Tuesday, February 14, 2017

Recruiting Tools

It’s the gang that can’t think straight. It’s saddled up and riding into the news.

Today it is repeating the worn-out meme that Islamophobia causes Islamist terrorism. Any time anyone decides to fight back against Islamist terrorism, any time anyone does anything to protect his nation from the scourge, the gang that can’t think straight will pop up on your television screen to explain: you have just given the terrorists a recruiting tool.

If the thought causes you to cringe in fear, please do it privately.

Over at the Sultan Knish blog, Daniel Greenfield (via Maggie’sFarm) exposes the illogic behind the thought. As Greenfield put it, Connecticut senator Chris Murphy joined “a chorus of the clueless” in issuing a dire warning: if we don’t accept more Muslim refugees into the nation they will join ISIS and kill us. 

Apparently, the lesson of Europe has been lost on the senator. Bless his heart, he has forgotten that Muslim refugees in Europe do not suddenly become proponents and practitioners of Judeo-Christian civilization. Their immersion in the warm bath of Western civilization often causes them to become even more radicalized… and to wish to impose their culture on the West.

Of course, Greenfield continues, it’s not just Democrats. Certain Republicans have bought the same illogical idea:

Singing their brains out in the same stupid chorus were Senator McCain and Senator Graham (“a self-inflicted wound in the fight against terrorism”), Senator Ben Sasse (“the terrorist recruiters win by telling kids that America is banning Muslims”) and Senator Heitkamp (“confirms the lie terrorists tell their recruits: that America is waging a war on Islam.”)

Senator Cardin went one better by whining that keeping potential Islamic terrorists out, “promises to make the U.S. less safe and places our courageous servicemen and women in even greater danger as they fight against terrorism.” Just tell it to the Marines shot and killed by a Muslim immigrant at a Chattanooga recruiting station and Naval reserve center.

Greenfield continues, asking the salient question:

Why would we want to take in people who express their disagreement with our politics by shooting up a gay nightclub or a social service center that helps the developmentally disabled?

When normal people don’t like a policy, they protest or write a letter to the editor. They don’t plant a pressure cooker bomb next to a little boy or stab college students with a butcher knife.

Why all this talk about recruitment tools? In part, it pretends that Islamophobia was responsible for terrorism and that if we only purge it from our hearts and souls, the terrorism will stop. If you believe that you will believe anything. But, it also serves as a rationalization for inaction, a way to excuse the weak and pusillanimous Obama approach to terrorism.

Obviously, this conspicuous show of weakness tells Islamists that they are riding the strong horse. It tells them that they are winning. It’s like catnip for terrorists: they no longer need to think that Islam is a failed civilization. They can believe that Western civilization is in decline and that Islam is the future. Besides, ISIS did not exist until the advent of Obama.

Greenfield continues:

ISIS recruitment has nothing to do with our immigration policy. Unless the world’s greatest ISIS recruiter was Obama.

ISIS had zero recruitment problems under Obama. There was no shortage of Muslims lining up to run over, rape, behead, bomb and mutilate non-Muslims even when his refugee policies bent over backward to favor Muslims. Instead that’s when “lone wolf terrorism” by ISIS supporters, some of whom had come here as first or generation refugees, took off.

At the height of Obama’s pro-Islamist policy, ISIS was picking up 2,000 new recruits a month. Even as he rolled out a plan to fight ISIS with aggressive tweeting, the Islamic State gained tens of thousands of recruits. There were investigations of ISIS sympathizers in every state and hundreds of Muslim settlers in America had traveled to join ISIS. Others carried out terror attacks here.

And also, this thinking relieves Barack Obama of responsibility:

Since none of this could be Obama’s fault, the media took to blaming random people who might make Muslims hate us. A guy who posted a YouTube video was blamed for a Muslim terror assault on our diplomatic compound in Benghazi. Hillary Clinton saw to it that he went to jail. A pastor who planned to burn the Koran got a phone call from the commander of United States Central Command. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer suggested that burning the Koran might not be protected by the Constitution. Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez refused to rule out blasphemy laws.

