The FBI’s problem with Muslim leaders

As we all know, the vast majority of Muslims are peace-loving. We all have Muslim friends or co-workers who are admirable people. And a handful of terrorist plots have been rolled up by the FBI based on tips from Muslims.

But what the FBI finds disturbing is that Muslim leaders by and large are reluctant to cooperate with the FBI to let the bureau know of radicals within their midst. The FBI is not about to publicize this. But for my book “The Secrets of the FBI,” Arthur M. “Art” Cummings II, who was the FBI’s executive assistant director in charge of counterterrorism and national security investigations, opened up about the problem.

The FBI has outreach programs to try to develop sources in the Muslim community and solicit tips, but Mr. Cummings found little receptivity. He found that while Muslims have brought some cases to the FBI, Muslim leaders in particular are often in denial about the fact that the terrorists who threaten the United States are Muslims.

“I had this discussion with the director of a very prominent Muslim organization here in D.C.,” Mr. Cummings told me. “And he said, ‘Why are you guys always looking at the Muslim community?’ “

Mr. Cummings began laughing.

“OK, you know what I’ll do?” Mr. Cummings said. “I’ll start an Irish squad, or how about a Japanese squad? You want me to waste my time and your taxpayer’s dollars going to look at the Irish? They’re not killing Americans. Right now, I’m going to put my money and my people in a place where the threat is.”

Then Mr. Cummings told him to take a look at the cells the FBI had rolled up in the United States

“I can name the homegrown cells, all of whom are Muslim, all of whom were seeking to murder Americans,” Mr. Cummings said. “It’s not the Irish, it’s not the French, it’s not the Catholics, it’s not the Protestants, it’s the Muslims.”

In response to such points, Muslim groups have told him he is rough around the edges.

“I’m not rough around the edges,” Mr. Cummings has told them. “You’re just not used to straight talk.”

Mr. Cummings found they respond by getting angry at him.

While Muslims will occasionally condemn al Qaeda, “rarely do we have them coming to us and saying, ‘There are three guys in the community that we’re very concerned about,’” Mr. Cummings said. “They want to fix it inside the community. They’re a closed group, a very, very closed group. It’s part of their culture that they want to settle the problem within their own communities. They’ve actually said that to us, which I then go crazy over.”

On one hand, “They don’t want anyone to know they have extremists in their community,” Mr. Cummings observed. “Well, beautiful. Except do you read the newspapers? Everyone already knows it. That horse has left the barn. So there’s a lot of talk about engagement, but realistically, we’ve got a long, long way to go.”

At one meeting, a Muslim group suggested having a photo taken of their members with then-FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III to show their community isn’t a bunch of terrorists and that they are partners in the war on terror.

Mr. Cummings responded, “Let me make a suggestion: When you bring to my attention real extremists who are here to plan and do something, who are here supporting terrorism, and I work that based on your information, then I promise you, I will have the director stand up on the stage with you.”

To Mr. Cummings‘ amazement, the answer was: “That could never happen. We would lose our constituency. We could never admit to bringing someone to the FBI.”

“Well, we’ve just defined the problem, haven’t we?” Mr. Cummings told them.

After September 11, according to Mr. Cummings, imams in as many as 10 percent of the 2,000 mosques in the U.S. preached jihad and hatred of America. In a 2011 Pew Research Center poll, 7 percent of American Muslims said suicide bombings against civilian targets are sometimes justified to defend Islam. But in more recent years, “Preaching jihad and hatred of the U.S. overtly has become more unusual and happens more in private,” Mr. Cummings said. Instead, “Radicalization on the Internet has risen to fill the void.”

“If you look at the websites of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, or the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, you see a passive, almost obligatory approach to condemning terrorism,” Mr. Cummings said. “The most prominent crisis for the Arab and Muslim communities is this perception that they’re terrorists, when only a small fraction of them are. Why wouldn’t you have a very loud, active program that says murder of anyone is immoral, illegal and not consistent with Islam, and anyone who supports terrorism or harbors a terrorist is a problem?”

FBI cases in such places as Atlanta, Lackawanna, N.Y., and Lodi, Calif., began with tips provided by individual Muslims. “But I don’t see the community doing that,” Mr. Cummings said.

