Pam Geller's Atlas Shrugs

North Carolina Muslim teen planned Islamic terror attack to kill 1,000 - Will the islamophobia never end? Another American Muslim ‘misunderstanding’ Islam in exactly the same way as millions of other devout Muslims. Seriously, folks, who are the misunderstanders? The devout or the apologists? Chris Cuomo or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi? How did this understanding of Islam become so widespread? And while Muslims in the US condemn the Islamic State, where are they teaching against the ideology that gave rise to it? Right now, nothing is being done to stop jihad recruiting in US mosques, even as several hundred young Muslims from the US have gone to wage jihad…

“Deranged Lone Assassin” Mows Down, Stabs 37 Austrians, Answering ISIS’ Call to Balkan Muslims: “Either Join, or Kill Over There” - Yesterday I reported on the jihad rampage of a devout Bosnian Muslim who ploughed his car into crowds in Austria’s second-largest city and then stabbed 37 Austrians.  Of course, not one of the news reports or enemedia outlets speak to his ideology, motive or religion. Balkans expert Julia Gorin fleshes it out here…..Is it a coincidence that earlier this month, the following call to Jihad by IS was issued specifically to Balkan Muslims: IS to Balkan Muslims: “Either join, or kill over there”  Well, Alen Rizvanovic killed over there. Not exactly...

AFDI Appeals Order Allowing NY MTA to Sidestep Injunction and Refuse Pamela Geller’s Ad - We are appealing the liberal-fascists’ end run around the First Amendment….. lawyers for Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, and their non-profit organization, American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), filed a notice of appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, appealing a federal district court’s ruling last Friday that “dissolved” the court’s earlier order requiring the New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) to run Geller’s “Hamas Killing Jews” advertisement displayed below.  Judge John G. Koeltl, presiding in the United States...

ISIS Offers Female Sex Slaves as Prize in Qur’anic Memorization Contest - Purported #ISIS document lists “Sabaya [female slaves]” as prize in Qur’anic memorization contest.

Iran lawmakers ban nuclear inspectors from military sites with lawmakers chanting “Death to the America” - And Obama is giving them a nuclear weapons accord. His inner Muslim is manifest in this deal. What could be treacherous, more fatal to humankind than jihadis with nukes? America is under siege, and the majority of Americans either don’t know or don’t care. And the media is like the man with the shovel following behind Obama the circus elephant. Happily…….With some lawmakers chanting “Death to the America,” Iran’s parliament voted to ban access to military sites, documents and scientists as part of a future deal with world powers over its contested...

NY Times: ISIS “is offering reliable, if harsh, security; providing jobs in decimated economics; and providing a rare sense of order” - The New York Times writes of the Islamic State, or ISIS, that “…the group is offering reliable, if harsh, security; providing jobs in decimated economics; and providing a rare sense of order in a region overwhelmed by conflict.”…..

Obama rebuffs Israel’s last-ditch bid for nuclear constraints in Iran accord - Obama’s true objectives are manifest yet again in this latest rout of attempts to rein in or impede the Islamic Republic of Iran’s march to nuclear war. Obama’s jihad against the Jewish state now borders on near-mania. These concessions, some might even say initiatives, to nuclear weaponize are astonishing. The Obama regime has been a seamless coup on Americanism, freedom, and the very premise of the existence of this country….

An Insider Account: Obama’s Jihad Against the Jews - In my 2010 book, The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America, I meticulously documented Obama’s antisemitic upbringing and the resulting allegiances, alliances and ‘friendships.” I unequivocally warned the disastrous consequences of a jihad-supporting commander-in-chief. Specifically, the chapters entitled “The indoctrination of Barack Obama,” “Obama and the Jews,” “Obama and Israel,” and “Obama and Iran” foretold what was to come. How right I was. I believe that Obama’s deep-seated hatred of Israel stems from his Islamic studies as a young boy in Indonesia. According to fellow classmates, Obama excelled in Quran classes, and...

‘Moderate’ Malaysia: Non-Muslim pupils told to drink urine - More from “moderate” Malaysia, one of the countries that Western elites love to site to illustrate their idea of moderate Islam. Islamic supremacism is a tenet of Islam — here are more examples of Malaysia’s moderate Islam. …..A senior teacher at a school in Kedah had allegedly told non-Muslim students not to drink water in class but to do so in the washroom.  The teacher, who is in charge of student affairs, had also allegedly told the pupils that if they don’t have water, they could drink from the “tap or their own urine” instead.

Jihad preacher intimidates UK cop into removing pro-military wristband - Constable Allerston is symbolic of what is wrong with the UK today, and of why British society is in such deep crisis. He had nothing to be ashamed up. He should have stuck up for his country and its military forces, instead of kowtowing to this preacher of hatred and violence. But he is just one small cog in a huge machine of capitulation…..A Metropolitan Police officer appears to have taken his Help for Heroes wristband off after being grilled by a hate preacher in East London who said he should not be displaying a ‘political agenda’.

June 22nd in History

Much more can be found here....

1633- Galileo Galilei forced to recant Earth orbits Sun by Pope (on Oct 31, 1992, Vatican admits it was wrong)

1807- British board USS Chesapeake, a provocation leading to War of 1812
1815- 2nd abdication of Napoleon (after Waterloo)
1870 - US Congress creates Department of Justice
1934 - John Dillinger is informally named America's first Public Enemy Number One 1940- France falls to Nazi Germany; armistice signed, France disarms
1941 - Finland invades Kareli
1941 - Operation Barbarossa: Nazi Germany invades the Soviet Union during WWII
1941 - Various Communist and Socialist French Resistance movements merge to one group.
1941 - Germany, Italy & Romania declare war on Soviet Union 1942 - Japanese submarine in mouth of Columbia River, Oregon
1942 - Jewish Brigade attached by British Army in WW II, forms
1943- W.E.B. Du Bois becomes 1st Black member of National Institute of Letters
1944 - US President Franklin Roosevelt signs "GI Bill of Rights" (Servicemen's Readjustment Act)

The Myth of Muslim Radicalization

Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 6 Comments

After some of its quarter of a million Muslims headed to join ISIS, Quebec decided the answer was a $2 million anti-radicalization center headed by a specialist in cultural sensitivity. But if you’re about to be beheaded by a masked ISIS Jihadist, a specialist in cultural sensitivity isn’t going to help you much.

