Thunder in the Distance

Prior to the Orlando radical Islamic terror attack, the elites on both the left and the right were only too happy to castigate Donald Trump for his less-than-nuanced suggestion (since amended) that we put Muslim immigration on hold until "we figure out what's going on." Trump's contention, backed up by every security expert outside the Obama administration, is that it's impossible to vet immigrants from Syria, from Libya, and from many other Middle Eastern locales, and that it's a virtual certainty that embedded into the immigrant flows are Islamist operatives, ISIS or otherwise.

After the attack, the elites (including Hillary Clinton) breathed a sigh of relief when it was determined that the Muslim terrorist was a 2nd generation immigrant who was a U.S. citizen. They gleefully spiked the football, indicating that Trump's "ban" wouldn't have worked in this case.

True, but what about future attacks that could be perpetrated by Islamists who enter with immigrant flows or cross unprotected borders—attacks that might use poison gas, or home-made bombs or anything other than a semi-automatic weapon. Oops, that lies outside the current elite narrative, so we really can't consider it.

Richard Fernandez writes about all of this:

... an article in the Washington Post by Rick Noack ... explains that the reason terror suspects involved in recent attacks have not been monitored is because there are simply not enough security personnel to do it. "It's impossible to monitor all terror suspects," he writes. "These charts show why." The charts proceed to show that Western police forces no longer have the manpower to track more than a small fraction of the suspected bad guys.

To cover the 3,000 terror suspects in the UK would take 40% of the entire police force, so the British cops track no more than 50. "If France wanted to observe all 11,000 terror suspects in the country, it would need its entire police force of 220,000 officers — or more." That is obviously out of the question, especially since ISIS has now taken to whittling down the number of French police by killing them. It would take 5/8 -- about 63% of the US police force -- to watch the 25,000 individuals on the watch list.

The developments that Megyn Kelly describes [from a tweet: "In the middle of #Orlando investigation, the Obama admin quietly announced it’s increasing the number of refugees coming to US"] doesn't make the security situation hopeless. It has been hopeless for some time. Yet the tragedy was entirely self-inflicted. A national security team of ex-novelists and campaign drivers sort of fell into it. The same crew that gave you the Arab Spring, the Reset and Benghazi now give you ... politicians in blind pursuit of virtue signaling who simply ran over the cliff.

One might ask how the Western elites could be so stupid as to get into a situation, where like Titanic, the threat is coming in faster than it can be pumped out. They may have even paid for some this influx from public funds. The Western elites first imported ISIS in the most expensive conceivable way and then proceeded to manage them through the most inefficient method imaginable. They imported a threat which as Foreign Policy points out is effectively a state-sponsored shock unit and now find they can't afford to monitor it. Why it's almost like promising pensions that can't be funded.

The only conceivable explanation for this fiasco is pure unadulterated arrogance and stupidity.

The Obama administration is the exemplar of "arrogance and stupidity" and it's third term continuation under a Hillary Clinton will continue the arrogance and stupidity and add a dollop of corruption along with a full measure of dishonesty.

For fifteen years, the elites have avoided any direct demand that the Muslim world police itself, even though that is our only hope at ridding the world of Islamic terror. They have equated any critique of Islam along with calls calls for an Islamic reformation with "Islamophobia." They have allowed political correctness to constrain policy, even when the results are ineffective or worse, dangerous. They have talked about profiling (the ONLY effective means for uncovering and tracking Islamists in our midst) as if it was akin to genocide. They have suggested that the ability of a nation to control its borders is somehow jingoistic and that the risk of embedded Islamists in immigration flows is unproven (even though it has been proven repeatedly in Europe).

And how has all of this worked out? Islamists are on the march across the planet. Islamic terror is increasing, not decreasing in frequency and ferocity. Mass Muslim immigration (in part, caused by the feckless policies of the Obama administration) are changing the social fabric of once great nations.

And yet, in their arrogance and stupidity, the elites continue to deflect attention from the core problem, trying to convince the little people that if we just ban the AR-15 or "fight against bigotry" there will be a magical solution to Islamic terror.

The elites correctly argue that we need the Muslim community to help us identify Islamists. But they then extrapolate that truism with an unproven contention that if we alienate Muslims with blunt but honest talk, they will abandon us and side with the terrorists. What does that say about the Muslim community if it is true, and what does it say about the soft bigotry of the elites if it's not?

Barack Obama—the king of elite arrogance and stupidity—smugly suggests that you're less likely to die from "violent extremism" than a lightning strike. When he leaves the presidency, Obama should buy a nice villa outside Kabul or Damascus or Mosul or Benghazi, move his family there, and be absolutely sure to never go outside when thunder can be heard in the distance. That way, he and his family will be safe, won't they?