While many Muslim leaders may be afraid to take on radical Islam publicly, providing tips confidentially to the FBI is another matter. And that is what the FBI needs to develop leads and roll up plots such as the massacre in San Bernardino and possible weapons of mass destruction attacks that could kill millions of Americans.

“I talked to a very prominent imam in the U.S.,” Mr. Cummings said. “We would have our sweets and our sweet tea. We would talk a lot about Islam. I would say we understand Islam and where they’re coming from. We’d tell him what our mission is, trying to keep people from murdering Americans or anybody else, for that matter.”

Months later, the FBI found out that the man’s mosque had two extremists who were so radical that they kicked them out. Clearly, those two extremists would have been of interest to the FBI. If they only engaged in anti-American rhetoric, the FBI would have left them alone. More likely they were planning action to go with their rhetoric.

Mr. Cummings asked the imam, “What happened?”

“What do you mean?” the imam asked.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this?” the agent said.

“Why would I tell you about this?” the imam said. “They’re not terrorists,” he said of the radicals. “They just hate the U.S. government.”

Yale fail: Ivy leaguers sign 'petition' to repeal First Amendment

Looking to understand just how controversial the debate over free speech on our college campuses really is, filmmaker and satirist Ami Horowitz recently traveled to Yale University, one of our nation’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning, to speak directly to students.

“I decided to take this campus free speech debate to its logical conclusion,” said Horowitz, who asked students if they’d sign a petition calling for an outright repeal of the First Amendment. “The result was this unbelievable display of total stupidity.”

In fact, Horowitz discovered a solid majority of the students asked willingly signed the petition, with several expressing their enthusiastic approval for his anti-First Amendment efforts.

It's All About 'Muscle'

In this, the millennials who inhabit America's campuses have learned a great deal from the left. If The Closing of the American Mind anticipated political correctness, it was Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism that prefigured what we now find on college campuses. Goldberg saw that liberalism had come unmoored from specific policy goals and was finally interested in just one thing: power.

Writing in the wake of his own school's capitulation, Claremont McKenna professor Charles Kesler observed, "When the leftists lacked power, they embraced free speech. Now that they have power, they don't need it." There are a great many other niceties of which the leftists no longer have any need.

Unless it is checked, in the coming decades the movement seen now on America's campuses will take control of every institution it can and burn to the ground every institution it cannot. Because however ridiculous the student protesters may seem, they have an intense, unshakable belief in the legitimacy of their cause. And they understand, keenly, that power is everything.

And also because they are joyless fun-crushing scolds who deserve to be boiled in cat urine. By elves.

Greens voters are the most unhappy about Christmas, presumably because of all the drowned flying reindeer. And also because they are joyless fun-crushing scolds who deserve to be boiled in cat urine. By elves.

The Stupidity Burns

If there were a real press in this country, someone would ask Obama how it is that he became the first president to host a Rose Garden celebration for a deserter.

The President hugs a Taliban sympathizer as they celebrate the return of a deserter

Dear Parents: Everything You Need to Know About Your Son and Daughter’s University But Don’t

Long, but worth a read,

Fights, fury and the Ku Klux Klan: Finland faces wave of vigilante mobs targeting migrants as arrest of an Afghan asylum seeker for rape of 14-year-old schoolgirl pushes one town to the brink

• In the town of Kempele, tension between locals and asylum seekers is rising after a 14-year-old girl was raped
• Happened fortnight after youth migrant centre opened in town to mass opposition and 17-year-old refugee charged
• Across Finland similar cases have sparked panic, with human chains blocking refugees at the country's borders
• Even some MPs are demanding asylum seekers leave country and put an end to 'nightmare called multiculturalism'

 

• SHARE PICTURE

+21

Resentment: There were angry protests in Kempele last weekend where hundreds of locals turned out onto the streets to protests against the centre, which wasn't wanted in the first place. Just north of Kempele, in Oulu, there were also demos against Kastelli emergency hostel

In Kempele, the rape of the schoolgirl, just a fortnight after the centre for young migrants opened, sent shockwaves through the community.

Rumours quickly spread around the town that two asylum seekers from Afghanistan had been arrested over the assault.