Western governments nevertheless keep rolling out their culturally sensitive approaches to fighting ISIS.

The key element in Obama’s strategy for fighting ISIS isn’t the F-15E Strike Eagle, it’s a Twitter account run by a Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer which claims to “Counter Violent Extremism” by presenting moderate Islamists like Al Qaeda as positive role models for the Islamic State’s social media supporters.

So far 75% of planes flown on combat missions against ISIS return without engaging the enemy, but the culturally sensitive State Department Twitter account has racked up over 5,000 tweets and zero kills.

Cultural sensitivity hasn’t exactly set Iraq on fire in fighting ISIS and deradicalization programs here start from the false premise that there is a wide gap between a moderate and extremist Islam. Smiling news anchors daily recite new stories about a teenager from Kentucky, Boston or Manchester getting “radicalized” and joining ISIS to the bafflement of his parents, mosque and community.

And who is to blame for all this mysterious radicalization? It’s not the parents. It certainly can’t be the moderate local mosque with its stock of Jihadist CDs and DVDs being dispensed from under the table.

The attorney for the family of Usaama Rahim, the Muslim terrorist who plotted to behead Pamela Geller, claims that his radicalization came as a “complete shock” to them.
It must have come as a truly great shock to his brother Imam Ibrahim Rahim who claimed that his brother was shot in the back and that the Garland cartoon attack had been staged by the government.

It must have come as an even bigger shock to Imam Abdullah Faaruuq, the Imam linked to Usaama Rahim and his fellow terrorist conspirators, as well as the Tsarnaev brothers, who had urged Muslims to “grab onto the gun and the sword.” The culturally insensitive truth about Islamic ‘radicalization’ is that it is incremental.

There is no peaceful Islam. Instead of two sharply divided groups, peaceful Islam and extremist Islam, there is a spectrum of acceptable terrorism.

Muslim institutions have different places on that spectrum depending on their allegiances and tactics, but the process of radicalization is rarely a sharp break from the past for any except converts to Islam.

The latest tragic victim of radicalization is Munther Omar Saleh; a Muslim man living in New York City who allegedly plotted to use a Tsarnaev-style pressure cooker bomb in a major landmark such as the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building. Saleh claimed to be following orders from ISIS.

Media coverage of the Saleh arrest drags out the old clichés about how unexpected this sudden radicalization was, but what appears to be his father’s social media account shows support for Hamas.

Likewise one of Usaama Rahim’s fellow mosque attendees said that Rahim and another conspirator had initially followed the “teachings of the Muslim Brotherhood” but that he had been forced to cut ties with them when they moved past the Brotherhood and became “extreme”.

Despite the media’s insistence on describing the Muslim Brotherhood as a moderate organization, it has multiple terrorist arms, including Hamas, and its views on non-Muslims run the gamut from the violent to the genocidal.

A year after Obama’s Cairo speech and his outreach to the Muslim Brotherhood, its Supreme Guide announced that the United States will soon be destroyed, urged violent terrorist attacks against the United States and “raising a jihadi generation that pursues death just as the enemies pursue life.”

Despite this, Obama continued backing the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power across the region.

There are distinctions between the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, but the latter is a splinter group of the former. Al Qaeda’s current leader came out of the Muslim Brotherhood. A move from one to the other is a minor transition between two groups that have far more in common than their differences.

And since the Brotherhood controls much of the Islamic infrastructure in the United States, the idea that Munther Omar Saleh or Usaama Rahim became radicalized because they went from a Jihadist group that takes the long view in the struggle against the infidel, putting political structures into place to make a violent struggle tactically feasible, to a Jihadist group that focuses more on short term violence, is silly.

Radicalization isn’t transformational; it’s incremental.

It’s the Pakistani kid down the block deciding that instead of joining the Muslim Students Association and then CAIR to build Islamist political structures in America, he should just cut to the chase and kill a few cops to begin taking over America now. Radicalization is the moderate Imam who stops putting on an act for PBS and the local politicians and moves to Yemen where he openly recruits terrorists to attack America instead of doing it covertly at his mosque in Virginia.

Radicalization is the teenage Muslim girl who forgets about marrying her Egyptian third cousin and bringing him and his fifty relatives to America and goes to join ISIS as a Caliphate brood mare instead.

It’s not pacifism giving way to violence. Instead it’s an impatient shift from tactical actions meant to eventually make Islam supreme in America over many generations to immediate bloody gratification. ISIS is promising the apocalypse now. No more waiting. No more lying. You can have it tomorrow.

Radicalization does not go from zero to sixty. It speeds up from sixty to seventy-five.
It builds on elements that are already there in the mosque and the household. The term “extremism” implicitly admits that what we are talking about is not a complete transformation, but the logical extension of existing Islamic beliefs.

Omar Saleh seemed cheerful enough about Hamas dropping Kassam rockets on Israeli towns and cities. Would he have supported his son setting off a bomb in the Statue of Liberty? Who knows, but his son was already starting from a family position that Muslim terrorism against non-Muslims was acceptable.

Everything else is the fine print.

When Usaama Rahim followed the way of the Muslim Brotherhood, he was with a moderate group whose spiritual guide, the genocidal Qaradawi was the godfather of cartoon outrage and had endorsed the murderous Iranian fatwa against Salman Rushdie.

The slope that leads from Qaradawi’s cartoon rage to trying to behead Pamela Geller isn’t a slippery one; it’s a vertical waterfall. And this is what radicalization really looks like. It doesn’t mean moderates turning extreme. It means extremists becoming more extreme. And there’s always room for extremists to become more extreme which turns old extremists into moderates while mainstreaming their beliefs.

In the UK, Baroness Warsi, Cameron’s biggest mistake, blamed Muslim radicalization on the government’s refusal to engage with… radicals. Or as she put it, “It is incredibly odd and incredibly worrying that over time more and more individuals, more and more organisations are considered by the government to be beyond the pale and therefore not to be engaged with.”

The reason why the government is refusing to “engage” with these organizations is that they support terrorism in one form or another. Warsi is proposing that the UK fight radicalization by mainstreaming it.

Mainstreaming extremism is also Obama’s policy. It’s the logic behind nearly every Western diplomatic move in the Middle East from the Israel-PLO peace process to the Brotherhood’s Arab Spring. And these disasters only created more Islamic terrorism.

