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December 2015

RUTHIE BLUM: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SAN BERNARDINO

As details began to emerge from the mass murder in California on Wednesday, it became perfectly clear that the perpetrators had set out to emulate the behavior of their Islamist brethren throughout the world.

Whether the Muslim Bonnie and Clyde — hiding in plain sight by “living the American dream” in San Bernardino — belonged to a particular terrorist organization has not yet been established.

But the method to the madness of their political-religious ideology was unmistakable. Leaving a 6-month-old baby behind to commit the kind of slaughter that was likely to result in their own deaths is not something that most parents outside of a mental institution, a radical mosque or the Palestinian Authority could understand.

Nor is it fathomable to Western couples recently blessed with a child to endanger that baby every single day of its short life during the period leading up to the massacre by concocting explosives and booby traps in its vicinity. They are too busy worrying about getting some sleep in between feedings and keeping the new member of their family safe, sound, healthy and happy, while trying to adjust their marriage to accommodate it all.

But Syed Farook, a Pakistani-American, and his Saudi wife, Tashfeen Malik, had more than a mere infant on their minds. After all, what is the value of one little baby compared to the greater good of global jihad in the name of Allah?

CAROLINE GLICK: AMERICA’S PATHOLOGICAL DENIAL OF REALITY

How much lower will America sink before it regains its senses? Wednesday, two Muslims walked into a Christmas party at a community service center in San Bernardino, California where one worked. They were wearing body armor and video cameras and carrying automatic rifles, pipe bombs and pistols. They opened fire, killed 14, and wounded 17.

The murderers, Syed Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik were killed by police.

Speaking to the Daily News, Farook’s father said his son, “was very religious. He would go to work, come back, go to pray, come back. He’s Muslim.”

Farook’s neighbor told the paper that over the past two years, Farook exchanged his Western dress for Islamic gowns and grew a beard.

These data points lead naturally to the conclusion that Farook and his wife were jihadists who killed in order to kill in the name of Islam.

But in America of December 2015, natural conclusions are considered irresponsible, at best.

In an interview with CNN following the shooting, US President Barack Obama said the massacre demonstrates that the US needs stricter gun laws. As for the motives of the shooters, Obama shrugged. “We don’t yet know the motives of the shooters,” he insisted.

MY SAY: THE MEDIA’S STEREOTYPICAL CONSERVATIVE

I confess to watching some pretty cretinous TV shows. Whenever they include any politics the conservative is always shown as a lout- an oaf who offends and blusters and lies under the false umbrella of “patriotism.”

He/she will insult the courage of prominent war heroes, mock another person’s looks, incite with trumped up statistics, offend a disabled reporter with wild hand gestures and, as The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler probably summed it up become “a fact checker’s dream…and nightmare. He spouts off so many ‘facts,’ often twisted or wrong, that it takes a lot of time to hack through the weeds.”

Sometimes he/she stumbles on some truth, but is so wrong on foreign policy- dealing with terrorism, North Korea, the Middle East with simplistic solutions.

I never would have thought that a candidate like that could emerge, and more incredible- I never thought that some of my friends- intelligent and politically savvy people could support a mountebank ( : a boastful unscrupulous pretender : charlatan)for the highest office…rsk

Mandatory Sensitivity Training on Campus Campus totalitarians and their call for Maost self-recrimination sessions. Richard L. Cravatts

As campuses across the country are roiled in paroxysms of self-righteous indignation over race, groups of black students, perhaps inspired and emboldened by the anarchistic successes at University of Missouri, have formed coalitions and presented elaborate, and breathtakingly audacious, lists of demands which they have nailed to the doors of their respective university administrations.