It has since emerged that police have arrested a 17-year-old boy at the centre, who is in custody awaiting trial.

It was the spark needed for those who had opposed the centre in the first place to take to the streets - as hundreds turned out for a protest march demanding it be closed immediately.

'Finland for the Finns! Close down the centre!’ they chanted.

OBAMA’S CRAZY VISA POLICY MAKES TRUMP LOOK LIKE A PROPHET

Today on Good Morning America, John Cohen, a former acting under-secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and now a national security consultant for ABC News, dropped a bombshell: over the objections of security-minded DHS personnel, the Obama administration secretly barred DHS from looking at postings on social media by visa applicants like Tashfeen Malik.

Glenn Reynolds Asks: Why are feminists so racist?

Ashe Schow

Harvard Law professors Jeannie Suk and Janet Halley are outspoken critics of current campus sexual assault policies. One reason for their opposition is that most of the accusations they have seen have been made against minority students.

Suk, writing for the New Yorker, outlined the past "historical bias against victims," who were not believed, but suggested that bias not be replaced "with the tenet that an accuser must always and unthinkingly be fully believed." Swinging the pendulum in this way has played right into another crime narrative — the overcriminalization of black men.

Whether they kill each other or unbelievers, Muslims are always the victim

Know Your Tropes For Exploiting Terrorism

On Sunday, President Obama gave us another dull, rote speech on terrorism in which he promised to stay the course on whatever it is he thinks he’s doing about ISIS. And then lectured us about our intolerance.

It was notable for only one thing: the presidential adoption of the Exactly What ISIS Wants trope.

You know the one. If someone doesn’t like any particular response to the latest terrorist attack, he’ll tell you that this response is “exactly what ISIS wants.” It has been dreadfully popular since last month’s attacks in Paris, and it is threatening to become 2015’s answer to 2001’s trope, “Or the Terrorists Win.”

You remember that one, right? In case you don’t, here’s a handy guide to help you know your tropes for the political exploitation of terrorism.

‘Or The Terrorists Win’

This is the claim that people should engage in some utterly ordinary activity — shopping, watching television, eating bacon, etc. — as an act of defiance against terrorism. Because if they don’t do it, “then the terrorists win.”

and

‘Exactly What ISIS Wants’

The bodies were barely cool in the Paris shootings when we were treated to lectures that “The West Is Giving ISIS Exactly What It Wants,” usually accompanied by very dubious projections of what ISIS wants, which just so happen to correspond to any policy proposed by someone on the American right.

and

‘Bin Laden Syndrome By Proxy’

In Bin Laden Syndrome by Proxy, you take someone else’s terrorist attack, fantasize what you think its causes and motives ought to be according to your world view, then advocate a response intended to address this pretended cause.

In Vicarious Terrorism, the terrorists’ real motives and agenda have some overlap with your own, and you succumb to the temptation to exaggerate the connection and use the attacks to promote your agenda. But in Bin Laden Syndrome by Proxy, the overlap is entirely a product of your own imagination, spurred by naked opportunism.

Probably the best example I have ever seen of Bin Laden Syndrome by Proxy is giving a speech after an ISIS-inspired terrorist attack in which you tell the American people that gun control is now “a matter of national security” — which is exactly what Obama just did. Obviously, he did not start wanting to ban “assault weapons” because a couple of terrorists used them last week. He’s been advocating it all along as his standard response to domestic shootings by crazy people with no ideological motive at all. But these shootings haven’t mobilized the public to support gun control, so he repackaged his argument to connect it to an issue on which people do seem to want strong action.

Then again, maybe that’s not the very best example, because it’s hard to top “climate change caused the Paris attacks.”

and

‘Nothing To Do With Islam’

“This has nothing to do with Islam” is a standard description for anything bad done by a Muslim in the name of Islam, based on arguments offered by Islamic imams citing quotations from Islamic scripture.

and

‘The Religion Of Peace’

The Religion of Peace is the religion that did not motivate the San Bernardino shootings, the Paris attacks, the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the Fort Hood shootings, the beheading of hostages in Syria, the mass execution of policemen and soldiers in Iraq, the shooting schoolgirls in the head, and so on and on. It definitely didn’t motivate the 9/11 attacks, and that is why it is not even supposed to be mentioned at the Ground Zero museum.