The Muslim teenagers headed to join ISIS did not come out of a vacuum. They came from mosques and families that normalized some degree of Islamic Supremacism and viewed some Muslim terrorists as heroes and role models. It’s time for Western governments to admit that the ISIS Jihadist is more the product of his parents and his teachers than of social media Jihadis on YouTube and Twitter.

Radicalization doesn’t begin with a sheikh on social media. It begins at home. It begins in the mosque. It just ends with ISIS.

American Thinker

The Clintons, US Intelligence, and the Great Uranium Follies

Hillary Clinton handing over a sizable portion of US uranium production potential to Russia is not an isolated event, but rather is the logical convergence of decades-old Clinton era dealings with Russia and rogue states, for enrichment of the power elite. AT contributor Michael Curtis is correct when he says that the Uranium One deal has serious implications for our national security. In fact, the revelation of Hillary’s independent intel network, coupled with Clinton era national security policy changes in the form of counter-proliferation (CP) regimes, have been far more strategically harmful than many Americans realize. More

There is no Crisis in U.S.Trade

Greg Richards

Nobody on the conservative side can understand what is going on with the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) trade bill. It is astounding (a) that the text of it is being kept more secret than a Clinton Foundation contribution and (b) that Congressional Republicans are pressing for fast track status to give the president a free hand in negotiations, presumably because of his demonstrated good faith on immigration, the Iranian Bomb, backing Israel, Affordable Care, and supporting the Muslim Brotherhood. This legislation will see the light of day when it is passed, so what benefit is there to secrecy before it is passed? If it is to protect negotiating gambits, that is very minor compared to giving domestic constituencies the time and ability to evaluate it. And there is a critical point here. There is no crisis in U.S. trade. The chart below shows this. It tells a very important story, so stick with me for a few minutes on it. More

My Take –There are two things that are absolutely clear. There is no trade crisis and this trade agreement is being kept from the public (their employers) for a reason. If there is no trade crisis who benefits from this back room deal? What companies will be favored and why? What special interest groups will benefit and why? There can only be one thing that is clear. This trade agreement must stink so badly the public can't see it without throwing up.

Karl Rove vs. the 2nd Amendment

Daniel John Sobieski

Rove displays an ignorance of our history and our Constitution and how we won our freedoms thanks to private citizens bearing arms. More

Evaluating the Left's Madness on Gun Control

William Sullivan

Democratic presidential hopeful Martin O'Malley is ready to shred the Constitution in pursuit of onerous gun laws that don't work. More

The Need for a Convention of the States

Dennis Lund

Our freedom was won at the cost of blood by men desirous of liberty unconstrained by tyrannical authority, and responding to unacceptable tyranny from a malevolent king. Once liberty was gained, the choice was made to decentralize power so as to not fall under the will of a single or limited power. Men like Madison, Jefferson, Washington, and others never envisioned that the nation would descend into what it has now become. (One man did: Alexis De Tocqueville.) The Founding Fathers recognized the experiment embarked upon suffered imperfections, as well as contradictions, such as between liberties and permitting the tyranny of slavery. They had no immediate solution for the latter, but placed into the Constitution wording to allow for modifications, which ultimately resolved the former. One solution addressing inherent imperfections is Article Five of the Constitution, which reads in part: “The Congress … on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution” More

My Take – The real solution rests in three parts.

1. Repeal the Sixteenth Amendment. That’s the income tax amendment. If you don’t starve the beast it will never stop growing. This amendment gave the federal government the power to take as much as they like from society and spend it like drunken sailors.

2. Repeal the Seventeenth Amendment. As mentioned in the article this was the amendment that changed how senators were chosen. The founding fathers wanted a balance of power between the states and the central government. The word state didn't mean province in those days. It meant an independent nation. In order to maintain that balance they chose to have the state legislatures appoint senators who would act as ambassadors of their states governments. That created a balance of power preventing the central government from getting out of control.

3. Pass a Twenty Eighth Amendment that would create term and age limits for the federal judiciary. There are three levels of the federal judiciary. The District level, the Appellate level and the Supreme Court. Every appointee would be limited to a ten year term at any level with a review after five years. At any time they may be chosen to fill a seat at another level, but must go through the process at each level. No jurist can be appointed to fill another term at a level they’ve completed. If a jurist is rejected by the Senate to finish the ten year term they can never be appointed to any federal court. If they finish their term and are selected to another level they must go through the process at each level. If an appointee is originally appointed to a higher court and fulfills their obligations honorable they may not be appointed to a lower court and if rejected to be seated at the higher court they cannot be appointed to a lower court. No federal jurist may serve after age seventy.

Bonfire of the Vulgarians: Middle East Studies in Decline

By Cinnamon Stillwell

Earlier this year, a firestorm erupted when Connecticut College philosophy professor Andrew Pessin’s 2014 Facebook comments, in which he compared Hamas in Gaza to a “wild pit bull . . . chained in a cage, regularly making mass efforts to escape,” were deemed “racist” and “dehumanizing” by student activists, colleagues, and administrators alike. Meanwhile, Middle East studies academics regularly emit commentary that is unambiguous in its bigotry, tastelessness, and vulgarity, to nary a peep. Not coincidentally, the vitriol is directed at targets academe finds politically unpopular: Israel, pro-Israel Jews, and anti-Islamists. A glaring example occurred in late 2014, when UC Irvine history professor Mark LeVine posted an expletive-laden, unhinged rant on Facebook calling for the destruction of Israel: More

Rape on Campus: Guilty until Proven Innocent

Claire Hawks

Megyn Kelly recently interviewed the attorney for "John Doe," a pseudonym for a young man who was charged with sexual assault when he was a sophomore at Amherst College by "Sandra Jones," another pseudonym. Evidently, colleges and universities now have panels or tribunals to judge charges of sexual assault. This began in 2011, when the Obama administration issued an edict claiming that one out of every five women in college has been sexually assaulted and warning that schools who didn't crack down and reduce the numbers of sexual assaults could lose federal funding. Colleges and universities rushed to set up panels and tribunals to "judge" these accusations in order to keep the cash flowing. Now it appears that all any woman has to do is accuse a male of sexual misconduct of any type, and this tribunal process begins. John Doe was a victim of this edict. K.C. Johnson, author of Until Proven Innocent, in a interview with Megyn Kelly, had the following to say about the tribunal system: More

Jessica Alba’s Honest Company profits from lies, fears: Gunlock

Posted on June 18, 2015 by admin

Jessica Alba has a billion dollar baby supply enterprise called The Honest Company, and it is based on the idea that “the products people use should be safe and non-toxic (surprisingly, many companies don’t!)”. Sounds nice, who could argue with that?