None of this shameless unconstitutional pandering to terrorists stopped or even slowed down the tide of Muslim terror attacks. No ISIS recruit lifted a sword and then refused to behead a crying Kurdish teenager because Obama offered Muslims an incredibly generous refugee policy.

America and the West should have learned that appeasing fanatics does not work. Greenfield suggests that the Obama appeasement policy has encouraged and emboldened terrorists. If you want to stop terrorism, the solution is to defeat them decisively, to make them look weak and ineffectual:

If we really want to cut down on ISIS recruitment, the best way to do that is by beating Islamic terrorists. Leftists argued that our presence in Iraq was feeding Al Qaeda recruitment. So Obama pulled out. And Al Qaeda in Iraq turned into the Islamic State and became its own country. It went from a small group of terrorists to fielding an entire army. Obama’s pullout from Iraq allowed ISIS recruiters to build a country and an army.

Appeasing Islamic terrorists doesn’t work. It has never worked. And it will never work.


Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

It's humorous to me... the Southern Poverty Law Center lists Greenfield's Sultan Knish blog as a hate website. It's funny because Greenfield is the type of person who needs to be socially sequestered -- he writes too plainly and incisively to be ignored. He must be stopped.

In terms of Trump's executive order, Greenfield wrote an extremely incisive post that makes so much sense that our government would never consider implementing it:

The paragraph about Justice Breyer's Constitutuonal interpretations and the U.S. Assistant Attorney General's rediscovery of blasphemy laws in defense of Islam shows the blatant self-congratulation and hypocrisy of the Left. Is actually scary. This is what Sam L. calls the Ctrl-Left. Apt.

It's like all the sensitive intelligentsia imagining all the terrible reprisals and hate crimes that will be directed against Muslims and Muslim neighborhoods, stimulating civic officials to trample each other to see who can get to the podium fastest to demand public calm in the wake of a terrorist incident. They do these PR stunts before the crime scene is even secured. Why? Because we've seen so many Muslim neighborhoods burn and Muslims get lynched in the United States. It's an epidemic, like fake news.

Hell, it is fake news!

Continued below...

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

Continued from above...

Thankfully, we've not seen widespread American Muslim suffering at the hands of nativist fanatics seeking revenge against Islamist fanaticism. But Leftist imaginings of KKK-like reprisals are becoming hallucinatory and delusional. A Muslim kid in Texas brings a suitcase "clock" to school and ends up getting a tweet from the President of the United States and the top of the U.S. government and corporate elite for his academic achievement! The family demanded a mere $15 million for emotional anguish and then split to live in Qatar. Who's kidding who?

No, no, no... what we've seen is Islamist carnage, shooting up gay bars, killing people who throw baby showers for their Muslim co-workers, and shooting unarmed soldiers at military installations. But by all means, let's concentrate efforts on the shadowy, dangerous, racist, bigoted, Islamophobic "American public." Scary folk, they. If we welcome more Islamists, maybe these ugly Americans will come around...

The Islamists look to the West, they look to the U.S., and they see weakness. They see us doing the Obama thing with an executive order prohibiting travel from certain countries. Then they see the new President Trump do it, and there is rabid, lugubrious Leftist apoplexy in the streets and airports of America, with Welcome Wagon standing by for the next soul to debark from an airliner that's just returned from the Middle East. After all, we know all people from Yemen are universally nifty. Our enemies see this, and they laugh. They see us as weak. We are. These airport protesters would be the first to run from Islamists, and scream into any waiting camera "Where are the police?" The same police the protesters told "Go #%$& yourself" 14 minutes earlier.

Our refugee policy is insane. Our courts are out of scope. Our federal legal law enforcement officials are cowed by political correctness, imagining slights somewhere being a clear and present danger to all Muslims in America. By all means, let's ignore the beheadings and caged drownings and acid baths and crucifixions and instead pay attention to what the courageous writers of "Saturday Night Live" serve up for our eyes this weekend. Did you hear Alec Baldwin guest hosted? Go figure.

Indeed, if we welcome all Islamists to America and get into therapy circles with them, all will be right as rain. They'll magically stop killing us. The DSM-V says fanaticism is curable, if we try hard enough. As our Therapist-in-Chief once said, "The future must not belong to phone who slander the Prophet of Islam." Of course not. Let's force-feed Sharia as a cultural immersion practicum for all of America. Perhaps then we'll "get it."

