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June 2016

Washington Funds Ignorance of Mental Illness The federal government doesn’t even try to estimate the number of Americans with schizophrenia. By E. Fuller Torrey

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/436484/print

The federal government collects accurate data on the number of pigs in Iowa, on milk cows in New York, and on turkeys in Delaware but none whatsoever on the number of people with schizophrenia. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention keeps a long list of diseases that must be reported, including cryptosporidiosis, chlamydia, and cancer, but not schizophrenia.

This is remarkable, since schizophrenia is among our most consequential and expensive diseases. In a 2013 study, the annual economic burden of schizophrenia was estimated to be $156 billion. Three studies have reported that individuals with schizophrenia are responsible for 10 percent of all homicides in the United States; other studies suggest that people with schizophrenia — such as Jared Loughner in Tuscon, Aaron Alexis at the Washington Navy Yard, and James Holmes in Aurora, Colo. — are also responsible for up to one-third of mass killings. Even Adam Lanza in Newtown, Conn., had had a diagnosis of schizophrenia, in addition to autism spectrum disorder.

Other developed nations believe that it is important to ascertain the prevalence of schizophrenia and whether it is increasing or decreasing. For example, recent European studies have reported that schizophrenia is twice as common in England and the Netherlands as in Italy or Spain, that it has been steadily increasing in south London over three decades, and that early-onset schizophrenia is increasing in Denmark.

And what do we know about the United States? Nothing. Could an increasing incidence of schizophrenia be partly responsible for the sharp increase in the number of homeless who are mentally ill? We have no idea. Or the increase in mentally ill persons in jails and prisons? Or the startling increase in the number of mentally ill individuals who now receive psychiatric disability benefits, and are therefore eligible for Medicaid, under the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) programs? We know nothing. Our last prevalence study of schizophrenia was in 1980–84, when four cities and one rural area were studied and, from the results, a national prevalence was estimated. The last complete enumeration of “insane” persons in the United States was in the 1880 census.

No, We Are Not ‘Doing Everything We Can’ The lie at the heart of our national-security argument By Kevin D. Williamson

One of the great problems we face in our ongoing confrontation with Islamic fundamentalism is that our enemies are rational and we are not.

It is a mistake — one that we insist on repeating — to tell ourselves that the jihadists and ISIS groupies who perpetuate terrorist spectaculars such as the attack on the Pulse nightclub outside Orlando are irrational, that they are mentally disorganized lunatics of the familiar-enough sort exemplified by Jared Lee Loughner and John Salvi, who may or may not believe themselves to be acting in the service of a particular cause. (Salvi was an abortion opponent who believed that a Vatican-based currency-manipulation scheme was shaping world affairs, and who believed himself to have been targeted by, among others, the Cosa Nostra and the Freemasons. Loughner, too, was obsessed with a currency-manipulation conspiracy.) Lunacy is not what we are seeing with domestic jihadists. What we see instead is the pursuit of specific cultural and political ends through acts of violence directed at symbolically important soft targets.

We speak of “lone wolf” jihadists as though this phenomenon were somehow independent of the wider Islamist project. It is not. The model of “leaderless resistance” in the service of terrorist projects is not new, and it has not been employed by the Islamists at random. Leaderless resistance has long been a part of the thinking of neo-Nazi groups such as Brüder Schweigen, and the Islamists have had a great deal of opportunity to develop that approach in various insurgencies around the world. Equally important, the emergence of the Internet as a worldwide medium for political communication and cultural expression has provided 21st-century terrorists with opportunities that were far out of the reach of their mimeograph- and fax-dependent predecessors a generation ago. If Omar Mateen turns out, as expected, to have had little or no substantive contact with organized Islamist groups, that fact will demonstrate the success of their communication strategy rather than the limitations of their reach.

We must be honest with ourselves about the enemy and his characteristics. He is not crazy. He has goals, and we know what they are and how he goes about pursuing them.

Killing Homosexuals Is Not ISIS Law, It Is Muslim Law For nearly 25 years, we’ve been clinging to the fiction that groups such as ISIS are anti-Islamic. By Andrew C. McCarthy

Various reports indicate that the death toll from the jihadist attack overnight at a popular gay club in Orlando may exceed 50 people, with more than 50 others wounded. The terrorist’s identity has been reported: He is Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old American citizen and devout Muslim from Fort Pierce, Fla., the son of immigrants from Afghanistan.