ACSH friend Julie Gunlock, that’s who.

Gunlock, of the Independent Women’s Forum and the Culture of Alarmism, has a fascinating opinion piece in today’s New York Post that pulled back the curtain on Alba’s enterprise and her assessment: Alba’s product is not baby supplies; it’s fear.

The article explains that the company’s main tenet is pushing the infamous “if you can’t pronounce it, don’t consume/use it” anti-science mantra other “celebrities” have spread. Alba has claimed that there’s a conspiracy by all other companies to hurt our children by sneaking chemicals, carcinogens and allergens into our diapers but that her company cares about children and they would never do that.

Thankfully, Gunlock is here to point out just how absurd this is. First, she explains the science: “Sure, chemicals can be toxic — if consumed in certain amounts. Heck, water is dangerous in high doses!” She continues by pointing out these products are safe: “Still, chemicals in products — including those fragrances used in diapers — are used in trace amounts, often improve the safety of those products and have undergone hundreds of safety tests.”

But perhaps the best part comes when she points out that the The Honest Company doesn’t even follow their own message, as they put unpronounceable chemicals in their products too. Gunlock explains that the diapers “…also contain sodium polyacrylatepolyolefin, Polymer Spandex, Polyolefin, and Polyurethane. Her dish soap contains cocamidopropyl betain, phenoxyethenol, and methylisothiazolinone. Her facial wipes contain polysorbate 20.”

Its not all criticisms of Alba though, as Gunlock “commends” Alba’s profiteering: “Her marketing tactics are below-the-belt: She tells the world that she’s the only one who can be trusted, implying the rest are out to harm, maim, poison and kill. The “Honest” Company thrives on alarmism, and a false promise of safer, healthier products at a high price. It’s a strategy that makes some people rich and many more riddled with anxiety. We can salute her for her marketplace success, but we shouldn’t let her get away with pretending that she’s saving the world.”

ACSH’s Nicholas Staropoli adds “We are longtime supporters of Julie’s work and this piece comports quite well with our prior admiration. Alba thinks her ‘small’ billion dollar company is saving the world from the evil toxin industry but all she is doing is breeding fear and mistrust in good science and safe, well tested products. The real reason she is doing this is not to save our nation’s babies but to pad her own wallet. My advice to the four time Razzie nominee: if you want to make a quick buck, instead of profiting off fearmongering, go make Good Luck Chuck 2. I’m certain Dane Cook is available.”

Environmentalism is an Emotional, Psychological, Philosophical, Theosophical, Intellectual and Immoral Fever Swamp

Benny Peiser’s Global Warming Policy Foundation Reports

That US Republicans Shrug Off Pope Francis' Climate Message  and

“The Green Pope” Gets Uneasy Reception In USA and Poland

 

Nigel Lawson: The Church Of Climatism - We have, in the UK, devised the most blatant transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich – and I am slightly surprised that it is so strongly supported by those who consider themselves to be the tribunes of the people and politically on the Left. I refer to our system of heavily subsidizing wealthy landlords to have wind farms on their land, so that the poor can be supplied with one of the most expensive forms of electricity known to man. However, the greatest immorality of all concerns those in the developing world. There are still hundreds of millions of people in these countries in dire poverty, suffering all the ills that this brings, in terms of malnutrition, preventable disease, and premature death. Asking these countries to abandon the cheapest available sources of energy is, at the very least, asking them to delay the conquest of malnutrition, to perpetuate the incidence of preventable disease, and to increase the number of premature deaths. Global warming orthodoxy is not merely irrational. It is wicked.--Nigel Lawson, Financial Post, 18 June 2015

US Republicans Shrug Off Pope Francis' Climate Message - The reactions [to the papal encyclical] suggested that the pontiff's desire to translate his climate views into real action to combat greenhouse gases could fall flat, at least as far as the American political system is concerned….Pope Francis' call for dramatic action on climate change drew a round of shrugs from congressional Republicans on Thursday, while many of the party's presidential candidates ignored it entirely. "I don't want to be disrespectful, but I don't consider him an expert on environmental issues," said Texas Rep. Joe Barton, a senior Republican on the Energy and Commerce Committee, in a comment echoed by a number of other Republicans. Even Capitol Hill's many Catholics, despite their religion's reverence for the holy father, seemed unmoved by his urgent plea to save the planet. --Erica Werner and Matthew Daly, Associated Press, 18 June 2015

Pope Francis’s Vow Of Poverty — For All - Like other environmental activists, the pope — who might now be considered the world’s leading green — is using global warming to prosecute a deeply ecological, anti-capitalist agenda. The pope’s green Peronism is hardly going to persuade American conservatives to join his climate crusade. Indeed, the pope invites disagreement with his views. “The Church does not presume to settle scientific questions or to replace politics,” the --Rupert Darwall, National Review, 18 June 2015

My Take - So the Pope says “But I am concerned to encourage an honest and open debate.” That all sounds great, but when he had the chance to have that "honest and open debate" except Vatican heavies silenced climate skeptics at the UN Papal Summit. When exactly and with whom did he wish to start that "honest and open" debate?

Less Than Half Of U.S. Catholics Believe In Man-Made Climate Change - A new Pew Research Center survey, released as Pope Francis publishes an encyclical on the environment and climate change, finds that 71% of self-identified American Catholics believe the earth is getting warmer, but only 47% attribute the perceived warming to human activity. --Susan Berry, Breitbart News, 17 June 2015

Green Pope Gets Uneasy Reception In Catholic Heartland Of Poland - Pope Francis's plunge into the climate change debate has caused uneasiness in the heartland of European conservative Catholicism in Poland, exposing the dilemma for Catholics who are devout but prefer their leaders to steer clear of "liberal" causes. For many Poles, coal is a national security issue. Without it, the country would need to import much more gas from Russia, making it dependent on a former overlord which it views with deep suspicion. Piotr Naimski, a member of parliament who is drafting energy policy for Law and Justice, would not comment directly on the encyclical but said: "All actions related to climate policy should be based on local needs." --Pawel Sobczak and Jakub Iglewski, Reuters, 18 June 2015

