Reactions to San Bernardino and Colorado Springs murders

A “guest article” titled “We must end senseless Muslim murders, Insha’Allah!” by Sheik Mohamed ali-Bama, National Chairman of the Council on Islamic-Kafir Relations (CIKR), will be posted here soon. 

San Bernardino massacre

Preliminarily, here’s an observation by Robert Spencer at Front Page Magazine:

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.

Yep.

According to the FBI,

“Domestic terrorism” means activities with the following three characteristics:

Involve acts dangerous to human life that violate federal or state law;

Appear intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination. or kidnapping; and

Occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S.

Following much debate, this astonishing news broke on the afternoon of December 4th, a mere two days after the attack:

The shooting spree by a Muslim couple that killed 14 and seriously wounded 21 Wednesday in San Bernardino, Calif. is officially being investigated as a terrorist act, the lead FBI investigator in the case said Friday.

David Bowdich, assistant director of the FBI’s Los Angeles Office, told reporters in an afternoon briefing that the determination was made given the extensive planning, the high-powered weaponry and the amount of armaments worn by Syed Rizwan Farook and his Pakistani-born wife Tashfeen Malik in carrying out the killing.

The Washington Post also reported on December 4th that the female attacker

pledged allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State, the clearest indication yet that this was an act of terrorism, according to two law enforcement officials.

The officials said Tashfeen Malik, 27, the Pakistani wife of the other shooter, made the statement on a Facebook page. It’s not immediately clear when she posted the declaration referring to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the emir of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, the terrorist group that says it has established a caliphate in Syria and Iraq.

That leaves the big question: Will Obama call it terror? Islamic Terror? Jihad? As pointed out by Scott Johnson at Power Line, “Jihad,” one definition of which is “a holy war waged on behalf of Islam as a religious duty,” is a perfect fit:

We’ve got the home armory. We’ve got the pilgrimage to Mecca. We’ve got the contact with foreign terrorist subjects. Sherlock Holmes solved the case in the story “Silver Blaze” with the clue of the dog that didn’t bark. The San Bernardino dog won’t shut up.

President Obama was talking about gun control before the bodies had turned cold. He now prefers to avoid the obvious for as long as possible, holding out hope that he can resort to the laughable “workplace violence” dodge that he has found useful in the past.

Obama won’t call it “jihad” because that would correctly impute Islamic motivations to the killers. His new Islamic State Czar probably won’t do that either:

President Obama has appointed a foreign policy advisor known to be a friend of the terrorist group Hamas to be the administration’s new czar in charge of countering ISIS. The appointee, Robert Malley, has a history of sympathizing with Islamists, which makes the appointment all the more appalling.

. . . .

Malley was Obama’s informal foreign policy adviser during the 2008 presidential campaign until his cozy relationship with Hamas, long classified as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department, came to light.  Israeli security officials had expressed “concern” about Malley for advocating negotiations with Hamas and providing international assistance to the terrorist group. This came amid reportage that Trinity United Church of Christ, Obama’s radical church in Chicago, had  reprinted a manifesto by Hamas in its newsletter. The manifesto defended terrorism as legitimate resistance, refused to recognize the right of Israel to exist, and compared the terror group’s official charter – which calls for the murder of Jews – to America’s Declaration of Independence. [Emphasis added.]

Fearful of losing Jewish voters, Obama severed ties with Malley in May of 2008 when it was disclosed that he had held meetings with Hamas. The campaign had been telling pro-Israel audiences that Obama would not talk with Hamas unless and until it had renounced terror, recognized Israel, and abided by previous agreements the Palestinians had signed with Israel. [Emphasis added.]

One day after the election, it was reported that Malley had been dispatched to the Middle East to work on Obama’s promise to “improve ties with Egypt and Syria.”

That all worked out so well, he’s been promoted to Obama’s ISIS czar.

Mr. Malley’s views on Holy Jihad doubtless coincide with Imam Obama’s and will, therefore, be taken seriously — and not only by Obama.

Hussam Ayloush, who heads the Los Angeles area chapter of the Muslim advocacy group Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR),

urged the public not to jump to conclusions about the motives behind the San Bernardino attack. He said he was concerned about a backlash against the Muslim community in view of the rise of Islamic State and some opposition among politicians and the public in the United States over U.S. plans to accept Syrian war refugees.

