“Though President Barack Obama claimed that America must “enlist Muslim communities” to combat terrorism in his Sunday evening Oval Office address, former FBI Counterterrorism Agent John Guandolo said on Monday’s Breitbart News Daily (6AM-9AM EST on Sirius XM Patriot channel 125) that since 9/11, “we collectively have received nearly zero help from the Muslim Community.”
Guandolo, who pointed out on Friday’s Breitbart News Daily that a “vast majority” of U.S. mosques and Islamic centers are a part of a much larger “jihadi network,” told host and Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon that though Muslim community leaders “certainly give the air as if they are helping,” if one looks at the “major Islamic organizations, the major Islamic centers in the United States,” they have “condemned all of the counter-terrorism policies and they’ve gotten the government to kowtow to them, to turn only to them for advice.”
“And what advice do they give them?” Guandolo asked. “That Islam doesn’t stand for this and that everything you’re doing is the reason for what happened—9/11 is your fault because of your policies.”
As Breitbart News reported, Los Angeles CAIR director Hussam Ayloush said last week just days after the San Bernardino terrorist attacks that America is “partly responsible” for the San Bernardino terrorist attacks because “some of our foreign policy” is “fueling extremism.””
“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.
A few years ago, a couple of writers for Salon.com showed up at a panel at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on which I was speaking, and were deservedly ridiculed after they were caught writing their story before the panel had even begun. But you can’t really blame them for trying to save some time: their story was going to be the same “Racist Bigoted Islamophobes Say Egregiously Evil Things” no matter what anyone on the panel really did say, so why not get a head start on the writing?
With San Bernardino, and every jihad attack, it works the same way. The media trims the facts to fit the Procrustean bed of their narrative, such that, in this case, most of the American public will likely never hear that San Bernardino jihad murderer Syed Farook had been “radicalized”; or that he had been in touch with Muslims being investigated for jihad terror activity; or that he spent his free time in the mosque, memorizing the Qur’an.
If they do hear about such things at all from the mainstream media, their significance won’t be explained: no one on CBS or NBC or ABC or PBS or NPR or in the New York Times or the Washington Post will remind his or her audience that the Islamic State and other jihad groups consider themselves to be at war with the United States, and have explicitly and repeatedly called upon Muslims in the U.S. to commit mass murder of American civilians. Would anyone have wondered about the motive of a German national who slaughtered fourteen Americans on U.S. soil in 1943? Of course no one would have, but that was a long time ago. Now we are engaged in a great ignored war, a war that only one side is fighting, a war in which enemy combatants are tried in civilian courts – as if they were criminals, not enemy soldiers — by a government that desperately wishes to maintain the illusion that there is no war at all.
This play has played to rapt audiences in Boston and Fort Hood, and all over the country. It is so familiar that all the players hit their marks with the nonchalant and unthinking precision of the overtrained. But it needs to close. The endless proclamations after every jihad attack, that it has nothing to do with Islam, and that Muslims are the real victims, are not only ludicrous; they’re offensive. The mainstream media and the Obama Administration have insulted the intelligence of Americans long enough. Their denial and willful ignorance are endangering us all, as they continue to behave after every jihad attack that their primary duty is not protecting Americans, but protecting Islam’s image.”
“Intelligence officials have determined that Islamic extremists have explored using the refugee program to enter the United States, they told the head of the Homeland Security Committee.
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) revealed portions of a classified letter from the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) on Monday, which offered new claims not previously disclosed by the Obama administration.
The disclosure could give ammunition to critics of the White House’s refugee plans who have warned that the program is vulnerable to infiltration by adherents of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
The NCTC has identified “individuals with ties to terrorist groups in Syria attempting to gain entry to the U.S. through the U.S. refugee program,” the intelligence agency told McCaul in a letter.”
Former WMBer Kyle was writing on Facebook about the idea of being “radicalized”. He doesn’t think someone can be radicalized without their willingly choosing to be so.
I generally agree, especially with adults. But I also know that brainwashing can occur in the right circumstances, especially with the young. However, I would tend to think a Muslim adult living in the U.S. could not easily be brainwashed, & any radicalization of their thought is of their own choosing.
What bothers me is that ISIS is taking young boys, brainwashing them, & turning them into killers. That chills me to my soul. I can’t even read the articles that describe it because it bothers me so much.
