Darkness

As I mentioned in Monday's post, the Left has recovered from its initial shock (and silence) immediately after the Paris terror attacks and has now circled the wagons. Leftists, many Democrats, and their trained media hamsters refute any notion that Islam may bear at least some of the culpability for the rise of violent Islamist acts perpetrated in Muslim countries and in the West.

None other than Secretary of State John Kerry tripped over himself and actually implied (before a quick walk back) that the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris earlier this year were different than last week's terrorist attacks because the editors of that satirical magazine insulted Mohamed. Others suggest that its all about poverty, or hopelessness, or discrimination, or general victimization targeted at Muslim youths. Bernie Sanders, in what has to be the most idiotic comment offered to date (and that is saying something), suggested that "violent extremism" (heaven forbid the use of the adjective "Islamic") has something to do with climate change.

Barack Obama led the charge against those who correctly contend that the mass migration of millions of Muslim immigrants into Europe is something to be concerned about. Even a relatively small 10,000 immigrants scheduled to enter the US is something that should be carefully considered before further action begins. In typical Obama snark, he insultingly suggested that his opponents are afraid of Syrian "widows and orphans." Yeah, that the ticket's—this is all about widows and orphans, not the 2,000 Muslim men (coming to the USA) between 18 and 40 who cannot be vetted in any reliable way. Let's do some simple math—if the Obama administration's "vetting process" for investigating the immigrants is 99% effective (and that is a very generous estimate of effectiveness)—that would still allow 20 hard-core Islamists to get through, and that's not considering the fact that some Islamists are women. It took only 8 Islamists to conduct the Paris attacks.

Heather Wilhelm expands upon this by quoting Obama and then commenting on his words:

"We are not well served when, in response to a terrorist attack, we descend into fear and panic,” he said. “We don't make good decisions if they're based on hysteria or an exaggeration of risks."

There you have it, folks: If you doubt any portion of our current refugee policy, you’re “hysterical.” Never mind that a recent poll showed 13 percent of Syrian refugees declaring a “positive” or “somewhat positive” view of ISIS, or that at least one of the Paris attackers apparently arrived in France posing as a refugee. Never mind the 26 charges of terrorism brought up against foreign-born individuals in the U.S. in the past year, as Sen. Jeff Sessions documented this week, or the fact that in October, FBI Director James Comey testified that our current system likely can’t effectively vet Syrian refugees.

More importantly, never mind the fact that opposition to current refugee protocols doesn’t necessarily translate into opposition to helping refugees altogether; had Obama led with an acknowledgment of the system’s weaknesses and showed genuine concern towards fixing them, we might be in a different situation today. As it is, a new Bloomberg poll shows 53 percent of Americans opposing the current settlement plan.

But at the end of the day, all of this is small potatoes when compared to a much bigger issue. David Harsanyi gets to the core of it:

Even as the terrorist attacks in Paris were happening, a predictable debate broke out over the millions of Islamic refugees now pouring into the West from the Arab world. We were once again asked to pretend that Islamic terrorism materializes in a vacuum that has absolutely nothing to do with theological beliefs of the majority of people in the Middle East and thus nothing to do with brutality and oppression that prevail in the region ...

Whatever the case, it’s true that most refugees are fleeing genuine and horrifying violence. But it is also true that many refugees bring with them — through their culture, ideology, and faith — the same conditions that bred the violence in the first place. It has nothing to do with what immigrants “look” like or how many superb and moral Muslims there are in the world (because there are many) and everything to do with what these refugees believe.

Many refugees bring with them — through their culture, ideology, and faith — the same conditions that bred the violence in the first place.

The vast majority of Muslims aren’t terrorists, but in the contemporary world nearly all movements and ideas that produce political terrorism are birthed in Islamic communities that house mostly peaceful people. Mass immigration bolsters those communities with hundreds of thousands of new, unassimilated adherents in the middle of secular nations with belief systems that grate against Islamic worldview. How can Europe not expect some of them will embrace the radicalism and fundamentalism adopted to some extent in nearly every other major Islamic community?

