Radical Islamic Terrorism, This Time Around

There should be some respectful and contemplative pause between such horrible carnage as occurred over the weekend in Florida and the inevitable and necessary political debates that always follow, but that no longer seems possible. With the death toll yet to be tallied, the all too familiar arguments are already being advanced.

This time around it’s difficult for the left to state its usual case. The murders of at least 50 people at an Orlando nightclub already sets a record for the deadliest mass shooting in American history, which would ordinarily cause many of the more prominent media and the predictable politicians to amplify their ritual calls for further gun control laws, but as usual none of their proposals wouldn’t have done anything to prevent the murders and in this case it’s far, far more complicated than that. The nightclub where the murders occurred catered to a homosexual clientele, the murderer made clear that he was motivated by his murderously anti-homosexual Islamic beliefs and his fealty to the Islamic State terror organization that has lately been inflicting such horrors on the homosexuals and the Christians and more peaceable Muslims and many others sorts of similarly sympathetic people in a the wide swath of the Middle East it now commands. Thus the President of the United States who lit the White House in the rainbow colors of the homosexual rights movement to celebrate same-sex marriage and dismissed the Islamic State as a “jayvee” team” of terrorism and insists there’s no such thing as radical Islamic terrorism and that at any rate the Koran doesn’t say about homosexuality what that mass murderer read in its plain text and has declared the future should not belong to those who slander the Prophet Muhammad finds himself arguing about gun control from a muddled position.

Even the most polite press media are now obliged to acknowledge that the Islamic State is proudly and credibly blaming credit for the mass murder on American soil, even the president and the rest of the government officials at every level are openly calling it an act of terrorism of some undefined sort of another, and there’s also the unavoidable matter that the killer not only passed those much-ballyhooed background checks for a weapons purchase but also for a position in the federal government, and that his outspoken anti-homosexual Islamic views somehow exempted him from official scrutiny even after two investigations by federal authorities. The recent Secretary of State and presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, who has fancied herself a fearless defender of homosexual rights for the past few years it’s been so popular, finds herself a similarly muddled situation.

Meanwhile, the presumptive Republican nominee, real-estate-and-gambling-and-strip-joint-and-professional-wrestling-and-scam-university-and-reality show mogul Donald J. Trump, has staked out what is at least a clearer stand. He’s on record on for wiping out the killer’s family and torturing anyone suspected of being involved with him and banning even the people with more peaceable notions of Islam from entering the country, and he’s used barnyard profanity to describe the bombings he’d inflict on the Islamic State, and although he’s backtracked all the crazy talk about ordering war crimes and how the military would bend to his will if he did, and although he’s also talked about out-sourcing that Islamic State problem to the alluringly strong Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, he still somehow comes off at the stronger horse to an understandably horrified public.

As we pray for those poor souls who suffered in the weekend’s massacre, we’d like to think that some more sensible solution could be found in a respectful and contemplative pause between such horrors and our nation’s response, but that no longer seems possible.

— Bud Norman

The Quarterback Scores

At the risk of sounding un-American, we will confess we’ve paid virtually no attention to football this past season. That’s partly because all the domestic abuse scandals and head injury lawsuits and offensive team name controversies and all the resulting litigation and moralizing grew so tedious, and partly because the Wichita Heights High School Falcons and the University of Oklahoma Sooners and the Kansas City Chiefs were all knocked out of championship contention way back when the early autumn weather was still warm. So complete is our indifference at this point that we’ve barely even noticed the pre-Super Bowl brouhaha about deflated balls, but we were heartened to hear the New England Patriots’ Tom Brady tell a massive throng of reporters that “This isn’t ISIS.”

The excessively handsome quarterback was widely criticized for the comment, but we’ve yet to hear any of his critics explain why a wee bit of air pressure that might or might not have been removed from the game balls in last weekend’s conference championship is as newsworthy as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Some explanation is called for, given that ISIS continues its head-chopping, crucifying, genocidal romp across an Indiana-sized swathe of the Middle East, and that a slightly softer football could hardly account for the game’s lopsided result in any case. We’re also grateful to Brady for getting ISIS back in the news, as it’s lately been edged out by such fare as sports scores and the surfeit of white folks honored with Academy Award nominations.

So little attention has been paid to ISIS lately that President Barack Obama was able to boast in his State of the Union address that an American-led coalition has stopped the terror gang’s advances without drawing a derisive laugh from his audience. That claim is not corroborated by any press reports we’ve been able to hunt down, and will surely come as a surprise to the unfortunate residents of Mosul and Fallujah and numerous other cities that once enjoyed the protection of American troops but are now beleaguered by ISIS’ murderous gangs, and is acknowledged as a falsehood by Pentagon officials, but that’s easily overlooked when there’s a charge afoot that a professional football team might have deflated a ball. The president further claimed that Russia’s aggression in Ukraine has been halted, that Iran has halted its nuclear weapons program in gratitude for the president’s protection from economic sanctions, and that he somehow deserves credit for America’s recent oil boom, but until some photogenic sports star draws attention to such balderdash it will also go largely unnoticed.

At least the president didn’t repeat last year’s boasts about his successes in Yemen, where another terror gang has lately taken high government officials hostage and American warships are readying to evacuate America’s diplomatic personnel, but he probably could have gotten away with that as well. There’s a Super Bowl coming up, and a too-white Academy Awards ceremony after that, some celebrity or another is bound to be getting a divorce a sex-change operation, sooner or later someone will get around to grousing about such a jingoistic team name as “Patriots,” and America has its priorities.

— Bud Norman