That’s been going on a long time, Karen. When I lived in CT, before 1986, I read a horrifying article in the NYTimes magazine about madras schools in Pakistan. Young boys were taken from home and left at these boarding schools where for 8 hours a day they memorized the Koran in Arabic– a language they did not speak.
No art, history, music, math or anything else to expand their minds. Recess was one ball kicked around a dirt courtyard.
They only women they saw were cooks and cleaners. They had no contact with their families or the outside world.
Is it no wonder the grew up with so narrow a world view? They had no experience with real life. 😦
And young girls. And America school systems are supporting it. By teaching that all religions are good and bad and we need them all, they are affirming that religion. By putting out social studies books that talk about how Christians brought the plague or whatever and deliberately spread it and did witch hunts but Muslims are nice peace loving people who just want everybody to be nice, they are endorsing it. And our youth, emotionally and mentally challenged due to our parenting techniques, are open to jumping right in.
… I understand Trump’s appeal. Indeed, I feel it. I vibrate to his call for the restoration of American greatness. I appreciate his emphasis on the importance of national borders and his opposition to illegal immigration. I agree with him that Muslim immigration raises a special problem that needs to be addressed. I second his condemnation of the mainstream media.
However, Trump is an embarrassment to those of us who care about the issues that have made him a frontrunner. He damages the prospect of sane reform. What Joe McCarthy was to the cause of anti-Communism, Trump is to the issues that have served him so far. That’s my fear. …
_____________________________
… Much of our talk about social media and its influence concerns the negative – the anonymous commenter, the Facebook debate threads, the dehumanization and debasement of others. Just last week, we saw the inability of our society to stop, pause, grieve, or pray in the midst of a tragedy. Social media sites were immediately summoned as weapons for a political cause.
But what if we are so accustomed to the bad of online interaction that we miss the flip side – a glimpse of the humanity we share with others? The story of one woman’s defection from Westboro Baptist lends credence to the rarely-discussed positive side of social media. …
Evangelicals often decry the depersonalizing, dehumanizing effect of social media for reducing people to avatars and leading to hate-filled anonymous comment streams. As someone who has blogged regularly for nine years, I can testify to the vitriol I have seen.
But in the case of Phelps-Roper, social media was a tool that led her to see her opponents as more human, not less. Is her story an aberration, since (thankfully) most Americans don’t belong to cults that dehumanize their opponents to this extent? Or is it true that there is an often-unspoken, underlying good side to social media?
For all the times I have talked about hateful and hurtful comments spewed toward me online, I should also recognize how many times I have been encouraged and blessed by people’s words on social media. In my interaction with other people on Twitter and in blogs, I have sometimes been disarmed by the gracious manner in which my opponents have disagreed with me.
This interaction has made a more careful reader and a more persuasive writer. For example, when I review books today, I usually know something more about the author than the brief bio on the back cover. I can often see the author online – their family, their interests, their hobbies, and their friends. As a result, I take greater care to read charitably people with whom I disagree. …
________________________________________________
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump not only continues to lead the Republican presidential field in a new USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll. The overwhelming majority of his supporters also say they would vote for him if he bolted the GOP and ran as an independent.
The nationwide survey, taken Wednesday through Sunday, finds a trio of Republican candidates who show emerging national strength — Trump, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio — as other once-serious contenders struggle for traction.
And in a chilling sign for Republicans, 68% of Trump’s supporters say they would vote for the blustery billionaire businessman if he ran as an independent rather than a Republican; just 18% say they wouldn’t. The rest were undecided.
Our only hope to avoid a Trump or Clinton presidency is for Trump to lose fair and square, take it like a man and walk away. But what are the chances of that?
Wandering Views 
Blaming the victim…..
If you’re waiting for the so-called “moderate” muslims to assist, you’ll be waiting a looong time.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/12/07/fmr-fbi-counterterrorism-agent-weve-received-nearly-zero-help-from-u-s-muslim-community-since-911/
“Though President Barack Obama claimed that America must “enlist Muslim communities” to combat terrorism in his Sunday evening Oval Office address, former FBI Counterterrorism Agent John Guandolo said on Monday’s Breitbart News Daily (6AM-9AM EST on Sirius XM Patriot channel 125) that since 9/11, “we collectively have received nearly zero help from the Muslim Community.”
