Why fight the terrorists when you can fight law-abiding Americans instead?
In March of this year, the director of National Intelligence told CNN that ISIS “could conjure up a raid like they did in Paris or Brussels.” The Orlando shootings proved him right. Consider a few of the events that led up to that terrible attack.
In 2009, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad killed an Army soldier and wounded another in Little Rock. Later that year, Major Nidal Hasan murdered 13 soldiers in Ft. Hood, Texas. In 2011, Arid Uka murdered two U.S. airmen in Frankfurt, Germany. In 2013, the Boston Marathon bombings left three dead and nearly 200 wounded. Zaim Farouq Abdul-Malik attacked four NYPD officers with a hatchet in 2014. Alton Alexander Nolton beheaded a fellow employee and stabbed another in Oklahoma the same year. The list goes on.
The tie that binds here isn’t lack of gun control, as congressional Democrats have it. These attacks are global. They happen in places with very tight gun restrictions, such as France and Germany. And they involve a wide spectrum of weapons, from knives (in the 2014 beheading in Oklahoma) to high explosives (in the Boston Marathon attacks).
Put gun control aside for a moment. Or put it aside permanently, as it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with terrorism. Terror attacks that are now on the rise globally have two things in common. First, the motivations are political and religious. The attacks are almost uniformly inspired by ISIS, to advance its dream of a new global caliphate; before ISIS, al-Qaeda’s vision was the spark. Second, the perpetrators have either no regard for the rule law or outright revulsion for it. And why would they? Terrorism in and of itself is . . . against the law.
Here’s something congressional Democrats should consider. Only 40 of 188 House Democrats voted for the National Defense Authorization Act last month.
The bill is a cornucopia of tools used by our military to fight global terrorism. It grants the needed authorization and resources to combat global terrorism. It arms our partners, including the Kurds and Jordanians. It funds training programs with regional military forces, so that they can hit terrorists within their borders. It funds our national intelligence apparatus, our first line of defense against new attacks. Most important, it funds Operation Inherent Resolve, the war against ISIS.
Nearly 80 percent of House Democrats voted against it.
If Nancy Pelosi and company believe all these goofy lines about “no-guns for terrorists,” it reflects either a stunning naïveté about the nature of the threat or a willful political calculation to turn national tragedy to their advantage.
Look at what happened after the Islamic attack on the Texas art gallery: A terrorist attack on the First Amendment was answered with a Democratic attack on the Second.
Make no mistake: Democrats indulge in their gun-control fantasy to the determinant of our national security. They are now staging an adolescent sit-in as the fight against ISIS intensifies, while the hydra grows new heads, and while new attacks are being carried out worldwide.
The gun-control distraction would almost be tolerable if Democrats showed some interest in actual methods to stop Islamic terrorism. Instead, they often vote against them. When U.S. military commanders came to the Hill and warned that defense cuts would cost American lives, did congressional Democrats obstruct regular order and camp out on the House floor, for the troops’ benefit? When Marines had to salvage jet parts from museums to keep their planes airworthy, did Democrats seize all the microphones on the House floor in protest? When Americans again started coming home to us from Iraq in cedar boxes, did they stage a social-media riot? When you fight a war, you want the government to be unified. You want a common goal with shared objectives. You want all parties to come together to fight a common enemy.
It may be counterproductive to point fingers here, and I take no joy in saying it. But the Democrats are making that damn hard right now. It is Democrats, the same ones with their rears parked on the House floor, who have voted to cut the defense budget. It is Democratic policies that have dumped billions into the world’s foremost terrorist organization, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, by virtue of the Iran deal. It is Democrats who voted to strip our military forces of needed equipment and the legal authorities required to strangle terrorism at the source.
ISIS-inspired stabbings, bombings, murders, rapes, and decapitations are erupting around the globe. And we’re to believe that banning AR-15s in Mobile, Ala., will solve the problem? Maybe Democrats will throw in increased Planned Parenthood funding and more EPA administrators when they broadcast their list of demands, though they have about as much to do with stopping ISIS attacks as more gun control does.
President Obama said himself that “the brutality of the terrorists of Syria and Iraq forces us to look into the heart of darkness.” Congressional Democrats have looked into the heart of darkness, and they decided it would be easier to fight the NRA instead.
— John Noonan was national security-adviser to the presidential campaigns of Governors Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney. Follow him on Twitter @noonanjo.
Source: National Review