Must be some other faith. Try the Presbyterians.

and

‘No True Muslim’

This is a variant on the No True Scotsman trope. In its original inspiration, this is a type of circular reasoning used by a Scotsman to endow his countryman with some particular, virtuous quality. When confronted with the counter-example of a Scot who fails to possess this virtue, he merely declares that the miscreant must be “no true Scotsman.”

In this case, the trope is used by a non-Muslim to disavow the association of Muslims with any negative qualities — particularly religiously motivated violence — by asserting that anyone who commits such violence must be No True Muslim.

Thus, when a British Muslim began stabbing people the London subway and declared, “This is for Syria,” an onlooker was recorded telling the attacker, in impeccable London slang, “You ain’t no Muslim, bruv!”

POLITICAL PRIORITIES

Last month Islamic terrorists slaughtered 130 innocent men and women, the youngest aged just 17, in a series of vicious attacks across Paris. More than 40,000 government leaders, negotiators and activists subsequently arrived in Paris to decide what the global temperature will be for people whose grandparents haven't been born yet.

If you want to get an idea of exactly where political priorities are in 2015, the above paragraph is a pretty good place to start.

...Appropriately enough, the climate change conference kicked off with a speech from murderous Zimbabwean tyrant bastard Robert Mugabe, who isn't exactly unfamiliar with large body counts. That includes his 91st birthday party earlier this year, which featured a feast of buffalo, impala and a baby elephant.

"Unless current trends are reversed, disaster stalks planet Earth," Mugabe told the conference, before presumably heading for the French capital's Parc Zoologique to see if it had a drive-through.

Shouldn’t the elites be aligning themselves with their voters?

Glenn Reynolds asks and important question responding to Peggy Noonan, former Obama supporter:

PEGGY NOONAN ON TRUMP: “The biggest reason has been the distance—the chasm—between the party elite at the top, who are more or less for illegal immigration, and the bulk of the party on the ground, who are opposed. In this case there is a chasm between elites concerned that they personally will look bigoted if they take action and voters concerned about who comes into America in the age of ISIS. It is a split, a distance; it is primarily the fault of the top, not the bottom; and Mr. Trump, who through his popularity could choose to be a bridge across the distance is instead functioning as a deepener of it.”

I’m not sure how Trump is supposed to bridge this distance. Shouldn’t the elites be aligning themselves with their voters?

When Don Imus asked the question we all should have asked.

via Glenn Reynolds Instapundit:

Historian Michael Beschloss: Yeah. Even aside from the fact of electing the first African American President and whatever one’s partisan views this is a guy whose IQ is off the charts — I mean you cannot say that he is anything but a very serious and capable leader and — you know — you and I have talked about this for years…

Imus: Well. What is his IQ?

Historian Michael Beschloss: …our system doesn’t allow those people to become President, those people meaning people THAT smart and THAT capable

Imus: What is his IQ?

Historian Michael Beschloss: Pardon?

Imus: What is his IQ?

Historian Michael Beschloss: Uh. I would say it’s probably — he’s probably the smartest guy ever to become President.

Imus: That’s not what I asked you. I asked you what his IQ was.

Historian Michael Beschloss: You know that I don’t know and I’d have to find someone with more expertise…

Imus: You don’t know.

Leftists Use Government Power to Silence Political Opponents

Good article on the corrupt John Doe investigations in Wisconsin.

A “John Doe” is an investigatory tool similar to grand juries, which allows prosecutors to silence their targets ostensibly for their own “protection.” The reality is quite different. Some of Chisholm’s worst abuses are by now well-known: A man spends hours in jail, his orange-jumpsuit-adorned mugshot blasted across local television for no official reason. Pre-dawn paramilitary raids force an unclothed woman to run toward her door lest armed apparatchiks batter it down. A 16-year-old boy home alone told he can’t call his parents or school as government agents rummage through his house. Millions of documents seized, hard drives and cell phones confiscated, gag orders imposed; astronomical legal fees. And all based on a legal theory the Wisconsin Supreme Court declared in July completely invalid.