“We’re living in a very difficult time,” he told CNN. “There’s a lot of Islamophobia out there, a lot of anti-Muslim sentiment, fueled by pundits here and there trying to blame a whole community for the acts of a few.”

Attorney General Lynch agrees.

At Rasmussen Reports, Michelle Malkin writes about “the CAIR effect.”

Reminder: The feds designated CAIR an unindicted terror co-conspirator in 2007 in the prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation and others for providing support to Hamas jihadists. Over the alleged objections of Dallas-area federal prosecutors, the Obama Justice Department’s senior political appointees declined to press terror-financing charges against CAIR co-founder Omar Ahmad.

Instead, the administration has rolled out the red carpet for CAIR officials “hundreds” of times since 2009 on a “range of issues.”

This is the same group of “Islamophobia!”-shrieking grievance grifters that cooked up the Ahmed “Clock Boy” Mohamed brouhaha in Texas, where the city of Irving and Irving Independent School District are now being sued for $15 million after raising alarms over the teen’s low-tech media stunt. Obama hailed Mohamed before the boy jetted off to Qatar to cash in on a Muslim Brotherhood-linked educational scholarship.

This is the same group of litigious radicals who unsuccessfully sued a Florida gun shop owner this summer for declaring that he would refuse to sell weapons to “[a]nyone who is either directly or indirectly associated with terrorism in any way.” A judge ruled this week that “[t]here are simply no facts grounding the assertion that Plaintiff (CAIR) and/or one of its constituents will be harmed.” CAIR is appealing, of course.

This is the same group of treacherous thugs that squelched critics of Somalia-based jihad group al-Shabab in Minnesota. CAIR smeared whistleblowing Muslims who participated in an educational Minneapolis forum on al-Shabab terrorism and youth gangs as “anti-Muslim.” In 2013, the uncle of a missing young Muslim radical testified before Congress about CAIR’s efforts to pressure families to impede FBI investigations.

“CAIR held meetings for some members of the community and told them not to talk to the FBI,” Abdirizak Bihi told lawmakers, “which was a slap in the face for the Somali American Muslim mothers who were knocking on doors day and night with pictures of their missing children and asking for the community to talk to law enforcement about what they know of the missing kids.”

. . . .

And this is the same dangerous group of jihad enablers that filed an obstructionist lawsuit to block vigilant Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from quizzing Muslim border-crossers about their ties to jihadist martyrs and radical mosques. The anti-“racial profiling” lawsuit has dragged on for three years.

Little wonder, then, that in this politically correct climate of intimidation, a neighbor of the San Bernardino jihadists told local media this week that he had “noticed a half-dozen Middle Eastern men in the area in recent weeks, but decided not to report anything since he did not wish to racially profile those people.”

That’s the CAIR effect: See something, do nothing. Silence is complicity.

Another problem with analyses such as Mr. Alyoush’s is that Islamic Jihad has long been integral to Islam, as copiously documented in the Quran, Hadith and Sharia Law.

As noted in my article linked immediately above, in Saudi Arabia (Sunni Islam) and Iran (Shiite Islam), there is little need for individual jihad against unbelievers, gays, et al because the state takes care of them, usually by torture and/or execution.

Islam provides the basis for Sunni and Shiite (principal branches of Islam) efforts to govern world civilization according to Islamic principles as voiced by Allah through his prophet, Mohamed. Since Islamic principles tolerate no religious or political freedoms (let alone contemporary gender equality or homosexuality notions), such western ideas must be extirpated — as they have been in Saudi Arabia (now the head of the UN Human Rights Council) and Iran. Islamic principles are also manifested by the hopes and efforts of the Islamic State (Sunni, like Saudi Arabia) and the Islamic Republic of Iran (Shiite) to achieve their own caliphates.

Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah Nasr is a scholar of Islamic law and a graduate of Egypt’s Al Azhar University — regularly touted as the world’s most prestigious Islamic university. Al Azhar University co-hosted Obama’s 2009 “New Beginnings” address in Cairo, to which Obama insisted that at least ten members of the Muslim Brotherhood be invited. According to an article at Jihad Watch,

After being asked why Al Azhar, which is in the habit of denouncing secular thinkers as un-Islamic, refuses to denounce the Islamic State as un-Islamic, Sheikh Nasr said:

It can’t [condemn the Islamic State as un-Islamic].  The Islamic State is a byproduct of Al Azhar’s programs.  So can Al Azhar denounce itself as un-Islamic?  Al Azhar says there must be a caliphate and that it is an obligation for the Muslim world [to establish it].  Al Azhar teaches the law of apostasy and killing the apostate.  Al Azhar is hostile towards religious minorities, and teaches things like not building churches, etc.  Al Azhar upholds the institution of jizya [extracting tribute from religious minorities].  Al Azhar teaches stoning people.  So can Al Azhar denounce itself as un-Islamic? [Emphasis added.]

Nasr joins a growing chorus of critics of Al Azhar.  Last September, while discussing how the Islamic State burns some of its victims alive—most notoriously, a Jordanian pilot—Egyptian journalist Yusuf al-Husayni remarked on his satellite program that “The Islamic State is only doing what Al Azhar teaches… and the simplest example is Ibn Kathir’s Beginning and End.”

Major Hasan’s “workplace violence” at Fort Hood and the more recent San Bernardino and Paris attacks by Islamists follow Islamic teachings, as do the activities of the Islamic State and its various affiliates and franchisees and such Islamic states as Saudi Arabia and Iran. To try to separate private from state actors, and thereby to separate them from Islam, is an at best frivolous exercise.

Planned Parenthood killings.

On December 1st, The New York Times posted a lengthy article about Robert L. Dear, Jr. who, on November 27th, had

entered a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, killing three people and wounding nine others with a semiautomatic rifle. The attack, which ended with his surrender to the police after a harrowing nationally televised standoff in the snow-dusted Western city, was a brutally violent and very public chapter in a life story whose details are not fully known.

The NY Times article provides copious information about Mr. Dear’s sexual escapades, serial adultery and temper (not generally considered Christian virtues) as well as his financial problems. It also quotes relatives and acquaintances as saying that he opposed abortion and Planned Parenthood’s trafficking in body parts. Others contend that he had less focus on that and was simply nuts.

According to a December 1st article at The New Yorker,

One way to make sense of all this is to conclude that Dear could just as easily have shot up a movie theater or a shopping mall. In other words, that he is a deranged individual who chose his target randomly, oblivious to the increasingly strident campaign to demonize Planned Parenthood in recent months. Not surprisingly, this is the view favored by David Daleiden, the founder of the Center for Medical Progress, the anti-abortion group that produced the inflammatory videos that ignited the calls to investigate Planned Parenthood for supposedly trafficking in body parts. In a statement posted on its Web site, the organization condemned the shooting in Colorado Springs and blamed it on “a violent madman.”

. . . .

In a report published earlier this year, the New America foundation found that, since 9/11, many more white, non-Muslim Americans than jihadists have perpetrated acts of terrorism on United States soil. Some of these terrorists have been white supremacists. Others have held radical anti-government views. An alternative way to make sense of Dear’s behavior is to see it in this light: as a case of homegrown terrorism perpetrated by a disgruntled white man who lashed out at an institution that has, in certain circles, become a symbol of thoroughgoing evil.

Dear’s lack of prior involvement in organized anti-abortion campaigns hardly proves that the accusations that Planned Parenthood sells “baby parts,” repeatedly made by Republican Presidential candidates and figures like former House Speaker John Boehner, failed to influence him. The toxic atmosphere of recent months has no doubt drawn more attention to the issue. Ironically, the anti-abortion extremists who took up arms in the nineteen-nineties rarely targeted Planned Parenthood centers. They refrained from shooting indiscriminately into waiting rooms where patients who were there for reasons unrelated to abortion might have been sitting, training their sights specifically on abortion providers and, in a few cases, clinic workers. In that era, extremists who harbored a more diffuse hatred of the government tended to focus on other sites – places like the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, in Oklahoma City, which was blown up in 1995, on the second anniversary of the Waco Siege. But these are different times. Dear clearly had tendencies that frightened people he crossed paths with in recent years. We still don’t know his motives. But we do know the context in which he operated.