Guandolo, who pointed out on Friday’s Breitbart News Daily that a “vast majority” of U.S. mosques and Islamic centers are a part of a much larger “jihadi network,” told host and Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon that though Muslim community leaders “certainly give the air as if they are helping,” if one looks at the “major Islamic organizations, the major Islamic centers in the United States,” they have “condemned all of the counter-terrorism policies and they’ve gotten the government to kowtow to them, to turn only to them for advice.”
“And what advice do they give them?” Guandolo asked. “That Islam doesn’t stand for this and that everything you’re doing is the reason for what happened—9/11 is your fault because of your policies.”
As Breitbart News reported, Los Angeles CAIR director Hussam Ayloush said last week just days after the San Bernardino terrorist attacks that America is “partly responsible” for the San Bernardino terrorist attacks because “some of our foreign policy” is “fueling extremism.””
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Sticking to the narrative….
http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/261017/san-bernardino-another-jihad-attack-another-cover-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.
A few years ago, a couple of writers for Salon.com showed up at a panel at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on which I was speaking, and were deservedly ridiculed after they were caught writing their story before the panel had even begun. But you can’t really blame them for trying to save some time: their story was going to be the same “Racist Bigoted Islamophobes Say Egregiously Evil Things” no matter what anyone on the panel really did say, so why not get a head start on the writing?
With San Bernardino, and every jihad attack, it works the same way. The media trims the facts to fit the Procrustean bed of their narrative, such that, in this case, most of the American public will likely never hear that San Bernardino jihad murderer Syed Farook had been “radicalized”; or that he had been in touch with Muslims being investigated for jihad terror activity; or that he spent his free time in the mosque, memorizing the Qur’an.
If they do hear about such things at all from the mainstream media, their significance won’t be explained: no one on CBS or NBC or ABC or PBS or NPR or in the New York Times or the Washington Post will remind his or her audience that the Islamic State and other jihad groups consider themselves to be at war with the United States, and have explicitly and repeatedly called upon Muslims in the U.S. to commit mass murder of American civilians. Would anyone have wondered about the motive of a German national who slaughtered fourteen Americans on U.S. soil in 1943? Of course no one would have, but that was a long time ago. Now we are engaged in a great ignored war, a war that only one side is fighting, a war in which enemy combatants are tried in civilian courts – as if they were criminals, not enemy soldiers — by a government that desperately wishes to maintain the illusion that there is no war at all.
This play has played to rapt audiences in Boston and Fort Hood, and all over the country. It is so familiar that all the players hit their marks with the nonchalant and unthinking precision of the overtrained. But it needs to close. The endless proclamations after every jihad attack, that it has nothing to do with Islam, and that Muslims are the real victims, are not only ludicrous; they’re offensive. The mainstream media and the Obama Administration have insulted the intelligence of Americans long enough. Their denial and willful ignorance are endangering us all, as they continue to behave after every jihad attack that their primary duty is not protecting Americans, but protecting Islam’s image.”
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But… but…. they’re just women and children, or something…. 🙄
http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/262316-isis-has-targeted-refugee-program-to-enter-us-chairman-says
“Intelligence officials have determined that Islamic extremists have explored using the refugee program to enter the United States, they told the head of the Homeland Security Committee.
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) revealed portions of a classified letter from the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) on Monday, which offered new claims not previously disclosed by the Obama administration.
The disclosure could give ammunition to critics of the White House’s refugee plans who have warned that the program is vulnerable to infiltration by adherents of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
The NCTC has identified “individuals with ties to terrorist groups in Syria attempting to gain entry to the U.S. through the U.S. refugee program,” the intelligence agency told McCaul in a letter.”
LikeLike
Former WMBer Kyle was writing on Facebook about the idea of being “radicalized”. He doesn’t think someone can be radicalized without their willingly choosing to be so.
I generally agree, especially with adults. But I also know that brainwashing can occur in the right circumstances, especially with the young. However, I would tend to think a Muslim adult living in the U.S. could not easily be brainwashed, & any radicalization of their thought is of their own choosing.
What bothers me is that ISIS is taking young boys, brainwashing them, & turning them into killers. That chills me to my soul. I can’t even read the articles that describe it because it bothers me so much.