Gag orders are blatantly wrong.

Steyn: "whenever something goofy turns up on the news chances are it involves some fellow called Mohammed."

Your Midweek Mohammed: To reprise an old line from America Alone (personally autographed copies of which are exclusively available, etc, etc):

Not long after September 11th I said, just as an aside, that these days whenever something goofy turns up on the news chances are it involves some fellow called Mohammed. It was a throwaway line but, if you want to compile chapter and verse, you can add to the list every week.

A plane flies into the World Trade Center? Mohammed Atta.

A sniper starts killing gas-station customers around Washington, DC? John Allen Muhammed.

A guy fatally stabs a Dutch movie director? Mohammed Bouyeri.

Etc. So here we go again. A ninth attacker in the Paris bloodbath has been named:

A 23-year-old man from Strasbourg, eastern France, has been identified as the third attacker involved in the terrorist assault at the Bataclan music hall in Paris, police sources have said.

Foued Mohamed Aggad went to Syria with his brother and a group of friends at the end of 2013, according to a source close to the investigation. Most of the others were arrested in spring last year after returning to France but Aggad stayed on in Syria, the source said.

The news was further confirmation that the deadly Paris attacks were carried out largely, if not entirely, by Europeans trained by Isis in Syria.

Europeans, everywhere. I switched on Fox News in my hotel room this morning to catch Bill Hemmer saying that this means "Seven of the nine terrorists were European." As the Guardian report continues:

The latest information means that all of the assailants identified so far were French or Belgian, all native French speakers, and the attacks increasingly appear to have been part of a homegrown terror plot.

So "Europeans" are the principal security threat. Along with "Americans" like "28-year-old California man Syed Farook".

This is why the public is not joining the media, the Democrats and the GOP establishment in getting the vapors over Donald Trump's comments about Muslim immigration. The men pulling the triggers in Paris and San Bernardino are men with French, Belgian and US passports, but they are not "French", "Belgian" or "American" in any meaningful sense. They regard their primary identity as Muslim - and their citizenship as a mere travel document. So it doesn't require a large leap to wonder whether Islam is, in fact, an issue.

As I said to Sean Hannity on Monday night, one reason why Trump's "outrageous" remarks never dent his numbers a whit is because to significant numbers of people he sounds far less insane than the mainstream consensus - now insisting that all these psycho "American" and "European" terrorists demonstrate why we'd be much better off letting in millions of "refugees".

~The latest brain-dead euphemism is "radicalized". As in: Oh, did you hear about poor Mohammed? He became radicalized. Don't know how it happened. He went out for a stroll in the park, and somehow came back "radicalized". This morning FBI Director Comey, in a fine demonstration of what a money-no-object bureaucracy can buy, announced that Syed Farook and his lovely bride had become "radicalized" even before they began (in Comey's delightful formulation) "courting".

Ah, the courtship rituals of the radicalized: Single Radicalized Female seeks young bearded man. Must have great sense of jihad.

Mark Steyn on Trump and Muslims

The so-called “Muslim terrorists” do not think of themselves as “Muslim terrorists” but consider themselves to be the only real followers of Mohammed

We do ourselves and disservice when we deny what Muslims proclaim when they attack us.  It's an insult to common sense.  Hitler's Mein Kampf was an honest expression of his beliefs, and a accurate predictor of what he planned to do.  Why must we continue to delude ourselves when it comes to Islam?


James V. Schall, S.J. provides some excellent analysis.

After almost every shooting involving a Muslim perpetrator, from 9/11 to Fort Hood to San Bernardino, we hear, from the President on down, some version of the following on-going narrative: “We are horrified by this inexplicable, horrendous act. Our hearts go out to the victims. This atrocity again proves the need for more gun laws.” We then have a statement from some Muslim group; its spokesmen, often women, are also horrified. They had nothing to do with it; they knew nothing about it. They are concerned with retaliation. Next we have a solemn admonition from some government official assuring us that the Muslim community is peaceful, that we depend on loyal Muslims. This shooting, it is explained, was the product of a loner or two, usually a citizen of the place where the killings occurred. This insane action requires the attention of psychological health experts; ideology is mostly or entirely ignored.