Richard Tol: The Pope Disappoints On Climate -The Pope has released an Encyclical on Care for our Common Home. It is rather long. It has good things. It has bad things. Carbon dioxide is referred to as pollution, which is a nonsense (outside the US legal system). Para 24 offers the alarmist claptrap you would expect to find in a Greenpeace magazine. Para 25 suggests that the poor are vulnerable to climate change because of where they live. Actually, they're vulnerable because they're poor. The Pope misdiagnoses, and thus recommends the wrong treatment. Economic growth is the prime strategy against the disproportionate impacts of climate change on the poor. --Richard Tol, 19 June 2015

If Fast Food Isn’t Fast, Hot, Cheap and Good Tasting - It’s Not Worth It

By Rich Kozlovich

On Friday George Will wrote this article, “McDonald’s, the ‘Progressive Burger Company’”  He starts out saying that “In January, McDonald’s, leaning against the winds of fashion, said kale would never replace lettuce on its burgers” and that in May they “will test kale in a breakfast meal”, which according to Will represents 25% of McDonalds trade. 

Although predication – especially about the future – is amazingly hard I’m going to make one right now.  That 25% figure is going to drop like a stone if kale is forced on McDonalds’ breakfast customers.

But this isn’t the end of McDonalds’ efforts to turn their sagging sales around.  Now they say they will end using milk that uses growth hormones and chickens that are treated with human antibiotics, which of course is a logical fallacy.  These aren’t “human” antibiotics….they’re just antibiotics that humans use.  The goal is to kill harmful bacteria and what works to kill bacteria infesting the human body also kills bacteria that infest animals.  Now….did everyone get that?  That really isn’t all that hard to grasp, unless of course you’re a leftist loon making ridiculous demands that will raise the cost of food and lower the health of animals. 

The company has supposedly launched a new slogan, “Lovin’ Beats Hatin’ to turn things around.  Well, I never saw it and quite frankly, I didn’t know they had an old slogan, and didn’t care, and I’m willing to bet most people are in the same boat, and no slogan is going to make me buy McDonalds or Burger King or any other fast food.  Then there are plans to make a bunch of menu changes. Do they really believe all this will increase sales? 

Will goes on to say that “Progressives are forever telling us who is and who is not on “the right side of history.” Many fastidious progressives deplore, and try to control (witness San Francisco’s current crusade against soft drinks), other people’s food choices. It will be instructive watching the progressive burger company try to persuade its chosen constituents to stop at McDonald’s on the way home from Whole Foods, their environmentally responsible, because reusable, shopping bags overflowing with kale.” I think that’s a cogent observation.  The people pushing McDonalds into these silly programs aren’t their core customers. 

About 20-25 years ago one of the polling companies called me to ask if I ate fast foods.  Since I’m an exterminator I’m on the road all day long and …yes I said…. I eat fast foods.  The girl I talked to wanted to know how often, and I said about three days a week.  Then she wanted to know why I ate fast foods.  I said because it was fast, cheap, hot and tastes good.  She asked if I thought it was healthy.   I said no, but I didn’t eat it for my health.  (As a side bar – I’ve completely changed my views on the health aspect of eating fast foods by the way.  It’s no less healthy than the beef, chicken, lettuce, cheese, mayonnaise and pickles at home.  In fact it may be healthier since it’s grilled and not cooked sitting it’s own grease in a frying pan) I eat it because it’s fast, cheap, hot and tastes good.   She asked if fast food was healthier would I eat more of it.  I said no. She asked why.  I said I eat it because it’s cheap, fast, hot and tastes good and I don’t care about anything else.  That was almost impossible for her to grasp as she kept attempting to get me to say I wanted fast foods to be healthier, which is one reason I think people lie to pollsters.  She just couldn't seem to to grasp their core customers want fast food to be fast, hot, cheap and taste good with little concern for the claims and demands of leftists who don't eat fast foods.   

Unfortunately they’ve lost sight of who and what they are.  The food is fast, and hot, but it’s no longer cheap and it no longer tastes that good.  If I order two Sausage and Egg McMuffins (The sausage doesn't taste as good either) with a hash brown and a small coffee it runs almost ten dollars at the window.   I can get that cheaper in a sit down restaurant.  Let’s break this down.  They give us two eggs, two pieces of sausage, two slices of cheese two muffins cut in half a small hash brown and one cup of coffee.  I can get two eggs, two or three pieces of sausage, two slices of bread of my choice and an order of hash browns two to three times the size of McDonalds and a bottomless cup of coffee for seven dollars.  Maybe those two slices of cheese are what's so expensive.   

So what ‘s the real problem?  Is it possible the costs are all out of whack?  To own a McDonalds franchise “a franchisee must start with at least $750,000in non-borrowed assets”and the start up can cost between over one or two million dollars.  Then there are the annual fees that can be over a million dollars a year. That’s a lot of burgers, fries, soft drinks, etc.  That's not mentioning a host of other minor fees.

 

McDonalds isn’t alone in this slump.  Burger King, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and KFC are all facing difficulty drawing customers and their franchise fees aren’t any cheaper.  Let’s get this right.  First -  the baby boomers who created the fast food boom are retiring at a rate that’s going to change the economics of every fast food business in America.  Secondly, the key for fast foods was it was fast, cheap, hot and tasted good.  That was foundational to success in fast foods.  It’s no longer cheap and it no longer tastes as good.  They’re losing their core customers because they’ve forgotten who and what they are.  And the younger people see it the same way! And no matter how it’s spun embracing leftist clabber isn’t going to save them.

Pam Geller's Atlas Shrugs

The New Israel Fund Giving Money to Support, Shill for Anti-Semitic Leader of BDS Movement - New Israel Fund grantee 972 Mag this week featured a glowing article with a vicious Jew-hater, Omar Barghouti under the headline “The Man Behind the BDS Movement.” The man has been described as a threat to the State of Israel, the left-wing newspaper, Yedioth Ahronot, calls him “Explosive Omar”, and he refuses to do interviews with Israeli journalists.  As their article said, “And if he and his boycott movement are giving both Zionist officials and their media a panic attack, one can only assume he is doing something right.” New Israel Fund keeps supporting a boycott. Alisa Doctoroff, President of UJA-Federation donates to NIF – so does Karen R. Adler and her Jewish Communal Fund. Arthur & Edith Stern,...

