA.  Keep in mind that Obama was calling for the terror watch/no fly list ban before San Bernadino as well – something that since the San Bernadino terrorists weren’t on the watch list, would have made no difference then and would make no difference now.  This is just exploiting a crisis.  (And of course the way to keep potential terrorists from doing any terrorists acts is to have the AG charge them with terrorist activities.)

The calls for gun control rather than terrorist control have been everywhere in the last week.  AG Lynch said the Obama administration would call for more, Obama spent last Friday talking gun control and not terrorism; and then there’s the stupidity of the left as they call for bans, not just the lack of any understanding about a bullet button, but one Dem congresswoman saying that “multi-automatic round weapons are easily available“, and a host of bogus statistics and BS that come from people who don’t even know what they want to ban, but they know they want to take it away from you, the leftist-parody-of-itself saying the NRA funds terrorism, and then as the left peels back the mask to reveal it’s true face – the straight up calls for disarming everyone.

A true liberal position, the place to start, is to call for domestic disarmament. That is the banning of the sale of all guns to private parties coupled with a buyback of those on the street (Mexico just moved to so control guns). Collectors can keep their guns as long as they remove the firing pin or fill the barrel with cement. Gun sports can be allowed — in closed shooting ranges. And hunters can be allowed to have long guns (if they pass background checks) with no scopes, which are not sporting. But, these exceptions aside, liberals should call for a gun-free nation and point out the much lower murder rates and fewer deaths due to accidental discharge of fire arms found in those civilized nations where most guns have been removed from private hands — and often even from those of the police.

That’s a true progressive leftist position – there’s nothing “liberal” at all about stripping everyone of their right of self defense.  It is, however, a wonderful plan to create tyranny.

The San Bernadino Terrorists, Books and Covers

ABC News managed to acquire a picture of the San Bernadino terrorists as they entered the country:

Federal officials around the world today are urgently trying to track the backgrounds and contacts of the newly-married parents of a baby girl who killed 14 people in California last week in a suspected ISIS-inspired attack, as a new photograph emerged showing the future terrorists entering the U.S. together for the first time last year.

The image, apparently taken as the couple moved through customs in Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport on July 27, 2014 and obtained exclusively by ABC News, shows Tashfeen Malik clad in all black looking directly into the camera as the taller Syed Rizwan Farook stands behind her, black bearded and with a blank expression. It is the most recent photograph of the two to be made public.

It’s a subtle bias of the media to describe them as “newly-married parents of a baby girl” as though to humanize them by comparing them to a traditional family; and at the same time to denigrate the traditional family by making these terrorists into a traditional family.

Americans are taught from an early age not to judge a book by it’s cover.  Problem with that is that there are words on the cover, and those words will sometimes give us an indication of what’s inside the book.  You don’t pick up Ann Coulter’s “How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)” and expect it to be some kind of treatise on mathematics.  You don’t pick up a Michael Stackpole Battletech novel and expect it to be a collection of poetry based on the Bhagavad Gita.  You don’t pick up “Mein Kampf” and expect to find a bedtime storybook.

Likewise, you don’t look at those two and think “these are people who really want to come to America and embrace American values and assimilate into American culture”.  These are people who look just like they are.

Offhand, the American muslims I’ve known who’ve wanted to integrate into American culture did so in part by acting like and looking like Americans.  One woman I knew also actively wanted to be American so she and her children would be protected by the American legal system against family members who wanted to murder her for not wanting to be shoved into a force marriage.  She rejected the oppressive culture, rejected being stuck in a forced marriage with a man 40 years her senior, and wanted no part of the culture of those two terrorists.  Others I’ve known go out and start shops and businesses emulating American culture in different ways – bringing positives from their culture to US culture – and bringing a traditional mercantile nature while disregarding the conquest-by-the-sword malice on the negative side of their culture that they’ve left behind not just because they personally dislike it but also because it’s bad for business.

That idea of not judging a book by it’s cover, and by not judging at all, is why the neighbors who saw Arab men going in and out of the house at all times of night didn’t bother to report anything.  They didn’t want to judge a book by it’s cover and be judgemental and racist, so they said nothing… and terrorists attacked because out of the goodness of their dumb little hearts, people won’t call a spade a spade.

The official response is that there is no terrorism here and that anyone who speaks bad about Islam or Muslims or the terrorism that seems to follow wherever they go will be punished by the Attorney General.

Lynch addressed the Muslim Advocate’s tenth-anniversary dinner and declared that she is concerned about an “incredibly disturbing rise of anti-Muslim rhetoric . . . that fear is my greatest fear.” Her greatest fear is — not terrorism — but a nonexistent Islamophobic backlash? ISIS has demonstrated that it can bring down passenger jets, strike the heart of a great Western capitol with urban assault teams, and inspire horrible carnage in California. We also know that ISIS has pledged to keep attacking the U.S. and possesses chemical weapons. Yet it’s politically incorrect speech that strikes fear into the heart of our attorney general.

Doesn’t matter what you’re seeing in front of you – if you observe things that happen repeatedly, begin to make a theory about why they happen, and see that theory pan out as things happen again, it doesn’t mean you’re applying scientific reasoning, it means you’re a racist islamophobe who must be punished for badthink.

Lynch of course has decided to backtrack a bit on her “you are all islamophobes fearing people who are only attacking you because of your violent microaggressions at them and because you’re bigoted against them and that’s why they have to kill you and you deserve it” because her reasoning is so far leftist ideologue that it’s plainly absurd to the run-of-the-mill Mametian-brain-dead liberal:

“We always have a concern when we see the rhetoric rising against any particular group in America, that it might inspire others to violent action — and that violent action is what we would have to deal with,” Lynch told journalists at Justice Department headquarters. She also urged Americans “not to give into fear” in the wake of the apparent terrorist attack in California. “So, [what] we’re focused on, obviously, is protecting all of the people under the ambit of the Department of Justice.”

Let’s see… in San Bernadino, Muslim terrorists killed more than a dozen people and their organizations and adherents swear to kill more.  Anti-muslim people killed… zero.

Sure, makes sense to go after the people who might say bad things about the people killing them.

“At this point…we’re not prepared to limit any particular ideology to what may have inspired these individuals,” the attorney general said.

Translation: “I will not blame Islamists for this because even though it’s plainly apparent it’s the reason and the terrorists themselves said as much before they went on their murder spree, I am such a leftist that I can only see them as victims of America and so it must always be America to blame.”

They’re terrorists.  Lynch won’t say it, Obama wouldn’t say it (until the FBI called it terrorism).  To their hard leftist view they steadfastly refuse to understand reality because they’re so ideologically brainwashed they can’t.

Newest thing today is that Syed Farook’s mother was a member of a pro-caliphate group:

Rafia Farook, the mother of San Bernardino terrorist Syed Rizwan Farook, is an active member of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), a Muslim organization that promotes the establishment of a caliphate and has ties to a radical Pakistani political group called Jamaat-e-Islami.

To the left, if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, flies like a duck, swims like a duck, has been genetically tested against other ducks and is a perfect 100% DNA match for a duck, then you’re a racist Islamaphobe.

Really, though, when a book is titled “Collected Mujahideen Handbook – From Al Qaeda’s Inspire Magazine: How To Wage Jihad, Build Bombs, and Kill The Kafir” and says so on the cover, it’s probably a reasonable inference that it’s not a biography of Beethoven.