Never send a community organizer to do a man’s job.
The other day Barack Obama made a most astonishingly stupid remark:
“..chanting ‘death to America” does not create jobs or make Iran more secure.”
The line appears to have to been written by the equally feckless Marie Harf, who called for fighting terrorists with jobs.
“We’re killing a lot of them, and we’re going to keep killing more of them. … But we cannot win this war by killing them,” Harf said on MSNBC’s “Hardball.” “We need … to go after the root causes that leads people to join these groups, whether it’s lack of opportunity for jobs, whether –”
Harf and Obama fail to grasp a fundamental principle: kill them all and you win. Obama wants to defeat ISIS (you know, the JV) with ideas alone. Vladimir Putin, to whom Obama has ceded being the strongest leader in the world, understands and disagrees with Obama.
“It is not going to be enough to defeat ISIL in the battlefield,” Obama continued. The coalition will “have to defeat their ideology; ideologies are not defeated by guns but by better ideas,” he said, calling on the international community to help Abadi create the political and economic opportunities necessary to keep the Islamic State from winning followers.”
The problem is, it doesn’t work. That philosophy already failed- in Minnesota.
There is a substantial Somali-American community in Minnesota and ISIS attracts fighters from it.
The fighters appear to have made the decision to go fight with Islamic State of Iraq and Syria/Levant while the terror group was fighting to overthrow Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, but some may now be in Iraq, where the marauding group is seeking to topple Baghdad.
“A Muslim has to stand up for [what’s] right,” Abdirahmaan Muhumed told MPR News through a series of Facebook messages dating back to the beginning of the year. “I give up this worldly life for Allah.”
Having economic opportunity hasn’t been a roadblock to ISIS recruiting efforts.
Last year it was estimated that 15 Somali-American men had gone to fight for ISIS. The number has grown to 250 and the largest plurality comes from Minnesota:
A new congressional study out Tuesday says that American recruits for the Islamic State terror group leave from all across the country, with the highest percentage coming out of Minnesota.
The 65-page report from the Department of Homeland Security says that the government has failed to stop more than 250 Americans from traveling, or trying to travel, to in Syria since 2011. In the 58 cases that are public, 26 percent of the recruits who made the journey, or attempted to, were from Minnesota.
The states or areas with the next high percentages of recruits are California (12 percent) and New York/New Jersey (12 percent).
Those reaching the ISIS camps recruit others back home:
The report’s main message is that government currently lacks an effective strategy to prevent recruits from traveling to Syria. It also says law enforcement agencies are increasingly unable to monitor possible recruiting as ISIS is using more secure technology to communicate with those it’s seeking to influence.
“Americans who make it to the conflict zone are reaching back to recruit others,” the report states. “A number of the cases we reviewed involved Americans who made it to Syria and attempted to remotely recruit others back home.”
The report listed Abdi Nur, of Minneapolis, as a prime example. He left the country last year and has since spent months trying to persuade his friends to do the same.
“His peer-to-peer recruiting nearly worked, as six of his friends attempted to leave the United States for Syria; they were arrested by the FBI this April,” the report said.
Of course it’s difficult when the government’s principal objective is spying on the Tea Party and conservatives above all else. The report also calls attention to the danger of returnees. And there’s the problem. The report asserts that the US has no cohesive program for stopping Americans who seek to travel to Syria to fight for ISIS.
Roughly 250 Americans have either tried to go or succeeded in getting to Syria to engage in violent jihad, the report said. But the committee staff was able to identify only 28 cases were the individuals were stopped before leaving the U.S.
“It appears the majority — more than 85 percent — still managed to evade American law enforcement on the way to the conflict zone,” the report said.
One problem has been the lack of stringent screening efforts in Western Europe:
“At least 5,000 Westerners have gone to join ISIS. The vast majority are from Europe, where there are very relaxed travel standards. They don’t screen passengers the way we do. So it’s much more more difficult to determine if someone is actually going over to Turkey or Syria to join the fight.”
The President needs to put the hammer down and demand more rigorous screening. But I disagree that they should be stopped from leaving.
Let them go. Do not let them return. Strip them of their passports on their way out.
Period.
This administration has a rather lenient response to those who do return from the ISIS jihad:
It is against the law for Americans to independently travel overseas to fight in civil wars or armed conflicts against foreign governments. FoxNews.com has written about Americans who went to join the war in Syria in the past, including Eric Harroun, a onetime U.S. Army soldier from Arizona.
After FoxNews.com interviewed Harroun from the battlefield, he traveled back to the U.S., where he was arrested in June 2013. He pleaded guilty to lesser charges and was released, then died of an apparent overdose in April.
We don’t want them back. We don’t want anyone who chooses the fight against American interests to remain here either.
Obama has concluded that the fight against ISIS would be a long one:
“This is a long-term campaign … against its ideology.”
In other words, he’ll be out of town washing his hands of responsibility. Wouldn’t be great to send Obama and his entire cadre of idiots into Syria to fight ISIS armed with high capacity magazines filled only with ideas?
Obama is risk averse. I get that, but one gets the feeling that Russia could strike Alaska or Maine and Obama would do nothing more than crap his pants.
DrJohn has been a health care professional for more than 30 years. In addition to clinical practice he has done extensive research and has published widely with over 70 original articles and abstracts in the peer-reviewed literature. DrJohn is well known in his field and has lectured on every continent except for Antarctica. He has been married to the same wonderful lady for over 30 years and has three kids- two sons, both of whom are attorneys and one daughter on her way into the field of education.
DrJohn was brought up with the concept that one can do well if one is prepared to work hard but nothing in life is guaranteed.
Except for liberals being foolish.