The FBI has indicated that Mateen, who was killed in a shootout with police at about 5 a.m., was an Islamic extremist. Representative Peter King (R., N.Y.), who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee, says the shooter was “trained in the use of weapons.” As we have noted here many times, military training is generally the key that separates competent terrorists from wannabes. But whether actual or would-be jihadists, these Muslims are motivated by Islamic supremacism, the belief that sharia, Islam’s ancient, totalitarian law, must be imposed on society.

Based on all this, there is abundant Washington and media speculation that the attack is “ISIS-inspired.” This is consistent with the bipartisan, government-approved inanity we have been following for a quarter-century, what I often call the political class’s concoction of “An Islam of Their Very Own.” It goes something like this:

Islam is a religion of peace, period. End of discussion. “Violent extremist” outfits such as ISIS and al-Qaeda kill wantonly, with no real ideological motivation. ISIS and al-Qaeda are thus not Islamic, but actually anti-Islamic — and if they cite Islamic scripture to justify their atrocities, they are “hijacking” and “perverting” Islam. Because we must see these groups as “anti-Islam” rather than Islam, it is acceptable to call a mass-murder attack “terrorism” only if law-enforcement develops some plausible tie to these groups. Otherwise, if a Muslim is involved, stick with “workplace violence” and the like. Finally when an attack committed by a Muslim is too obviously terrorism to deny, call it “ISIS-inspired,” or “al-Qaeda-inspired,” or “Hamas political resistance,” etc. — but by all means do not, absolutely do not, ascribe it to Islam in any way shape or form.

This is idiocy. Will today’s event, the worst mass shooting in American history, help us see that?

We need to consider separately Islam and its sharia law.

GAO Revelations: Our Open Door For Terrorists The deadly failures of the visa waiver program. June 13, 2016 Michael Cutler

Visas are a component of border security. While much has been made about the need to erect a fence along the U.S. / Mexican border to enhance border security, an effectively administered visa program in essence, moves America’s borders out to the U.S. embassies and consulates in countries around the world where the visa applications for aliens seeking entry into the United States are processed.

Most terrorists who have been identified, entered the U.S. through ports of entry.

An effectively administered visa program essentially moves America’s borders out to the U.S. embassies and consulates around the world where our consular officers adjudicate applications for visas. Aliens who are unable to secure a visa are not only not able to legally enter the United States, they are not even able to board airliners destined to the United States- keeping them as far from our shores as possible.

The very first paragraph of the preface of “9/11 and Terrorist Travel – Staff Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States” makes that nexus between visas and border security crystal clear:

“It is perhaps obvious to state that terrorists cannot plan and carry out attacks in the United States if they are unable to enter the country. Yet prior to September 11, while there were efforts to enhance border security, no agency of the U.S. government thought of border security as a tool in the counterterrorism arsenal. Indeed, even after 19 hijackers demonstrated the relative ease of obtaining a U.S. visa and gaining admission into the United States, border security still is not considered a cornerstone of national security policy. We believe, for reasons we discuss in the following pages, that it must be made one.”

Apparently bowing to pressure from a number of deep-pocketed lobbying organizations- especially the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the United States created the Visa Waiver Program (VWP) that strips our nation of a vital layer of security and a half dozen specific ways that the visa requirement can enhance airline safety, national security and the safety and well-being of America and Americans.

This Is How Democracy Dies Why more left-wing violence is likely on the horizon. Bruce Thornton

The attacks on Trump supporters at a rally in San Jose last week were another example of the left’s violent assaults on free speech and association. Before the election there is likely to be more thuggery, as an emboldened left lets slip their dogs of war to foment disorder to continue Obama’s aim to “fundamentally transform” America. As the long history of political philosophy teaches, this undermining of law by violence is an important sign of democracy’s impending doom.

Over 2100 years ago, the Greek historian Polybius described how democracy dies:

So when [the rich] begin to hanker after office, and find that they cannot achieve it through their own efforts or on their merits, they begin to seduce and corrupt the people in every possible way, and thus ruin their estates. The result is that through their senseless craving for prominence they stimulate among the masses both an appetite for bribes and the habit of receiving them, and then the rule of democracy is transformed into government by violence and strong-arm methods. By this time the people have become accustomed to feed at the expense of others, and their prospects of winning a livelihood depend upon the property of their neighbors, and as soon as they find a leader who is sufficiently ambitious and daring . . . they introduce a regime based on violence.