Various other articles debate Mr. Dear’s “Christian” characteristics and Think Progress concludes that he is a “Christian terrorist.”

As investigators scramble to make sense of last week’s tragic mass shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado, new details have emerged about the possible motivations of the alleged gunman: namely, that his actions may have been inspired not only by politics, but also a warped understanding of the Christian faith.

. . . .

There is, of course, an argument to be made that the actions of Dear and other extremists who commit violence against abortion providers are not representative of Christianity. Just as Muslims all over the world constantly decry groups such as ISIS as unIslamic, so too do many Christians rebuke those who claim Jesus as their justification for violence.

Nevertheless, some Americans — especially conservative pundits and Republican presidential candidates — have repeatedly insisted that if a terrorist claims to be Muslim, they should be identified as such. By that (arguably problematic) standard, Dear would appear to be a clear example of a “Christian terrorist.”

According to The Telegraph (UK),

The Colorado Springs attack, as it’s become known, was clearly an assault on women’s reproductive rights. While Dear’s precise motives remain unconfirmed, he was widely reported to have shouted something about “no more baby parts”, a reference to the false allegation that Planned Parenthood has illegally traded fetal tissue  – a charge that, despite being untrue, has been bandied about continuously by Republican candidates.

. . . .

[I]n the wake of yet another violent attack on a Planned Parenthood clinic, Republican politicians need to stop undermining women’s reproductive rights for their own personal political gain and, instead, acknowledge the immediate need for much stricter gun control.  If women are pregnant and do not want to be, they need options – and without the risk of terrorist attacks.

The coercive and terrorist activities carried out by people on the Right in America – and inspired by the rhetoric of their political leaders – is shameful. The shooting in Colorado was orchestrated by a man who was clearly deranged. But the failure of all politicians – especially on the Right, but also on the Left – to call for an immediate ban on guns following the attack, in order to ensure the protection of women seeking medical care is confirmation that America has lost its moral compass.

Following the Planned Parenthood attack in Colorado Springs, there was a rush to judgment concerning the motivations of, and Christian support for, Mr. Dear. Following the San Bernardino jihad attack, there was a rush to judgment that there would be an anti-Muslim backlash were motivations (correctly) linked to Islam, coupled with a rush from judgment concerning those motivations and Islamic support for the San Bernardino jihadists.

Following the Colorado Springs and San Bernardino incidents, Obama et al and most media outlets demanded new gun control legislation. According to Jonathan Turley,

The New York Daily News has a controversial front page this morning blasting politicians and others who are offering prayers while opposing to take steps to curtail gun access in this country in the wake of the latest massacre in California. It is the same message sent by President Barack Obama who appears ready to use executive authority to restrict gun sales at gun shows. The problem with calls for such action is that Congress has declined to order such changes — raising yet another potential conflict over executive overreach in our system. Moreover, the right to own firearms is now recognized as an individual right under the Second Amendment, limiting the extent to which gun ownership can be meaningfully curtailed. Absent a constitutional amendment, many of the calls for banning gun ownership would fail as unconstitutional. [Emphasis added.]

The action to be taken the Administration seems somewhat artificial as a response to the shooting in san Bernadino. Officials are saying that President Obama will close the so-called gun show loophole that allows people to buy guns each year without a background check. However, the police have confirmed that at least two of the weapons used by Syed Farook, 28, and his wife Tashfeen Malik, 27, were lawfully purchased. Thus, the response is like denouncing forest fires by passing a new law combating kitchen fires. It reminds one of the old story about a man who comes upon another man in the dark on his knees looking for something under a street lamp. “What did you lose?” he asked the stranger. “My wedding ring,” he answered. Sympathetic, the man joined the stranger on his knees and looked for almost an hour until he asked if the man was sure that he dropped it here. “Oh, no,” the stranger admitted, “I lost it across the street but the light is better here.”

Another problem is that the guns as used in the San Bernardino attack were already unlawful under California law.

In the guest article which will appear at this blog shortly, Sheik ali-Bama will explain some common sense gun control ideas. He is the National Chairman of the Council on Islamic-Kafir Relations (CIKR).