Ohio: Muslim Was Ready to ‘Cut Off the Head of His Non-Muslim Son’ to prove his worth as a Muslim - Devout Muslims in this country have plans — bigger plans than we have had a misfortune to have experienced in the recent past. “If the Texas bros had maybe 6 more with them it may have been a different story,” he said, according to the FBI testimony.  This devout Muslim would cut off his own son’s head to show his allegiance to Islam. That tells you everything.  To show his devotion to the Islamic State terror group, and to Islam as a whole…… told an informant that he would cut off the head of his own biological son—akin to the beheadings carried out by Islamic State...

Vehicular Jihad: 3 Dead, scores injured in Austria after Bosnian Muslim drives into into crowd before ‘stabbing passers-by’ - Another grateful Bosnian Muslim — dead bodies were left lying face down in the street after the vehicle sped through streets near the the historical Herrengasse in Graz.  Must be all that goodwill we generated sending US troops to Bosnia to fight for the Muslims against the Christian Serbs. Another one of our grateful Balkan Muslim friends whom we “rescued” from Christian Serbs and the jaws of civilization.

Islamic State Training Children from 100 Countries - Raising up the next generation of jihadis. This is going to be a long, long war — unless the West continues its policies of capitulation and submission to the point of suicide. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi says that Islamic State (IS) has been training thousands of children from about 100 countries to fight Iraqi security forces. In a press conference on Monday, Abadi said around 40 foreign suicide bombers enter Iraq each month and he called on countries in the region to curb the flow of foreign fighters.  Suicide bombers are one of the deadliest weapons of the militants, who...

The Secular Religion of the Left

Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 24 Comments

For most of human history, men and women have derived their moral dimension of life from the family and religion. Both of those are now dead or dying in the West under the influence of its new moral and ethical system. That system is one that we know in its various forms as the left.

The left can be summed up as moral materialism. It is a secular religion that claims to add a moral dimension to materialism. Its obsessions are largely economic, from its early class warfare focus to its modern environmentalism. Even its racial politics code class warfare by skin color.

Kill off religion and what do you have left? The answer can be seen in China. You're left with materialism and family interests.. Cast off the shackles of the family for individualistic consumerism and you're left with nothing except materialism as can be seen in any major Western city.

Modern urban man is much too "smart" for religion. At least his own. He wants to add an ethical dimension to life without having to believe in anything except the sense of fairness that he already has, but which he does not realize is not nearly as valid objectively as it is subjectively in his inner emotional reality.

And that is what the left is. It strips away everything except that egotistical sense that things should be run more fairly with predictably unfair results.

Liberalism, and the milder flavors of the left, provide a permission slip for materialism by elevating it through political activism. This is the philosophical purpose of environmentalism's green label. It tells you that you are a good person for buying something and soothes the moral anxieties of an urban class with no coherent moral system except the need to impose an ethical order on the consumerism that defined their childhood, their adolescence and their adult life.

Those most in need of the moral system of materialism are the descendants of the displaced, whether by immigration to the United States or migration within the United States from rural to urban areas, who have become detached from a large extended family structure that once sustained them.

Their grandparents had already loosened their grip on religion and as the family disintegrated, materialism took its place. Their grandparents worked hard to provide for their children, but the children no longer saw maintaining the family as a moral activity. Sometimes they didn't even bother with a family. They became lonely individuals looking for a collective. A virtual political family.

Liberalism fills the missing space once inhabited by religion and the family. It provides a moral and ethical system as religion did and the accompanying sense of purpose and its state institutions replace and supplant the family. It does both of these things destructively and badly as its institutions forever try to patch social problems created by the disintegration of the family and its ideas provide too few people with a sense of purpose of a meaningful life.

And yet it isn't entirely to blame for this state of affairs. The left has actively tried to destroy the family and religion, but the American liberal was until recently less guilty on both charges. His main crime was collaborating with the left while refusing to acknowledge its destructive aims. The process by which the displacement of liberal ideas and their replacement by the ideas of the far left is nearly complete. The American liberal is now an aging relic. In his place is the resentful radical.

The process that led to this state of affairs isn't the left's fault either. Even if it's not for lack of trying. In some ways the left isn't the problem, it's a symptom of the problem. Its ability to fundamentally transform people is limited. The transformation that has occurred is because of the choices that people have been led into making trading religion and family for a dead end materialism. Those choices evolved organically from the natural direction of society and technology.

And into that empty space, the left came. It dominates because there is nothing else to fill that space. It can only be truly resisted by cultural groups that have maintained hold of family and religion. Without that sense of purpose, there is only the endless baffled retreat of the Republican Party.

Liberalism appeals more to the middle class and the upper class because it is a religion of materialism. It makes very little sense to those who don't have material things. The underclass might embrace the harsher populism of the left, but shows little interest in its larger collectivist philosophy. The underclass is losing family and religion at a faster rate than the upper class, but it clings to what it has and finds meaning in it. It may be nakedly materialistic, but it doesn't believe that it is too smart for religion or too individualistic for family. It has many flaws, but arrogance isn't one of them.

Ennobling consumerism is a difficult task. The left doesn't come anywhere close to succeeding at it. Instead it makes it more expensive and raises the entry barriers for everything by working to eliminate cheap food, cheap household goods and cheap everything. It's a class issue.

Why does the left really hate Walmart? It doesn't really have a lot to do with unions and has a lot to do with class. Walmart's crime is industrial. It's the crime of the factory and the supermarket and every means of mass production and consumption. It makes cheap products too readily available to the masses. Liberals like to believe that they oppose consumerism, but what they really want to do is raise the entry levels to the lifestyle. Liberal consumerism is all about upselling ethics.

When tangible goods become too easy to produce, you add value through intangibles. The fair trade food tastes the same as non-fair trade food. Organic, a category with a debatable meaning, doesn't really provide that much more value. And environmental labels are worth very little. And yet the average product at Whole Foods is covered in so many "ethical liberal" labels that it's hard to figure out what it even is.

Intangible value is all about class. And class is all about creating barriers to entry.

Liberalism has become a revolt against the middle class that its grandparents struggled to reach, a rejection of their "materialism" while substituting the "ethical materialism" of liberalism in its place that envisions a much smaller upper and middle class that derives its wealth and power not from hard work in the private sector, but highly profitable social justice volunteerism in the public sector.

An American Dream of universal prosperity has been pitted against the left's dream of a benevolent feudal system in which the few will be very well paid to oversee the income equality of the many.

