Deception & Misdirection

أضحك بصوت عالٍ، أقهقه, or, That sound from Raqqah


[Continuing our series on deception in politics and public policy.]

The Obama/Clinton people, working with their allies in the news media, spent days trying to make us think, contrary to every piece of evidence, that the San Bernardino attack in which Islamofascist terrorists killed 14 people was a case of workplace violence, just like the “workplace violence” (as they characterized it) that happened at Fort Hood, where an Islamofascist terrorist killed 14 people, counting an unborn baby.  Now the Obama/Clintonites have unveiled their plan for dealing with the Al Qaeda spinoff ISIS:

Keep doing what the U.S. government has been doing in the Middle East. How serious is that effort? Barry Shaw of the Israeli Institute for Strategic Studies wrote in November (http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/11/jaccuse_obama.html ) that “When Israel was forced to respond to thousands of missiles and rockets fired by Hamas last year, they flew 5500 air sorties over Gaza during the fifty-five days of the conflict. US planes have barely flown 1500 sorties in over a year against ISIS. This, to any military chief, is not serious.” And, as of last July, twice as many planes were returning with their ordnance due to a lack of available targets as compared to sorties at a similar point in the Afghan war (35 percent as of July vs. ISIS, versus 17 percent in Afghanistan in 2012).

In September, we learned (http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/sep/16/us-military-syrian-isis-fighters ) that—

 A $500m effort to train Syrian forces against the Islamic State has resulted in only a handful of fighters actively battling the jihadi army, the top military commander overseeing the war has testified. “We’re talking four or five,” General Lloyd Austin, commander of US Central Command, told a dissatisfied Senate armed services committee . . .

Lest you be sickened by this astonishing waste of effort and taxpayers’ dollars, rest assured that our brilliant president saw it coming (http://nypost.com/2015/11/20/obamas-anti-isis-theater-of-the-absurd/ ).

When “60 Minutes” correspondent Steve Kroft asked about this spectacular failure [in October], Obama replied that he always knew it wouldn’t work. “Steve, this is why I’ve been skeptical from the get-go about the notion that we were going to effectively create this proxy army inside of Syria,” Obama said.

Crack down on speech that the government considers anti-Islamic or “Islamophobic.” David French wrote in National Review Online (http://www.nationalreview.com/article/428048/san-bernardino-shooting-loretta-lynch-muslim-backlash ):

There is now a “wonderful opportunity and wonderful moment to really make significant change,” [Attorney General Loretta] Lynch declared the day after 14 innocent Americans were murdered and 23 injured at the hands of a Muslim couple who’d reportedly pledged allegiance to ISIS. And what is this change? New gun-control measures, of course, including stripping the constitutional rights (without due process) of Americans often arbitrarily placed on the vastly over-inclusive terror watch list. Lynch addressed the Muslim Advocate’s tenth-anniversary dinner and declared that she is concerned about an “incredibly disturbing rise of anti-Muslim rhetoric . . . that fear is my greatest fear.” Her greatest fear is—not terrorism—but a nonexistent Islamophobic backlash? ISIS has demonstrated that it can bring down passenger jets, strike the heart of a great Western capitol with urban assault teams, and inspire horrible carnage in California. We also know that ISIS has pledged to keep attacking the U.S. and possesses chemical weapons. Yet it’s politically incorrect speech that strikes fear into the heart of our attorney general.

Keep in mind that Obama, Clinton, and their allies have characterized as anti-Islamic such expressions, protected by the First Amendment, as drawing cartoons of Mohammed and criticizing Islam in a YouTube video. As President Obama told the United Nations: “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” Among the vast majority of Muslims, denying the status of Mohammed as the prophet of the One True Religion is considered “slander.”

By the way, we now know that both the Fort Hood and San Bernardino shootings might have been prevented except that people chose not to come forward with their suspicions, out of fear of being labeled racist. So the good news is that the anti-Islamophobia campaign is working!

 

Do not use religious tests for refugees.  …even when the law and common decency demand it. U.S. law requires the use of a so-called “religious test” when considering the plight of refugees, to ensure that the government prioritizes groups, such as Yazidis and Middle Eastern Christians, that are the target of enslavement and genocide.

