Few in the West Are Serious About Islamic Terror

It appears that no matter how many men, women and children Islamists slaughter or maim, few in the West take Islamic terror seriously. This may sound odd, given how much talk there is about terror, but a compelling case can be made for this assertion.

The elites of the Western world are far more preoccupied with -- and fearful of -- global warming than Islamic terror. They regard those who believe that Islamic terror is the greatest threat to civilization as not merely wrong but bigots. They have labeled such people Islamophobes, but of course, there is no such thing as a carbon-phobe or fossil fuel-phobe.

The universities of the Western world not only do not identify Muslim terrorists or Muslim terror organizations as Muslim but also teach students the falsehood that there is no moral difference between Islam and Christianity or Judaism. This has helped leave the West incapable of dealing with the root cause of Islamic terror -- some of the teachings and practices of Islam.

Of course, there are vast numbers of peaceful Muslims; and the great majority of American-born Muslims are just like their Protestant, Catholic and Jewish neighbors. But to deny that there is something Muslim about the theology of the Muslims who commit atrocities against "infidels" is to deny one of the most important truths about Islamic terror. And it therefore prevents the only solution to Muslim violence -- a reformation of Islam, starting with overthrowing its ideal of a Shariah-based society and then moving to Muslim views of women, of non-Muslims and of Muslims who convert out of Islam.

The business giants of the Silicon Valley are united in weakening Western civilization's ability to fight Islamic terror. The heads of Apple, for example, are on the verge of making it impossible for anyone, even Apple itself, to ever be able to open an iPhone. The tech company refused to unlock the iPhone used by Syed Rizwan Farook, the husband of the married team of San Bernardino terrorists, to see whether he had accomplices -- even though Farook was not the phone's owner and his employer, San Bernardino County, owned the phone and wanted it unlocked.

In other words, Apple's position is that even if it could prevent another massacre of Americans by unlocking a terrorist's iPhone, it would not do so. The position was supported by virtually every major Silicon Valley company.

In The Wall Street Journal, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, no conservative, recently wrote this about the tech companies and terrorism:

"In the future, phones will be designed to prevent even Apple from opening them, just as the makers of some messaging services have already done. Such a move would be an unprecedented rejection of public authority and a potentially catastrophic blow to public safety. The prospect of criminals and terrorists communicating with phones beyond the reach of government search warrants should send a shiver down the spine of every citizen.

"Google, Facebook, Snapchat and WhatsApp are all working to increase encryption in ways that will make it impossible for the courts and law-enforcement officials to obtain their users' data."

The American government under its president, Barack Obama, does not call Islamic violence "Islamic violence." Rather, it's "violent extremism." This began in 2009, when the Obama administration declared the massacre of 12 soldiers and a civilian by "Allahu akbar"-shouting Nidal Hasan at Fort Hood "workplace violence." It continues. You'd think that after two massacres in Paris, another in Brussels and another in Nice in just the past 18 months, the administration would change its terminology to comport with the facts. But it hasn't. Islamic violence is, to the American government, still "violent extremism."

Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president of the United States, has called for the U.S. to accept 65,000 Muslims from the Middle East. That's six times more than President Obama has called for. She says they would be vetted -- a laughable notion. How do you "vet" 65,000 Syrians and Iraqis?

Do we ask them, "Do you want to kill Americans?" "Do you favor killing Muslims who leave Islam?" "Will you kill your daughter if she dates a man you don't approve of?" "Do you want Israel to be destroyed?"

Even more extreme than Hillary Clinton's call for 65,000 Middle Eastern Muslims, Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, announced last year that Germany will accept more than 800,000 more Muslims into its borders -- and, by extension, to virtually all European Union countries.

There are already about 20 million Muslims in the EU, a significant percentage of whom do not assimilate and reject Western liberal values, and among the latter, a small but significant number are what we call radicalized.

Despite this, the leader of the most powerful country in Europe calls for nearly a million more Muslims from the most radicalized Muslim region in the world -- the Middle East.

It is inconceivable that this situation will long endure. Most people in the West do not share its elites' broken moral compass.

"Ideas have consequences." - Weaver

A so-called "education system" controlled top-to-bottom by "progressives" for the past several decades, where curriculum was censored to exclude not only America's founding ideas of liberty, but examples from civilization's history of long-existing competing ideas of tyranny and oppression--this "progressive" control has prepared a citizenry for what we are seeing today, has it not?

America's Founders were not so ignorant of the history of civilization.

In America, we have seen semantic maneuvers and outright censorship of the very ideas of liberty upon which our Constitution's protections were built.

At the time of the report titled "A Nation at Risk," there were warnings about the degree to which the public schools in America had failed in teaching students about their nation's historical foundations, one observing that there had been an effecting "erasing" of the national memory. That was during the Reagan Administration.

So-called "progressive" imposition of coercive control by political elites, as a substitute for self-government and an ignoring of what the Founders acknowledged to be the "Supreme Judge of the World" in their Declaration of Independence may have led us to where we are today.

Semantics and hidden meanings have played a large part in the current Administration's promotion of its idea of "hope and change." Citizens, in their ignorance, supplied their own sometimes uninformed meanings, and now we see some consequences of an uninformed electorate.

A Memorial and Remonstrance. . . . - James Madison (Excerpt)
"Because we hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth, “that Religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the Manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.”
"The Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an unalienable right. It is unalienable; because the opinions of men, depending only on the evidence contemplated by their own minds, cannot follow the dictates of other men: It is unalienable also; because what is here a right towards men, is a duty towards the Creator. It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage, and such only, as he believes to be acceptable to him. This duty is precedent both in order of time and degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society. Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the Universe: And if a member of Civil Society, who enters into any subordinate Association, must always do it with a reservation of his duty to the general authority; much more must every man who becomes a member of any particular Civil Society, do it with a saving of his allegiance to the Universal Sovereign. We maintain therefore that in matters of Religion, no man’s right is abridged by the institution of Civil Society, and that Religion is wholly exempt from its cognizance.
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"Although all men are born free, slavery has been the general lot of the human race. Ignorant--they have been cheated; asleep--they have been surprised; divided--the yoke has been forced upon them. But what is the lesson?...the people ought to be enlightened, to be awakened, to be united, that after establishing a government they should watch over it....It is universally admitted that a well-instructed people alone can be permanently free." - James Madison

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