An ever-growing list of these remarkably outrageous demands is even being archived at a site, The Demands.org, and which, as of this week, comprised the juvenile manifestos of groups on over 60 campuses, including calls for removals of college presidents (as happened at University of Missouri, as the most conspicuous and significant example), the renaming of buildings and schools named for racists and other moral reprobates (as happened at Princeton and indignation over its former president, Woodrow Wilson), and various similar calls for increased recruitment of minority faculty and students, enhanced centers and facilities for minority students, increased financial aid to “students of color” and other underrepresented groups, and a litany of other minority-centric benefits and amenities.

“The power to be found in victimization, like any power,” wrote Shelby Steele in The Content of Our Character, “is intoxicating and can lend itself to the creation of a new class of super-victims who can feel the pea of victimization under twenty mattresses.” Apparently, the new victims in the culture of aggrievement that seems to have overtaken our campuses have been irritated by the ‘hard pea’ of racism and want everyone else on campus to know and feel their pain, as well, since almost all the lists of demands from the campus crybullies includes one well-intentioned, but intellectually pernicious, item; namely, mandatory sensitivity training on the details of diversity, oppression, racism, and other maladies purportedly afflicting marginalized student groups on today’s campuses.

Michael Cutler :Placating Americans with Fake Immigration Law Enforcement How our leaders create fantasy ‘solutions’ for our immigration-related vulnerabilities.

Politicians understand that in order to get elected they need to create the illusion that they are addressing their constituents’ concerns. This is not unlike the parents who are awakened in the night by their young child who, startled by a nightmare in the middle of the night, starts crying and screaming.

The drowsy parents want desperately to be able to go back to sleep, but know that must calm their upset child. The dutiful parents stumble into their child’s room, administer a back-rub to the crying child, speaking soothingly, telling the child whatever they think they need to say to calm him/her and perhaps even serving up a glass of warm milk, hoping that the now-placated child will go back to sleep.

Years ago during a conversation with a journalist about immigration and crime, I told him that the Bush administration’s strategy was to create the illusion of aggressively seeking to arrest criminal aliens to placate concerned Americans. I told him that the President would periodically conduct news conferences at which he would highlight some law enforcement operation conducted by the Border Patrol or by ICE agents that had been given tough-sounding names such as “Operation Gatekeeper” and “Operation Return to Sender.”

There Are No American Soldiers in Iraq Obama and Hillary’s phony ISIS war will get Americans killed. Daniel Greenfield

Americans used to laugh at the bereted Iraqi Information Minister screaming, “I triple guarantee you, there are no American soldiers in Baghdad”, even while they could be seen moving into the city.

Now Baghdad Bob’s rhetoric has been transplanted over from Baghdad to Washington D.C.

Last year, Obama said, “I want to be clear: the American forces that have been deployed to Iraq do not and will not have a combat mission.” A good way to get stinking drunk is to drink a shot every time Obama precedes a blatant lie with an “I want to be clear.” And this time was no different.

The year before that he told the American people, “I will not put American boots on the ground in Syria.”

No word on whether soldiers in the “Specialized Expeditionary Targeting Force” will be wearing sandals or slippers as they carry out raids into Syria to free hostages and capture ISIS terrorists.

Obama had assured Americans that the mission “will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil.” Did he annex Syria and Iraq as new states while Congress was in recess?

San Bernardino: Another Jihad Attack, Another Cover-Up Mainstream media reporters don’t even need to show up for work. They can file their stories beforehand. Robert Spencer

The San Bernardino jihad massacre is the latest jihad atrocity, but it’s just like the last one, and just like the next one: it has played out in exactly the same way that the last jihad atrocity did, and in just the same way that the next one will play out as well. Mass killings by “radicalized” Muslims are followed by earnest statements from the President and the mainstream media that we must not rush to judgment, that the motive of the shooters was unclear, that we need gun control, that we need to address the real threat of climate change, that Muslims fear “Islamophobia,” and so on. It’s always a new massacre, but it’s always the same story.