A century ago, Christians were 14-20 percent of the population of the Middle East; now it’s four percent, and falling. In some places, almost-2,000-year-old Christian communities are vanishing. In Syria, Christians were, until the current conflict, ten percent of the population, but, according to the most recent figures, have made up only 2.6 percent of the Syrians allowed into the U.S. (The number of Yazidis: one. Not one percent—one person.) Among Christians and Yazidis and other non-Muslims, females lucky or unlucky enough to survive an ISIS attack and come into the group’s custody are sold as slaves, often sex slaves passed from one ISISite to another. Ten-year-olds fetch the best prices.

Said Mr. Obama: “[J]ust as it is the responsibility of Muslims around the world to root out misguided ideas that lead to radicalization, it is the responsibility of all Americans, of every faith, to reject discrimination. It is our responsibility to reject religious tests on who we admit into this country. It’s our responsibility to reject proposals that Muslim-Americans should somehow be treated differently. Because when we travel down that road, we lose. That kind of divisiveness, that betrayal of our values plays into the hands of groups like ISIL.” The Obama administration, like the Roosevelt administration in the case of the MS/SS St. Louis—Jews fleeing Hitler—is using religious neutrality as an excuse to look the other way. If you stand up for human rights, you’re a “bigot” and a subject of ridicule by Obama & Co.

 

Outlaw certain types of guns. These are guns that leftists sometimes refer to as “assault weapons” (a category of firearm that does not exist) and sometimes as assault rifles (a type of gun that has been illegal in the U.S., except in extremely rare cases, for 70 years). During the lifetime of President Obama, no legally-purchased assault rifle has been used in a crime in the United States. The guns used by the San Bernardino terrorists were the most popular type of handgun in the world and the most popular type of rifle in the U.S.; neither the handguns nor the rifles were automatic weapons like machine guns.

And California already has laws banning various weapons that the Left wrongly calls “assault weapons.” The Left calls California-type gun laws “commonsense” and “sensible.” Last week, following the murder of 14 in San Bernardino, California, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-California) declared that “the fact is, sensible gun laws work. We’ve proven it in California.”

 

Take away a person’s right to buy a gun if he or she is on the “no-fly” list. That’s a secret list of supposedly suspicious people that has included Weekly Standard/Fox News contributor Stephen Hayes, Timothy Noah of Slate (now of Politico), and the late Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Massachusetts). According to a recent Inspector General report, the larger, similar Terror Watch List includes 72 staffers at the Obama administration’s Department of Homeland Security. The San Bernardino terrorists were on no such list. (Tashfeen Malik, in fact, passed the U.S. government’s careful, intense vetting process while using a fake address on  her visa application.)

The list is made up largely of people who are deemed suspicious because of their connections with Muslim groups, which, as the President and his allies point out, have nothing to do with terrorism. (Clinton: “Muslims are peaceful and tolerant and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.”) The no-fly list is something that the Obama people used to count among the civil liberties violations perpetrated by a man they consider both an evil mastermind and an idiot, George W. Bush.

Georgetown Law professor Laura Donohue wrote that the no-fly list came to the attention of the public when “prominent antiwar activists, such as Jan Adams and Rebecca Gordan, and political opponents of the Bush administration, such as Senator Edward Kennedy and the civil rights attorney David Cole, found themselves included.”

The New York Times noted that “A 2007 audit found that more than half of the 71,000 names then on the no-fly list were wrongly included.”

Remember Cat Stevens? He was the honored guest at that big Washington rally led by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, an event that was styled as a parody of a Tea Party rally. Lee Smith wrote in the Weekly Standard in 2010 (http://www.weeklystandard.com/anti-anti-islamism/article/516691 ):

When Cat Stevens was introduced at Jon Stewart’s recent “Rally to Restore Sanity,” the musician also known by his Muslim name Yusuf Islam was greeted with warm applause and howls of approval. It was a strange reception coming from a culturally savvy, mostly twentysomething audience, for while Stevens’s songs are a staple in the 1970s schlock-folk canon, he is best known these days for having supported Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa demanding the execution of novelist Salman Rushdie.

Stevens has tried to whitewash his record over the years, without ever acknowledging or apologizing for his comments, including his response to a British interviewer’s question as to whether he would attend a demonstration to burn an effigy of the writer; Stevens answered glibly that he “hoped that it’d be the real thing.” “I don’t know why no one in that crowd booed Stevens, or heckled him when he was introduced,” says the British author Nick Cohen, who was in contact with Rushdie after the rally. “Rushdie phoned Stewart, who said he was sorry if it upset him, but it was clear Stewart didn’t really care.”