Then ISIS or Al Qaeda announces that it is responsible for the killings, whether that is actually true or not. We almost always are led to conclude that this event is just another irrational act. As with earthquakes, no real explanation exists. Such things just happen; some human beings are nutty. Since similar acts now happen every other week, if not sooner; we have to be ready for them. We need to call in the FBI, federal agencies, more militarized police, community organizers, religious leaders, and psychiatrists. But the bottom line is that, though all religions are prone to violence, we are told these particular happenings have nothing to do with religion, especially not Islam. They are caused by “terrorism” and “violence”, as if these acts are somehow themselves independent ideological positions with no relation to the organizations that use them to foster their ends.

Is there another conceivable way to look at these events that comes closer to a more plausible explanation? The first step is that these atrocities all have a single ultimate origin. I do not mean some central command post in Syria ordering operatives today to go to Paris, tomorrow to San Bernardino, the next day you name it, though there may be that too.

The ultimate origin is found in the history of Muslim conquests from its beginning in the 7th and 8th centuries and confirmed by many passages in the Qur’an. Muslim scholars know that this jihadist approach is found within the religion. It is not an outside import; it is not an aberration. It may not be the only position found in this rambling book, but it is one that is there. This same force of spirit to convert all to Islam has abided for twelve hundred years. Yet, instead of grudgingly acknowledging it and dealing with it, we deny it exists.

Islam has no central authority. Passages in the Qur’an and its commentaries advocating holy war may be interpreted literally, symbolically, or poetically, but they are there. The reason why this jihadist inspiration always comes back to incite some Muslim believers is because it is found in the sources as the only true interpretation of Islam. ISIS members insist that their religious motives be taken seriously. This earnestness is what motivates them. We insult them, while at the same time playing into their hands, by refusing to understand what they say and, indeed, give witness to with their lives. It is those Muslims who have died killing in western cities--not those who are murdered--who are considered to be, yes, martyrs.

The so-called “Muslim terrorists”, then, do not think of themselves as “Muslim terrorists”. They consider themselves to be the only real followers of Mohammed. They see themselves as doing exactly what he and his first followers did in the saga of a rapid conquest of much of the African, Arab, and Middle Eastern worlds. The conquest of Europe would complete the stymied efforts at Tours and Vienna, victories that allowed Europe to remain Europe and not become Muslim much sooner. Moreover, jihadists have a perfectly intelligible explanation for what they are doing and how they are doing it. It is a sophisticated intellectual theory deftly designed to explain exactly why these “terrorist” acts are both legitimate and indeed praiseworthy in the eyes of Allah. The voluntarist metaphysics behind such reasoning is by no meant unfamiliar to western thinkers. And it is this intellectual battle that we are unwilling to or unable to fight.

Briefly, the assigned mission of Islam is to conquer the world for Allah. Submission to Allah is the highest human good. Any means to carry it out is good if it is successful. Carrying out this mission, in this view, is a Muslim’s vocation. With the re-establishment of the caliphate, this mission can now recommence. No other religion or its symbols, including ones more ancient than Islam, are allowed within its conquered territories. The fact that many individual Muslims may not agree with this interpretation is irrelevant. There are millions that do agree. But numbers are not the key factor.

Fear rules both the Muslim and western cultures that oppose the jihadists or are its victims. This fear is kept alive by methods of warfare, shrewdly applied, that utilize modern technology but rely on old and reliable techniques. Muslims fighters learned some time ago that modern weapons are not particularly effective against them. Slitting the throats of ten Christians on international TV is more effective than weapons of mass destruction, which they would also like to possess. We see that trucks and cars are often feared means of their warfare.

Thus, tanks and bombs are not particularly effective against individual and seemingly random attacks on enemy homelands. With local passports and cell phones, small arms, home-made bombs, and knives, any large western city can be brought to its knees for several days. It is something of a joke now to think that such things as the Transportation Safety mechanisms we have in airports make much difference. The downing of a Russian passenger plane may still happen, but attacking schools, buses, trains, churches, or just random individuals anywhere in the world will instantly be on international news with the usual disclaimers. Bringing down passenger planes may be an obsolete means in terms of effectiveness.