It takes only a few revisions reflecting the modern world to see how closely Polybius’s analysis describes how the ideology and policy of the progressives are degrading America’s democratic republic.

First, the progressives have “seduced and corrupted” the people not, like the aspiring tyrants of old, by spending their own money, but by redistributing the property of other citizens via the 16th Amendment, which instituted the federal income tax. Over the next century the funds appropriated by the IRS have financed the “bribes” for the people: the various social welfare programs and transfers that relentlessly have escalated in number, scope, and cost––in 2014 these programs ate up two-thirds of the federal budget.

These transfers have indeed “stimulated” both the “appetite” of the people for even more government programs, and the “habit” of receiving them. That is why today the biggest problem facing our economy––the unsustainable entitlement spending that threatens in decades to gobble up every dollar collected by the feds––got only cursory attention in all the speeches of the presidential candidates from both parties. Indeed, the Democrats want to create even more programs and spend even more money on these “bribes.”

Ramadan Massacre in Orlando At least 50 dead and 53 wounded. Robert Spencer

It was the worst mass shooting ever on American soil: Omar Mateen, 29, opened fire at the Pulse, an Orlando, Florida gay nightclub, on Saturday night. Mateen murdered at least fifty people and wounded another 53. The death count is almost certain to go higher, as many are quite gravely wounded. Mateen was a Muslim who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and mentioned the Boston Marathon jihad killers in a 911 call just before he started shooting. Thus in the wake of the jihad massacre, it was time for the Leftist political and media elites to do what they always do first and foremost after every jihad massacre: make sure that no one thought ill of Islam.

The FBI, to its credit, immediately declared the massacre a terror attack, but Barack Obama was circumspect about what kind: he declared that it was too early to know “the precise motivations of the killer.” This despite the fact that not only had Mateen pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and made reference to the Tsarnaev brothers, but also the Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attack, and the FBI is investigating reports that Mateen recited Islamic prayers during the massacre. On top of all that, the attack took place during the Muslim month of Ramadan, during which the Islamic State has called for jihad attacks against Americans.

Nonetheless, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, along with many other Leftists, tried to turn the jihad attack into a commercial for rolling back Americans’ Second Amendment rights, tweeting: “We mourn with the people of Orlando and the LGBT community as a whole on the news that -once again- we have lost precious lives to the gun.” Who knew that guns could be so diabolical and anti-gay?

Leftist responses ranged from the ominous to the absurd. Ominously, Facebook and Reddit turned to censorship to try to prevent people from thinking ill of Islam. Facebook removed the Stop Islamization of America (SIOA) page, which had been up for six years and had over 55,000 members, and Reddit began banning people who dared to mention that the killer was a Muslim.

On the absurd side, ACLU staff attorney Chase Strangio tweeted that the massacre was the fault of conservative Christians: “You know what is gross — your thoughts and prayers and Islamophobia after you created this anti-queer climate.” Does the illustrious Strangio actually believe that Omar Mateen was incited to commit mass murder in the gay nightclub in Orlando by an “anti-queer climate” created by Christian conservatives? He probably does, since, as a Leftist, he knows that non-Muslims are always and everywhere to blame for atrocities that Muslims commit.

Imam Speaking in Orlando Said Gays Must Be Killed Out of ‘Compassion’ By Patrick Poole

There is new information on the horrific terror attack in Orlando last night that has killed at least 50 and wounded more than 100 in the largest mass shooting in American history.

Sources are telling the Daily Beast that suspected killer Omar Mateen had previously been investigated by the FBI in 2013 and 2014, making this yet another “known wolf” terror attack:

Omar Mateen of Port Saint Lucie, Florida, came to the attention of federal authorities twice prior to being identified as the gunman in the Orlando nightclub mass shooting, a senior law enforcement source told The Daily Beast.

Mateen 53 people and shot more than 100 in total at the Pulse gay nightclub early Sunday morning, in the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history.

The senior law enforcement source reports that Mateen became a person of interest in 2013 and again in 2014. The Federal Bureau of Investigation at one point opened an investigation into Mateen but subsequently closed the case when it produced nothing that appeared to warrant further investigation.

“He’s a known quantity,” the source said. “He’s been on the radar before.”