And who are the "bitter clingers" adhering to unyielding dogma, superstition and vacant community rituals? Sounds like the orthodox postmodern secular Leftists to me. That's what my government has been asking me to believe the last 8 years, right up to the epitaph that was the Yates replacement. I may be a Deplorable Catholic, but I'm not dumb enough to believe that I can just pray for Islamist souls, say my rosary and light a candle at church and somehow all will be right with the world.

Being liberal requires a willful suspension of belief that is frightening to fathom.

trigger warning said...

The NYT reports that a young Afghan woman was sold (by her father) for some goats and a few head of cattle, and then shot to death because she was unhappy with her slavemaster and attempted to elope with her boyfriend.

Sounds like the Islamoklan on 'Roids.

It takes more than a "willful suspension of belief" to even contemplate importing such people into America, at any time, under any circumstances.

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

trigger warning @February 14, 2017 at 6:46 AM:

I saw that same story. It's insane. And that's from "the paper of record." And in the same breath the editorial page will say Republicans have a "War on Women." The Afghan story sounds like the "Princess Bride" went sideways on that one. Sorry to sound so crass, but it is an apt comparison from fantasy fiction. It would be wise if we kept everything in context, yet we don't.

The willful suspension of disbelief is the reason humans enjoy drama. But I suspect the reason Lefties enjoy politics goes much deeper. It is a willful, ignorant, subjective concept of human goodness. And they apply it to everyone. And compel everyone to follow it. Some freedom... some choice.

I have no illusions about human goodness. Human goodness shows up all the time, and it is altruistic and amazing and beautiful. It is also not forced or enforced. It is a spiritual movement the results in a choice -- and that choice is a powerful example to others and reflects the upward road of the human journey. Without it, we would be lost. And it would not be so remarkable were it not that it is so rarely seen. And when it is seen........ wow!

We are not the self-reliant men in Emerson's (or especially Thoreau's) fantasy. We are more of the "crude matter" of Yoda's admonishment. We are sinful, lowly creatures absorbed by our own thoughts, needs and desires. It's awful. We all know it. But the problem with the liberal mind is the exemption they all feel from this human condition, and the blithe folly of believing they can transcend it. That is the simultaneous ignorance and arrogance that I find disgusting. That the rules of nature and nature's law do not apply to them. They are no different than the churchgoing hypocrite they make fun of. Actually, they're worse... at least the churchgoing hypocrite is putting himself in the position where he might be challenged.

Like so many things, we are not intrinsically good, nor intrinsically evil. We are just... human.

I am watching these White House press briefings in awe of the condescension, conceit, and self-righteousness that would make Veruca Salt blush. Scream, howl, wail. It's all an injustice. My God, Obama's DOJ lackeys are holding Michael Flynn to a suspicion of "blackmail risk"??? Hillary Clinton, their chosen successor, was the walking embodiment of a blackmail risk.

I think mainstream women's advocacy groups show their cards all too readily. They don't care about women. They care about power. It has nothing to do with femininity or the elevation of femininity, or that femininity is superior. All they care about is abortion -- the right to kill by choice. Men may be looked at as aggressive, murderous brutes, but no man can murder at will over his convenience about having another human person in his life. That right -- in our enlightened, modern Western age -- is the sole prerogative of woman.

It strikes me that today's chief censors are Leftists. They're not at the receiving end, they're at the initiatory, aggressive end... censoring what they wish. Because they can. Because it offends their uninformed, emotive sensibilities. Yet hey can be equally cruel as any human opponents they can imagine. And again -- miraculously -- they find themselves exempt. How wonderful.

Maybe in the grand scheme of things we're all worth a few goats and a head of cattle, but I don't think so. Yet I do not believe any human is worthy of full congratulation, nor morally magnificent. That belongs to God. If you acknowledge Him. And if you don't, well, then you're a power unto yourself, and you should not be surprised when people among you claim moral superiority and agency... just because. After all, that's the way you're living your life, too.

My, we've come a long way.