Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Obama's FBI 

Many members of Congress, as well as average Americans, are furious that Russian intelligence warned the FBI about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, which interviewed him, allowed him to leave the country for six months and then ignored him. 

His growing interest in radical Islam was obvious. He had visited Internet sites of Islamic radicals preaching hatred of America. The Wall Street Journal reports that he even tried to convert one of the FBI agents during his interview. Apparently that didn't raise any red flags since the FBI determined that Tamerlan was not a threat. 

Tamerlan Tsarnaev is now the fifth person to become involved in a terror plot AFTER being interviewed by the FBI. Others include the Fort Hood assassin Major Nidal Hasan and Carlos Bledsoe, who attacked an Army recruiting office in Little Rock, Arkansas. Both attacks took place in 2009. 

The Associated Press reports today that the interrogation of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has led investigators "to believe he and his brother were motivated by a radical brand of Islam." Sadly, that might come as a big surprise to many in our increasingly politically correct government.

Here's what has happened to the FBI under this president. In recent years, following orders from political appointees, the FBI has purged anything critical of the Muslim Brotherhood from its counterterrorism and agent preparation manuals. The Muslim Brotherhood is at the root of many modern Islamic terrorist movements. 

The FBI has been ordered to reach out to local mosques, a good idea in theory. The problem is that many American mosques have been built with and are subsidized by Saudi money. They are often staffed with imams who are trained in Saudi Wahhabism and teach from radical Saudi texts. 

Put yourself in the shoes of a young FBI agent. Often those agents have gone through U.S. universities permeated with leftwing instructors. There they learned all of America's flaws while being inundated with politically correct dogma extolling tolerance and diversity as the highest values. 

Then they come into an agency in which the way to end your career is to appear to be overly zealous in pursuing radicalism in the Islamic community -- leaving you open to charges of profiling and bigotry. 

Just consider what is coming from the top. President Obama hesitated to call the Boston Marathon bombing "terrorism." His administration labeled the Fort Hood shooting "workplace violence." After the attack, a top general fretted about "diversity becoming a victim." 

The Secretary of the Homeland Security prefers to avoid the term "terrorism" in favor of "man-caused disasters." The new director of the Central Intelligence Agency argues that "jihad" is a "legitimate tenet of Islam." 

The amazing thing is in spite of all these disincentives to keeping us safe, we have had only a handful of attacks like Fort Hood and the Boston Marathon bombing. But left-wing political correctness and pure blindness will put more Americans at risk, and, if unchecked, it will become our own "suicide belt." 

Canadian Bombing Foiled 

Chiheb Esseghaier and Raed Jaser, ages 30 and 35, were arrested in Canada yesterday and charged with plotting to blow up a passenger train that runs from Toronto to Niagara Falls and then onto Penn Station in New York City. Canadian authorities said that no attack was imminent, but stressed that the plot was serious because the men had "direction and guidance" from Al Qaeda operatives in Iran. 

There is no known connection between this plot and the Boston bombing, except perhaps the motivation. The Canadian Muslim suspects have been described as "very religiously strict." 

Immigration Reform A Boon To Democrats? 

I like Florida Senator Marco Rubio. I think he has a bright future ahead of him. But there must be some disconnect between the way he describes the comprehensive immigration reform bill he is supporting and the reaction of so many liberal politicians to the bill. 

Why is Chuck Schumer (D-NY) so happy with this bill? Schumer is a raw political partisan. Why has Obama's political operation announced it is mounting an all-out effort to get it passed? Politico answers those questions in a report today. Consider this excerpt: 

"The immigration proposal pending in Congress would transform the nation's political landscape for a generation or more -- pumping as many as 11 million new Hispanic voters into the electorate a decade from now in ways that, if current trends hold, would produce an electoral bonanza for Democrats and cripple Republican prospects in many states they now win easily."

The article goes on to note that had those voters been eligible to participate in the 2012 election, Obama's narrow win would have been a seven-point landslide. States like Florida, Colorado and Nevada would be reliably Democrat, while Arizona and Texas would be highly competitive swing states. 

To Rubio and the GOP leadership: SLOW DOWN! 

Boy Scouts Compromise 

The Boy Scouts of America, under pressure from the militant homosexual rights lobby and its big business allies, recently put forward a compromise on its membership policy. Trying to "cut the baby in half," the proposed new policy will allow openly homosexual scouts but not openly homosexual scout masters. 

Given that the vast majority of scouting chapters are sponsored by churches or religiously affiliated organizations, this proposed compromise will hurt the Scouts and cost them members and chapters. 

Predictably, all of the leftwing groups, led by the Human Rights Campaign, immediately made it clear that this compromise was not enough. If anyone at the BSA thought this would end the pressure, they haven't been paying attention to the culture wars in America. 

This may be shocking to our friends at the BSA, but even if they announced a total reversal of the entire policy, the left's assault would not end. It would instead intensify. 

Surrender would only be greeted by more demands for sensitivity training to guarantee that tolerance was being enforced, resulting in the indoctrination of young scouts into the homosexual rights agenda. All that the BSA accomplished with this move was to demoralize its supporters and encourage its opponents. 

For readers who may be confronted by friends with the "tolerance" argument, let me remind you once again that this is not about tolerance. If tolerance is the yardstick, then where is the tolerance for the BSA and its values? 

The left has no tolerance for the values of men and women of faith. Like the debate over marriage, this is about the left forcing its "morality" on the rest of society. It is the left that will not tolerate a traditional group for young men. 

No one in America is saying, "You can't start a group similar to scouting for gay kids." Anyone can do that, but I doubt the group would have many members. 

Meanwhile, the BSA only has to look to its Canadian counterpart to see what the future holds if it continues to surrender to the demands of the left.