Presumably what mattered to Stewart and the rally’s cosponsor Stephen Colbert was less Stevens’s willingness to join in the bloodlust of the Islamic Republic of Iran (the fatwa has been reaffirmed by Iran’s current supreme leader, Ali Khamenei) than the fact that Stevens/Islam had been put on a no-fly list by the Bush administration. Never mind that the folk singer had been identified as having donated to a Muslim charity with ties to Hamas; anyone considered unfriendly by Bush is an ally.

 

Or course, leftists jump at every opportunity to push new laws related to guns. It’s their fetish, their knee-jerk solution for every problem, akin to Republicans’ tendency to propose tax cuts as a cure-all for economic problems (not that taxes shouldn’t be cut, of course). Leftists run to the podium with their pre-fab proposals every time there’s a rash of shootings (not counting gang-related shootings of African-Americans or Latinos, about which leftists couldn’t care less).

Leftists can’t do anything about dangerously insane people wandering the streets (because the Left, largely through the ACLU, made it nearly impossible to lock them up); they can’t do anything about the gun-free zones that attract terrorists and crazies alike (because Starbucks-drinking liberals like gun-free zones); they can’t do anything about the news media coverage that glorifies glory-seeking mass-shooters and primes the pump for the next shootings (because they need the coverage in order to strike fear in people’s hearts and make the National Rifle Association into villains). But they have down-to-a-science the process for demanding gun laws that have absolutely nothing to do with people’s safety and everything to do with politics.

 

…and the final element of their plan for dealing with ISIS:

Stop praying. ’Cause praying is the problem.

sja deception blog NYDailyNews and two congressmen attack prayer 151207 prayer-shaming

That’s the front page of the New York Daily News, along with tweets from Zack Ford of ThinkProgress, which is an arm of the Clinton organization, and from Senator Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut).

“Stop thinking”? Thanks for the advice, Zack.

 

—-

 

Another thing…

Here’s another front page from the bigoted New York Daily News. Can you spot the trick?

sja deception blog NYDailyNews Wayne LaPierre Holmes et al as terrorists 151207 Screen-Shot-2015-12-04-at-8.33.45-AM

 

No, the trick is not just that Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association is branded a terrorist (lower right), presumably for his support of Article 2 of the Bill of Rights. (For those who came in late, LaPierre supports Americans’ right to possess guns for hunting animals or defending themselves from criminals, which means that, as far as the kooks are concerned, he’s responsible for the acts of Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik—because, I suppose, the terrorist couple, who amassed some 7,000 rounds of ammunition and 15 pipe bombs, would not have been able to arm themselves if those “common sense gun safety laws” the President talks about had been in effect.)

Look at the pictures. See the trick?

The trick is that the Daily News includes, on a list of terrorists, the mass-shooters from Newtown, Connecticut and Aurora, Colorado, both of whom were out of their minds and not terrorists. (A terrorist is someone who uses violence against civilians to instill fear among the populace, in pursuit of political or religious objectives, or is affiliated with a group that uses such a strategy.) The News also lists the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood shooter as a terrorist, which remains to be seen, depending mostly on whether he was rational enough to formulate a motive.

By characterizing the Newtown and Aurora shooters, along with political activist LaPierre, as terrorists, the Daily News deliberately and methodically attempts to confuse people about the threat of terrorism. Likewise, the New York Times, in an editorial Saturday, lied, “Let’s be clear: These spree killings are all, in their own ways, acts of terrorism.”

The Obamaite media downplay the threat, and line themselves up with the President, who may believe that more attacks are on the way and is desperate to make his political adversaries somehow responsible for the horror to come.

The President falsely claimed during the 2012 campaign that Al Qaeda was “on the run” (see http://capitalresearch.org/2014/09/this-is-what-al-qaeda-on-the-run-looks-like/ ). He falsely characterized ISIS as a “Jayvee team”—not a serious threat—and he claimed, a few hours before the Paris attack, that ISIS had been “contained.” Now he and his allies are trying to turn the fight against ISIS into a fight against Republicans and the NRA.

That sound you hear is the laughter of a man named Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

 

 

 

 

Dr. Steven J. Allen

A journalist with 45 years’ experience, Dr. Allen served as press secretary to U.S. Senator Jeremiah Denton and as senior researcher for Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign. He earned a master’s…
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