It doesn’t only manifest in terrorism, but in the medievalism of whippings, mass hangings, stoning, and violent misogyny and bigotry — not just mean words.

None of us who address these issues have given in to "fear" as Obama contends. That's a convenient way for this president to look tough (a laughable attempt indeed) and at the same time indulge in moral preening—something he's very, very good at.

There is a real need to "have a conversation" with Islam. The conversation isn't driven by fear as the left would have you believe, but rather by concern that their co-religionists are doing barbaric, heinous things and their religion (really it's an ideology) has done little to combat those things.

If those things continue and Islam remains silent, we'll all experience dark days ... but a darkness that is the stuff of nightmares will envelop Islam.

More than a decade ago it was the World Trade Center, last week it was Paris, in between it was London and Madrid, and Mumbai, and Beirut, and Nairobi, and Jerusalem, and Nigeria to name only a few. But soon something truly horrific will happen in a place that is yet unknown. When that happens, when hundreds or thousands are dead or maimed, when fear does grip the populace, the darkness will bubble up to the surface. Barack Obama is either too uninformed or too delusional to appreciate that simple idea. After all, better to fall back on moral preening than to begin a serious and frank "conversation" with Islam, isn't it?

UPDATE—I:
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Richard Fernandez discusses the "duality" of the sudden awareness in Europe that (1) Islamists are armed with military weapons while exceedingly strict gun laws keep the citizenry unarmed, and (2) the decades old promises by the Western political class of a better future tied to diversity and multiculturalism may have been instead a catalyst for the presence and growth of Islamic terror on the streets of Western cities. Fernandez writes:

This duality explains why resistance to Syrian refugee resettlement in America has taken the form of a 'revolt' against Barack Obama. "Governors across the country are publicly rejecting President Obama’s plan to relocate Syrian refugees." There's a growing realization that the Jihadi threat in part rests upon a destructive political agenda in the West which enables it, nurtures it and spreads it because in some perverse way it helps those same Western political forces keep power ...

[While refugees are statistically a net historical positive] ... the refugee flows will also contain a fair number of enemy agents and penetrators. However in the past America knew how to handle expatriates and gained from them far more than they lost. Or at least the public trusted that the Federal government could do so. The reason there is now such a visceral resistance to Syrian refugees is not due to some sudden slamming of the door or belated racism, but because the public has no confidence in the Obama administration to manage it properly.

It may be that of all his failures, the destruction of public trust in the honesty and effectiveness federal government may be this president's most memorable legacy.

UPDATE-II:
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Daniel Henninger discusses the very short memory of the public and the manner in which tough actions against Islamic terror erode over time:

Some will say that Socialist French President François Hollande’s forceful, eloquent opposition to Islamic terror suggests the European left can still see clearly on the moral imperative of protecting a nation. I doubt it. Their support for him will wane over time, as after 2001.

Through the pitched battles over the Patriot Act, Edward Snowden’s releases of the U.S.’s antiterror surveillance software, and the controversies over interrogations of captured terrorists, the progressive-liberal opposition pressed the idea that these initiatives were not only illegal or unconstitutional but that they were self-evidently immoral.

The war on terror itself became morally distasteful to the global left. On Oct. 29, weeks before the undetected Paris rampage, the European Parliament passed a resolution that all member states should “drop any criminal charges against Edward Snowden.” On Wednesday, FBI head James Comey said Islamic State’s encryptions were thwarting investigations of terror recruits.

The French may indeed be austere in these matters. Their neighbors are not, and Barack Obama and John Kerry are not. Secretary Kerry expressed Tuesday his ambiguities over the Charlie Hebdo murders. A European version of Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11,” which played to cheering progressive audiences in New York, will arrive in time.

President Obama, like a campus protester, has repeatedly expressed in public his moral disdain for the antiterror policies of the previous eight years (even as he quietly continued many of them, notably for surveillance). In fact, Mr. Obama was merely aligning himself with a quarter century of Western progressivism’s moral ambivalence, at best, about national security. The terrorists kill-riding their way across Paris interrupted that long reverie, for now.

For now.