Don's Tuesday Column

          THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   6/14/2016

          Gay-hating jihadist in Orlando

The whole, as I see it, is a sum of the parts. The whole, in the case of the mass murder of gay nightclub attendees in Orlando, Florida early Saturday morning, is the diabolical intent and determination of followers of radical Islam to slaughter “infidels.” An imam visiting Florida said that it is “compassionate” to kill homosexuals—“Let’s get rid of them now”—under Islamic tenets.

They’re often thrown off tall buildings in Muslim lands. Look up, at Clarionproject.org, “5 Ways Islamists Set the Stage for the Orlando Attack; Muslim leaders may condemn the attacks, but that doesn’t address the underlying ideology that says homosexuals are evil and worthy of death,” by Ryan Mauro,

One knee jerk reaction, illegitimate but sadly predictable, is the pointing of ideological fingers at the weapons: handguns and “assault” rifles with high capacity magazines. Just like with the radicalized jihadists in San Bernardino, a few armed citizens might have made a difference in the death toll, but that misses the big picture while focusing on weaponry. Bars in Florida, it should be noted, are by law “gun free” zones; the obvious results were seen in Orlando.

Those same club-goers could have been killed with suicide vests worn by Islamic fanatics and assembled with Internet instructions. We found out in the Boston marathon massacre that household pressure cookers can do a more-than-adequate, evil job of killing innocent bystanders. Christians, Jews, homosexuals and insufficiently observant Muslims are brutally killed every day with knives, rocks, gasoline, drowning, as well as the assisted fall from a high roof.

For bettor or worse, we have political figures and choices of leaders asking for our trust in the face of such religiously inspired terrorism. Witness our distracter-in-chief, Barack Obama, blindly refusing to describe the radical religious nature of the Islamic State, its fighters and Internet proselytizers. He is hamstringing the battle abroad by overly restrictive rules-of-engagement and no-civilian-deaths policies applied to drone and manned bombing of ISIS targets.

The same type of ideologically-driven law enforcement shackles were evident in the FBI statements that the Orlando jihadist, Omar Mateen, had numerous investigated contacts that failed to warrant actionable, closer surveillance. Such surveillance might have revealed personal or Internet connections with motivational sources that reinforced his intent to commit mass homicide. A security guard and co-worker at his place of employment found Mateen’s racist, homicidal and anti-homosexual rants so disturbing that he left his job. He stated that his complaints to management weren’t taken seriously because of Mateen’s Muslim faith.

So, if you think Obama’s policies, beliefs and statements—ignoring Islamic terrorism and harping on guns ad infinitum, ad nauseam—is a winning, security-minded strategy, you have what we have. You also have more of the same from Hillary Clinton, who has offered not one iota of distinction from what I have just described as it relates to Obama. Whether she admits it or not, Hillary Clinton is running as Obama’s third term, which is certainly his observable position.

Moreover, Clinton has refused to agree to the notion that the 2^nd Amendment confers a personal right to firearm ownership, a patently obvious right but one denied by four current Supreme Court justices. Hence, we have her useless blather about “common sense gun safety” measures.

Has she, or other liberal anti-gun Democrats, proposed any reasonable, workable policies designed to prevent guns from getting into the hands of mentally unstable persons? Are any of them proposing a mandate that the FBI place someone with Omar Mateen’s type of background on the federal registry disallowing them from purchasing firearms? For that matter, you can read every day about guns in the hands of felons and gang members already barred from possessing them—they just steal them or get someone with a clean record to buy them.

The Orlando homophobic Muslim Mateen called 9-1-1 and pledged allegiance to the Islamic State. Hillary states that “this talk and demagoguery and rhetoric is not going to solve the problem. I’m not going to…declare war on a religion.” I ask what problem is it then? Would that be the religion of the Islamists that declared war on us? The religion, shariah, declared by the highest imams in the Middle East to be the one true Muslim faith? Based on the same Koran that repeatedly used the word terror—or variations of that word—to describe what faithful Muslims should do to infidels?

In “Obama: ‘We’ are to blame, not Islamic terrorism, for massacre,” by John Podhoretz, Obama is quoted simply calling it “terror.” JP: “But using the word ‘terror’ without a defining adjective is like a doctor calling a disease ‘cancer’ without making note of the affected area of the body…So determined is the president to avoid the subject of Islamist, ISIS-inspired or ISIS-directed terrorism that he concluded ‘we need the strength and courage to change’ our attitudes toward the LGBT community. That’s just disgusting. There’s no other word for it.”

Hugh Hewitt: “Thus far in 2016, 9 people have been arrested in 8 states for ISIS-related threats…There are 36 plots uncovered in Europe, 24 plots in the United States, 23 plots outside the U.S. or Europe. 40,000 jihadis have traveled to ISIS land—6,900 of them from the west, 250 from America. Director James Comey says there are 950 investigations in 50 states. That’s the context.” Moreover, ISIS has 8,000 Americans on its “kill list.”

Say what you will, but if Trump’s policy had been in effect, Omar Mateen’s parents would not have been allowed into America and Omar couldn’t have committed the atrocities.