The left's private argument against the American Dream is that it's little more than Walmart. And to some degree they're right. Easy availability of the necessities of life does not lead to a meaningful life. But the easy contempt that the left has for it shows its basic inability to understand how important these things are and how hard they were to come by for most of human history.

Salt was once a precious commodity. Today it sells for pennies a pound. The ability to light the darkness meant the difference between studying at night and living in ignorance. Today a light bulb goes for a quarter. At least it did until the left banned them. And electricity, the left also keeps raising the price of that. Few of the post-apocalyptic fantasies spilling out of Hollywood really describe what would happen if the people manufacturing them were thrown back before the industrial revolution.

Progress has made a good life materially possible, but it has also displaced and damaged the social mechanisms that make a good life socially possible. We have easy access to technology and streets full of vicious illiterate thugs. We can discuss anything with anyone, but we live in a society that values few things worth discussing. We have mass production, but not mass character.

For all its feigned populism, such elitist critiques of society are not foreign to the left. The left's elitist critiques differ in some regards, but they are on the same basic wavelength as those of the social conservative. And its solution is to promote what it considers social progress by reversing or slowing down industrial, commercial and technological progress. The environmental movement is only the latest ideological incarnation of this philosophy which strives to slow down the rate of progress.

The left's social collectivism however is no replacement for what is being lost. What it really does is attempt to apply industrial and commercial strategies to human relationships. Not only is it not a challenge to a consumeristic society, but it attempts to worsen the damage by rebuilding society on the model of the factory and the department store as an impersonal system.

That's not a solution to the problem. It is the problem.

The left cannot escape its own materialism. Its attempts at adding an ethical dimension to materialism fail because its ethical dimension is still materialistic. Its pathetic efforts at injecting pastiches of Third World and minority spirituality into its politics to provide the illusion of a spiritual dimension are hollow and racist. The left cannot fill its own hole, because it is the hole.

Like Islam, it provides something for people to believe in, but the thing it provides is the compulsion to find meaning by forcibly remaking other people's lives in a perpetual revolution which becomes its own purpose.

The left can't replace family or religion. Its social solutions are alien and artificial. They fix nothing and damage everything. Their appeal is to those who are arrogant and starved for meaning, who want religion without religion and family without family only to discover that they are not enough.

Alan Caruba, R.I.P.

By Jim Lakely June 16, 2015

I report tonight with shock and sadness that long-time Heartland Institute policy advisor Alan Caruba has passed away. Alan was a patriot, an online entrepreneur, and a brave and tireless writer. We were honored to publish much of his work at this blog, and to call him a friend.   On May 22, Alan announced he was undergoing surgery the following week. It wasn’t serious, he assured his fans, but something that would involve just “three to four days recovery” in the hospital. “I have no concerns regarding this other than to just get it over with!” he wrote, wishing us a great Memorial Day weekend and an eagerness to get back to his writing..........

 

An entire generation has grown up and graduated from college since the first lies about global warming were unleashed. That’s how long Heartland and others have labored to present the truth. If the media fails to take notice of this week’s conference, you will know that the battle will continue for a long time to come.

 

That battle will continue for a long time to come. Alan cherished the fight, and his friends at Heartland will continue to wage it with his fearless and determined spirit in our hearts.

Alan Caruba, R.I.P.....To Read More.....

[Read all of Alan’s contributions to the public debate published here at this link.]

 

"Stupid is As Stupid Does" - Forrest Gump

By Rich Kozlovich

How many of out there read the daily Rasmussen polls?  If you do you will find it amazing! Based on Rasmussen’s Daily Presidential Tracking Poll between 43 and 52 percent approve of Obama’s performance on any given day, with between twenty and twenty five percent strongly approving. 

After reading these polls I keep asking:  Who in the world are they talking to?  And I’ve come to the conclusion that critics are right when they say people lie to pollsters.   I’ve  also come to the conclusion (presuming of course the polls are accurate) that at least twenty five percent of the people of America are blatantly stupid.  But they have an excuse.  They can’t help themselves.  They really are stupid!  I’ve also concluded the number of really stupid people has increased over the last forty years.  Then there are those who choose stupidity because they think stupid will suit them financially or socially.  Unfortunately merely eliminating the warning labels off of everything won’t fix that. 

Here’s what I find interesting.  

Approximately 55 percent of the population disapproves of his performance.  But that number’s misleading because only between 40 and 45 percent strongly disapprove.  So let’s do a little math.  If you take the strongly approve at say 25 percent and the strongly disapprove at 45 percent that leaves 30 percent of the population on both sides of that spectrum who don’t really have a clue and can choose to be stupid - or not - at some point in time.  I can only assume they’re part of that seemingly uninformed and strangly mysterious group called - moderates - and won't be fixed!  Moderates being another name for going along to get along and clueless.  They can be encouraged to accept any idiocy as long as they can be convinced their lives won’t change. 

Of course everyone has a right to choose stupid as their philosophy de jour, unfortunately politicians, heads of major corporations, celebrities, bureaucrats, academics, religious leaders and the media just can’t help themselves in abusing that privilege.  These have clearly earned membership in the Club For the Galacticly Stupid, which now includes the Pope.  And the reason why you can’t fix stupid is because some really are stupid and can't help themselves and can’t be fixed, or they’re always following the latest philosophical flavor of the day.  They call it conventional wisdom, which may or may not last as long as today’s ladies fashion.  Unfortunately this requires them to abandon traditional wisdom which has stood the test of time.

Below is one commentary and a series of articles dealing with the realities of Islam and the realities of global warming. Try and spot all the stupidity!

The Myth of Muslim Radicalization

Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 1 Comments

After some of its quarter of a million Muslims headed to join ISIS, Quebec decided the answer was a $2 million anti-radicalization center headed by a specialist in cultural sensitivity. But if you’re about to be beheaded by a masked ISIS Jihadist, a specialist in cultural sensitivity isn’t going to help you much.

 

Western governments nevertheless keep rolling out their culturally sensitive approaches to fighting ISIS.

The key element in Obama’s strategy for fighting ISIS isn’t the F-15E Strike Eagle, it’s a Twitter account run by a Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer which claims to “Counter Violent Extremism” by presenting moderate Islamists like Al Qaeda as positive role models for the Islamic State’s social media supporters.