LikeLike
That’s been going on a long time, Karen. When I lived in CT, before 1986, I read a horrifying article in the NYTimes magazine about madras schools in Pakistan. Young boys were taken from home and left at these boarding schools where for 8 hours a day they memorized the Koran in Arabic– a language they did not speak.
No art, history, music, math or anything else to expand their minds. Recess was one ball kicked around a dirt courtyard.
They only women they saw were cooks and cleaners. They had no contact with their families or the outside world.
Is it no wonder the grew up with so narrow a world view? They had no experience with real life. 😦
And that wa 30 years ago. 😦
A tragic waste.
LikeLiked by 1 person
And young girls. And America school systems are supporting it. By teaching that all religions are good and bad and we need them all, they are affirming that religion. By putting out social studies books that talk about how Christians brought the plague or whatever and deliberately spread it and did witch hunts but Muslims are nice peace loving people who just want everybody to be nice, they are endorsing it. And our youth, emotionally and mentally challenged due to our parenting techniques, are open to jumping right in.
LikeLiked by 2 people
On Trump’s latest:
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/12/the-trump-trend.php
__________________________
… I understand Trump’s appeal. Indeed, I feel it. I vibrate to his call for the restoration of American greatness. I appreciate his emphasis on the importance of national borders and his opposition to illegal immigration. I agree with him that Muslim immigration raises a special problem that needs to be addressed. I second his condemnation of the mainstream media.
However, Trump is an embarrassment to those of us who care about the issues that have made him a frontrunner. He damages the prospect of sane reform. What Joe McCarthy was to the cause of anti-Communism, Trump is to the issues that have served him so far. That’s my fear. …
_____________________________
LikeLiked by 3 people
On social media and how it’s not always awful. 🙂
http://blogs.thegospelcoalition.org/trevinwax/2015/12/08/how-twitter-helped-fred-phelps-granddaughter-walk-away-from-westboro/
____________________________________________________
… Much of our talk about social media and its influence concerns the negative – the anonymous commenter, the Facebook debate threads, the dehumanization and debasement of others. Just last week, we saw the inability of our society to stop, pause, grieve, or pray in the midst of a tragedy. Social media sites were immediately summoned as weapons for a political cause.
But what if we are so accustomed to the bad of online interaction that we miss the flip side – a glimpse of the humanity we share with others? The story of one woman’s defection from Westboro Baptist lends credence to the rarely-discussed positive side of social media. …
Evangelicals often decry the depersonalizing, dehumanizing effect of social media for reducing people to avatars and leading to hate-filled anonymous comment streams. As someone who has blogged regularly for nine years, I can testify to the vitriol I have seen.
But in the case of Phelps-Roper, social media was a tool that led her to see her opponents as more human, not less. Is her story an aberration, since (thankfully) most Americans don’t belong to cults that dehumanize their opponents to this extent? Or is it true that there is an often-unspoken, underlying good side to social media?
For all the times I have talked about hateful and hurtful comments spewed toward me online, I should also recognize how many times I have been encouraged and blessed by people’s words on social media. In my interaction with other people on Twitter and in blogs, I have sometimes been disarmed by the gracious manner in which my opponents have disagreed with me.
This interaction has made a more careful reader and a more persuasive writer. For example, when I review books today, I usually know something more about the author than the brief bio on the back cover. I can often see the author online – their family, their interests, their hobbies, and their friends. As a result, I take greater care to read charitably people with whom I disagree. …
________________________________________________
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Oy. Poll taken before Trump’s latest remarks, but still … gulp.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2015/12/08/poll-trump-cruz-rubio-clinton-sanders/76948760/
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump not only continues to lead the Republican presidential field in a new USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll. The overwhelming majority of his supporters also say they would vote for him if he bolted the GOP and ran as an independent.
The nationwide survey, taken Wednesday through Sunday, finds a trio of Republican candidates who show emerging national strength — Trump, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio — as other once-serious contenders struggle for traction.
And in a chilling sign for Republicans, 68% of Trump’s supporters say they would vote for the blustery billionaire businessman if he ran as an independent rather than a Republican; just 18% say they wouldn’t. The rest were undecided.
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Our only hope to avoid a Trump or Clinton presidency is for Trump to lose fair and square, take it like a man and walk away. But what are the chances of that?
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He already reopened the independent-run door today — which would probably ensure a Democrat in the White House
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