The Bookworm Beat 12-9-15 — the “15 minute” roundup and open thread

I have fifteen minutes before I have to abandon my computer for a while. Let’s see how much I can share with you:

Yes, Syrians are a terror threat

One of the things I absolutely hate about Leftists is their pretended or real inability to distinguish motives from actions. It’s this moral blindness that allowed Michael Moore to compare Islamic terrorists to America’s Revolutionary War Minutemen: “The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not ‘insurgents’ or ‘terrorists’ or ‘The Enemy.’ They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen….”

Moore and his ilk are too stupid to see or too evil to admit that, just because someone wages war against a larger, or established power, that doesn’t mean the person waging war is fighting for a good cause. There’s a big difference between an insurgent group fighting to enslave people to a theocratic tyranny and an insurgent group fighting to liberate people from a monarchic tyranny. Motives matter.

This is why I find so infuriating the endless Leftist comparison between Syrian refugees and groups of people subject to historical discrimination. There was no evidence whatsoever that Holocaust era Jews, en masse, had a burning desire to destroy America. There was no evidence whatsoever that Irish Catholics were intent upon planting bombs across America. There was evidence that Iranians were a problem, so Jimmy Carter banned them to protests from . . . nobody.

While there are many innocent Syrians, the reality is that (a) Muslims really do hate us, and in dangerous numbers, and (b) Syrian Muslims really hate us, in a weaponized way.

On generalized Muslim hatred, David French explains that the hatred is like a pyramid of increased loathing:

To understand the Muslim edifice of hate, imagine it as a pyramid — with broadly-shared bigotry at the bottom, followed by stair steps of escalating radicalism — culminating in jihadist armies that in some instances represent a greater share of their respective populations than does the active-duty military in the United States.

The base of the pyramid, the most broadly held hatred in the Islamic world, is anti-Semitism, with staggering numbers of Muslims expressing anti-Jewish views. In 2014, the Anti-Defamation League released the results of polling 53,100 people in 102 countries for evidence of anti-Semitic attitudes and beliefs. The numbers from the majority-Muslim world are difficult to believe for those steeped in politically correct rhetoric about Islam. A full 74 percent of North African and Middle Eastern residents registered anti-Semitic beliefs, including 92 percent of Iraqis, a whopping 69 percent of relatively secular Turks, and 74 percent of Saudis.

The trend toward Muslim anti-Semitism continues even when Muslim nations are far removed from the Arab–Israeli conflict. A solid majority — 61 percent — of majority-Muslim Malays harbor anti-Semitic attitudes, while only 13 percent of neighboring majority-Buddhist Thais are anti-Jewish.

The next level of the pyramid is Muslim commitment to deadly Islamic supremacy. In multiple Muslim nations, overwhelming majorities of Muslims support the death penalty for apostasy or blasphemy. Collectively, this means that hundreds of millions of men and women support capital punishment for the exercise of the basic human rights of freedom of expression and free exercise of religion….

[snip]

Moving beyond Islamic supremacy to the next step of the pyramid, enormous numbers of Muslims are terrorist sympathizers. It is still stunning to see how popular Osama bin Laden was early last decade, and even as his popularity plunged (as he grew weaker and more isolated), his public approval remained disturbingly high….

[snip]

But what about ISIS — the world’s most savage and deadly terror organization? The latest polling data show that while a majority of Muslims reject ISIS, extrapolating from the populations of polled countries alone shows that roughly 50 million people express sympathy for a terrorist army that burns prisoners alive, throws gay men from buildings, and beheads political opponents. In Pakistan a horrifying 72 percent couldn’t bring themselves to express an unfavorable view of ISIS….

And the hatred gets worse from there, although it’s somewhat more difficult to quantify, other than through looking at fundraising and mass terrorist attacks.

The Muslim Syrians (not the Christian ones) that Obama so desperately wants to introduce in America have already climbed high up that hatred pyramid:

Syria is a terror state. It didn’t become that way overnight because of the Arab Spring or the Iraq War.

Its people are not the victims of American foreign policy, Islamic militancy or any of the other fashionable excuses. They supported Islamic terrorism. Millions of them still do.

They are not the Jews fleeing a Nazi Holocaust. They are the Nazis trying to relocate from a bombed out Berlin.

These are the cold hard facts.

ISIS took over parts of Syria because its government willingly allied with it to help its terrorists kill Americans in Iraq. That support for Al Qaeda helped lead to the civil war tearing the country apart.

The Syrians were not helpless, apathetic pawns in this fight. They supported Islamic terrorism.

A 2007 poll showed that 77% of Syrians supported financing Islamic terrorists including Hamas and the Iraqi fighters who evolved into ISIS. Less than 10% of Syrians opposed their terrorism.

Why did Syrians support Islamic terrorism? Because they hated America.

So, no, Syrians are not German Jews.  The equivalence is false — which is pretty much par for the course when the Left tries to sell you something you intuitively know is wrong.  Syrians are not freedom seekers; they are freedom destroyers.

Not all American shootings are created equal

When blacks kill blacks, the media says nary a word about gun control.  Heck, the media barely mentions the murder — and Obama doesn’t say that we need more gun control.  The reality is that blacks are killing blacks (something that cannot be mentioned) in regions that have the most gun control of all (something else that cannot be mentioned).  As always, the media lies, either directly, through affirmative misstatements, or indirectly, through silence.

Yes, Muslims do have to condemn terrorism

In the wake of Muslim terrorism, you always get myriad stories about Muslims who are scared of backlashes that never come.  You also get myriad stories about self-righteous Muslims saying “How dare you hate me, personally, just because I’m a Muslim?  I, personally, am a good person.”  What you never get are stories of Muslims saying “I am ashamed to be a Muslim today.”  All you get are CAIR statements saying it’s not their fault and, if they can, blaming America.  One Muslim writer says it’s just not fair to expect Muslims to condemn other Muslims:

Each time a violent attack is perpetrated by Muslims, the entire (billion-plus) Muslim population is essentially forced to distance themselves from it.

This collective responsibility is almost never projected on the communities of Christian, particularly white, male, mass murderers. Robert Dear, who killed three and injured nine people last week at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado, was described as a “gentle loner” in one draft of a New York Times story — and despite his avowed evangelical Christian background, American Christians were never asked to publicly condemn his actions.

Dear Dodo:  The reason Christians are never asked to publicly condemn these actions is because Christians immediately voluntarily condemn the actions.  Oh, and the other thing is that Christians don’t have murder as one of their central tenets.  Just saying….

If you see something, say something

The San Bernardino terrorists’ neighbors knew something was going on, but were too fearful of being called racists (or, in Loretta Lynch’s America, of being prosecuted as racists) to say something.  For the time being at least, that’s not the case in Israel.

More later….