So far 75% of planes flown on combat missions against ISIS return without engaging the enemy, but the culturally sensitive State Department Twitter account has racked up over 5,000 tweets and zero kills.

Cultural sensitivity hasn’t exactly set Iraq on fire in fighting ISIS and deradicalization programs here start from the false premise that there is a wide gap between a moderate and extremist Islam. Smiling news anchors daily recite new stories about a teenager from Kentucky, Boston or Manchester getting “radicalized” and joining ISIS to the bafflement of his parents, mosque and community.

And who is to blame for all this mysterious radicalization? It’s not the parents. It certainly can’t be the moderate local mosque with its stock of Jihadist CDs and DVDs being dispensed from under the table.

The attorney for the family of Usaama Rahim, the Muslim terrorist who plotted to behead Pamela Geller, claims that his radicalization came as a “complete shock” to them.

It must have come as a truly great shock to his brother Imam Ibrahim Rahim who claimed that his brother was shot in the back and that the Garland cartoon attack had been staged by the government.

It must have come as an even bigger shock to Imam Abdullah Faaruuq, the Imam linked to Usaama Rahim and his fellow terrorist conspirators, as well as the Tsarnaev brothers, who had urged Muslims to “grab onto the gun and the sword.” The culturally insensitive truth about Islamic ‘radicalization’ is that it is incremental.

There is no peaceful Islam. Instead of two sharply divided groups, peaceful Islam and extremist Islam, there is a spectrum of acceptable terrorism.

Muslim institutions have different places on that spectrum depending on their allegiances and tactics, but the process of radicalization is rarely a sharp break from the past for any except converts to Islam.

The latest tragic victim of radicalization is Munther Omar Saleh; a Muslim man living in New York City who allegedly plotted to use a Tsarnaev-style pressure cooker bomb in a major landmark such as the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building. Saleh claimed to be following orders from ISIS.

Media coverage of the Saleh arrest drags out the old clichés about how unexpected this sudden radicalization was, but what appears to be his father’s social media account shows support for Hamas.

Likewise one of Usaama Rahim’s fellow mosque attendees said that Rahim and another conspirator had initially followed the “teachings of the Muslim Brotherhood” but that he had been forced to cut ties with them when they moved past the Brotherhood and became “extreme”.

 

Despite the media’s insistence on describing the Muslim Brotherhood as a moderate organization, it has multiple terrorist arms, including Hamas, and its views on non-Muslims run the gamut from the violent to the genocidal.

A year after Obama’s Cairo speech and his outreach to the Muslim Brotherhood, its Supreme Guide announced that the United States will soon be destroyed, urged violent terrorist attacks against the United States and “raising a jihadi generation that pursues death just as the enemies pursue life.”

Despite this, Obama continued backing the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power across the region.

There are distinctions between the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, but the latter is a splinter group of the former. Al Qaeda’s current leader came out of the Muslim Brotherhood. A move from one to the other is a minor transition between two groups that have far more in common than their differences.

And since the Brotherhood controls much of the Islamic infrastructure in the United States, the idea that Munther Omar Saleh or Usaama Rahim became radicalized because they went from a Jihadist group that takes the long view in the struggle against the infidel, putting political structures into place to make a violent struggle tactically feasible, to a Jihadist group that focuses more on short term violence, is silly.

Radicalization isn’t transformational; it’s incremental.

It’s the Pakistani kid down the block deciding that instead of joining the Muslim Students Association and then CAIR to build Islamist political structures in America, he should just cut to the chase and kill a few cops to begin taking over America now. Radicalization is the moderate Imam who stops putting on an act for PBS and the local politicians and moves to Yemen where he openly recruits terrorists to attack America instead of doing it covertly at his mosque in Virginia.

Radicalization is the teenage Muslim girl who forgets about marrying her Egyptian third cousin and bringing him and his fifty relatives to America and goes to join ISIS as a Caliphate brood mare instead.

It’s not pacifism giving way to violence. Instead it’s an impatient shift from tactical actions meant to eventually make Islam supreme in America over many generations to immediate bloody gratification. ISIS is promising the apocalypse now. No more waiting. No more lying. You can have it tomorrow.

Radicalization does not go from zero to sixty. It speeds up from sixty to seventy-five.

It builds on elements that are already there in the mosque and the household. The term “extremism” implicitly admits that what we are talking about is not a complete transformation, but the logical extension of existing Islamic beliefs.

Omar Saleh seemed cheerful enough about Hamas dropping Kassam rockets on Israeli towns and cities. Would he have supported his son setting off a bomb in the Statue of Liberty? Who knows, but his son was already starting from a family position that Muslim terrorism against non-Muslims was acceptable.

Everything else is the fine print.

When Usaama Rahim followed the way of the Muslim Brotherhood, he was with a moderate group whose spiritual guide, the genocidal Qaradawi was the godfather of cartoon outrage and had endorsed the murderous Iranian fatwa against Salman Rushdie.

The slope that leads from Qaradawi’s cartoon rage to trying to behead Pamela Geller isn’t a slippery one; it’s a vertical waterfall. And this is what radicalization really looks like. It doesn’t mean moderates turning extreme. It means extremists becoming more extreme. And there’s always room for extremists to become more extreme which turns old extremists into moderates while mainstreaming their beliefs.

 

In the UK, Baroness Warsi, Cameron’s biggest mistake, blamed Muslim radicalization on the government’s refusal to engage with… radicals. Or as she put it, “It is incredibly odd and incredibly worrying that over time more and more individuals, more and more organisations are considered by the government to be beyond the pale and therefore not to be engaged with.”

The reason why the government is refusing to “engage” with these organizations is that they support terrorism in one form or another. Warsi is proposing that the UK fight radicalization by mainstreaming it.

Mainstreaming extremism is also Obama’s policy. It’s the logic behind nearly every Western diplomatic move in the Middle East from the Israel-PLO peace process to the Brotherhood’s Arab Spring. And these disasters only created more Islamic terrorism.

The Muslim teenagers headed to join ISIS did not come out of a vacuum. They came from mosques and families that normalized some degree of Islamic Supremacism and viewed some Muslim terrorists as heroes and role models. It’s time for Western governments to admit that the ISIS Jihadist is more the product of his parents and his teachers than of social media Jihadis on YouTube and Twitter.

Radicalization doesn’t begin with a sheikh on social media. It begins at home. It begins in the mosque. It just ends with ISIS.