Mateen was a U.S. citizen; his parents are from Afghanistan, CBS News reports.

Man Arrested with Guns, Explosive Ingredient Reportedly Headed to L.A. Pride Parade

The FBI is already circling the wagons that Marteen was just “one of hundreds” of ISIS sympathizers known to the FBI:

A Month of Islam in Britain: May 2016 Child Sex Grooming, Prison Brainwashing and “Allah Knows Best” by Soeren Kern

“A Muslim man with way too many extremist links to be entirely coincidental is now the Mayor of London. … In a couple more decades Britain may well have its first Muslim Prime Minister. … Reality cannot argue with demographics, so the realistic future for Britain is Islamic.” — Paul Weston, British politician.

One-third of Muslim adults in Britain do not feel “part of British culture,” according to a new report on British multiculturalism. Nearly half (47%) of Muslims consider their Islamic faith to be the most important part of their identity.

The government was accused of burying a report on prison extremism which warns that staff have been reluctant to tackle Islamist behavior for fear of being labelled “racist,” according to the Sunday Times. Belmarsh, a maximum-security prison in London, has become “like a jihadi training camp,” according to testimony from a former inmate. There are more than 12,000 Muslims in prisons across England and Wales.

Former MP Ann Cryer suffered verbal abuse and was accused of “demonizing” the Asian community when she began a campaign more than a decade ago to get the authorities to tackle child sex grooming in Keighley.

“At the end of the assault, when Mr. Zimmerman was lying motionless and defenseless on the floor of the ticket hall, the defendant crouched over him and quite deliberately began to cut Mr. Zimmerman’s throat with a knife blade.” — Prosecutor in the attempted murder trial of Somalia-born Muhiddin Mire, who attacked a random stranger in the London Underground.

May 1. Mubashir Jamil, a 21-year-old man from Luton, was arrested on suspicion of attempting to travel to Syria and engage in “violent jihad” with the Islamic State. He was charged with “engaging in conduct in preparation for committing acts of terrorism.”

Orlando Shooting: Pickled in Hatred by Shoshana Bryen

The terrorists are pickled in hatred that simply does not allow for the humanity of “the other” and insists that individuals exist only as representations of religions, objects, and social or political points of view.

The American homeland — free speech, religious institutions, open inquiry in academia, our military and our way of life — is under attack.

America’s blessing is a political system built on tolerance of “the other.” Not all of us, not all the time — remember, we used to buy and sell our fellow human beings — but the principle to which we aspire is tolerance of “the other.”

But our national blind spot is not seeing that we share this lovely space with people who want to kill us for the peculiar people we are.

It is a lot to process. Omar Mateen, the American-born son of Afghan parents, murdered 50 people and wounded scores of others in a gay nightclub Sunday. The first surprise is that it was not a surprise, especially to the FBI. Mateen was the subject of investigations in 2013 and 2014. “He was a known quantity,” a source said. “He has been on the radar before.” But Assistant Special Agent Ronald Hopper told reporters, “Those interviews turned out to be inconclusive, so there was nothing to keep the investigation going.”

Omar Mateen’s father probably wasn’t terribly surprised. He told NBC News “that his son became angry after seeing two men kissing a few months ago in Miami.” He speculated that could have triggered his decision to kill. “This has nothing to do with religion,” his father added.

Christian Human Rights Activist Jailed in Turkey by Robert Jones

Assyrian human rights activist Sawo Oshana Ide, accused of “being a member of an armed organization,” has been jailed in Turkey since February 18. The indictment does not mention which “armed organization.”

The second trial will be held June 16. The international community must not abandon him.

The Assyrian human rights activist Sawo Oshana Ide, accused of “being a member of an armed organization,” has been jailed in Turkey since February 18. The indictment does not mention which “armed organization” Sawo belongs to. According to Ide’s lawyer, Erkan Metin, “He is abstractly accused of doing research in accordance with the objectives of an organization and forming lists about ammunition.”

According to the Turkish penal code, it is a charge that can bring imprisonment for five to ten years.

According to Assyria TV, “the Turkish security forces stormed the apartment of Sawo Oshana Ide in Midyat, Turkey. The police took his computer and other notes. Thereafter, Sawo and his wife were taken into interrogation. Today in the afternoon, the police released Sawo’s wife but he was arrested on charges of collaborating with a terrorist organization.”