Surely by now mainstream media reporters don’t even need to roll out of bed to file their stories. How much legwork does it take to write, “Syed Farook and Tashfeen Melik murdered 14 people at a Christmas party in San Bernardino; yes, Farook was a devout Muslim, but authorities are searching for a motive; moderate Muslims condemned the attack and said they feared anti-Muslim backlash”? Change the names and date, change the number of victims and the place, and they’ve filed that story dozens of times. They can just take out their last New York Times or CNN piece on the Paris jihad attack, change the details, hit send, and pour a cold one.

Cruz vs. Rubio — A Better GOP Race By Rich Lowry

A funny thing is happening on the way to the GOP meltdown.

According to the latest Quinnipiac poll, the two most popular and broadly acceptable candidates in the field are perhaps the most talented and most reliably conservative. Oh, and by the way, they are Hispanics in their 40s.

Donald Trump is still leading the polls and has demonstrated a staying power that has confounded his critics, but Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz are now beginning to stand out in the rest of the field, clustering with Ben Carson in effectively a three-way tie for second place nationally.

According to the latest Quinnipiac poll, Rubio is at 66 percent to 8 percent favorable/unfavorable, while Cruz is at 65 percent to 9 percent, for the highest net favorable ratings in the race, 58 percent and 56 percent, respectively. Only 5 percent of Republicans say they wouldn’t consider voting for Rubio, and 6 percent say that of Cruz, the lowest numbers in the field (Trump and Jeb Bush are unacceptable to the most Republicans, at 26 percent and 21 percent, respectively).

No, Virginia, There Is No Good News Anymore By Deroy Murdock

It is the worst of times. It is the worst of times.

While America certainly suffered light years more during the Civil War, the Great Depression, World War II, and the Jim Crow era, that hardly comforts a nation in which nothing seems to go right, on a planet where everything seems to go wrong.

Wednesday offered fresh grimness. Newlyweds Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 27, left their six-month-old daughter with her grandmother. They then went to Farook’s workplace in San Bernardino, Calif., and stormed into a Christmas luncheon. The young couple looked at the very same people who recently threw them a baby shower. And then they opened fire, murdering 14 of them, and wounding 21 others.

After some of the 300 intrepid police officers who responded to this emergency cornered and liquidated these killers, they discovered that they had converted their home into a pipe-bomb factory. Further investigation may prove that these two crusaded against poor working conditions. However, Farook’s devout Muslim faith and the couple’s recent sojourn in Saudi Arabia suggest that this may be a blood-soaked example of militant-Islamic terrorism on American soil.

San Bernardino exploded six days after Robert Dear’s one-man atrocity in Colorado Springs. He allegedly burst into a Planned Parenthood clinic, pulled his rifle’s trigger, and continued until three people were dead and nine wounded.

Hillary Clinton: ‘Nothing to Do with Islam’ By Mona Charen

In the aftermath of Paris and before San Bernardino, Hillary Clinton articulated the forced catechism of the Left: “Let’s be clear: Islam is not our adversary. Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.”

What happens when a major political party becomes so wedded to political correctness that it feels constrained to deny reality? Clinton could hardly have chosen a less opportune moment to squeeze her eyes shut about the threat of Islamic extremism — a threat that is glaringly, blazingly obvious.

The first part of what Mrs. Clinton said was true. Islam is not our adversary. There are an estimated 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, and if all of them were violent extremists, we’d have a planet drowning in blood. Most Muslims are peaceful. Beyond that, they practice charity, care for the sick, and encourage good works.

But there is a fever sweeping the Muslim world that has infected a significant minority of Muslims — and because Muslims are so numerous, that minority amounts to hundreds of millions. It began in the 1920s with the Muslim Brotherhood. Its Shiite incarnation has captured the government of Iran. Saudi oil money has facilitated its spread to places such as Pakistan and Afghanistan. President Obama, deluded from the get-go that our enemy was not Islamic extremism, but merely “al-Qaeda,” stood by while the Islamic extremists in Iraq and Syria morphed into a new entity called ISIS. Obama never saw it coming because he was determined to believe, with Mrs. Clinton and other Democrats, that terrorism has nothing to do with Islam.