As long as we choose (and it is a choice) not to identify the problem the more it is successful and the more it will grow. That growth may indeed be the reason it is not identified. The deeper problem lies in the truth of Islam’s mission to conquer the world for Allah. If it is true, that is, if the Qur’an is a revelation of God, then it will eventually win. Even if it is not true or from God, as I do not think that it is, even in Christian apocalyptic terms, it may well win. If our view of the world is cast in terms of relativism, of diversity theory, of pacifism, we really have no clue about that is happening. One cannot but admire the logic and abiding persistence within Islam to continue its centuries-long, Allah-given mission to conquer the world.

One can speculate about why we cannot locate the problem, and therefore not face its real attraction for its millions of followers within Islam. In no actual Muslim country is there any real freedom of religion. Whenever and wherever possible, all or part of Muslim law is established as civil law. Many Muslim countries are “peaceful” only in the sense that their governments, usually military dictatorships, keep down that radicalism that would overthrow them and is overthrowing them in many places. Muslim masses wait to see who is winning. They know even within Islam that they cannot afford to be on the losing side.

The present strategy of ISIS and its followers seems clear enough. The following steps or remarks seem most plausible:

1) Gain control of governments and armies within present Islamic states.

2) Eliminate all Christian, Jewish, and related elements, including their buildings and records, from within existing Muslim states.

3) Place as many Muslims, especially young males, in European countries and other countries as possible.

4) Continue to produce large numbers of children so that demographic and democratic processes will provide increasing majorities on towns, cities, and nations.

5) Make every city and area on earth, from Mumbai to San Bernardino, the object of incidents of terror both on a systematic and random basis, preferably both.

6) Already more than enough followers are found in most western countries that are willing to sacrifice their lives to carry this project out in the coming years.

7) Create an atmosphere that makes it difficult to stem the Muslim conquest.

8) Undermine and convert to your use all police, and military operations left remaining to oppose a final conquest.

Granted the speed of the success, the confusion, and deliberate blindness of its opposition, ISIS and its sympathizers have a reasonable hope of final success at least in Europe and possibly America. Russia, China, and India may take longer. They will ultimately have to be dealt with. All three of these countries already have met Muslim invasions or turmoil. Their own nationalist or religious unity may prove more difficult to counter. They are, when provoked, less likely to stand by confused and relatively helpless.

And one last caveat, from Howard Kainz’ essay “Christians As ‘Soft Targets’”: “The combination of the surrender to modernism in the ‘developed world’ and Christians’ helpless exposure to violence and subjugation in Muslim-dominated regions leads to a possible alternative vision of Armageddon and victory: a final martyrdom of the Church.” The Church has no armies. Who will defend her?

Viewed from this perspective, removing weapons from the populace makes subjugation of the country much easier.  Makes you go "Hmmm" and ask why the Obama administration's focus after every attack is gun confiscation.

The closed minded Barack

Don't confuse him with facts, his mind is made up.

We have a president who is eager to put a racial frame around incidents in which white cops kills blacks, even if, as in the case of Officer Darren Wilson and Michael Brown, the shooting was justified and there was no evidence that it was racially motivated. No matter; the incidents fit into Mr. Obama’s worldview, and off to the races he went.

But in the case of jihadism, when the killers themselves are invoking the Koran and the Islamic faith to justify their malevolence — when the caliphate established in the heart of the Middle East is called the Islamic State — the president refuses to confront it. He goes into contortions to downplay or ignore the connection to Islam. He has a narrative to advance, and he will do it even if he has to run roughshod over reality to do it....

Here’s the problem: There is an independent reality apart from what Mr. Obama thinks. He can ignore the truth, but he cannot wish it out of existence. And by ignoring the reality of things, he makes everything worse. (It turns out that calling ISIS a “jayvee team” last year and declaring it “contained” a day before the massacre in Paris doesn’t make it so. Who knew?)

Mr. Obama is lost and confused, inhabiting a world of his own making. That would be bad enough if he was a community organizer; it is disastrous for a man who is president. America and the world are paying a terrible price because of the closing of Barack Obama’s mind.

Peter Wehner assumes, of course, that Obama doesn't want what's happening to happen.   That's not yet certain.