President Donald Trump played Captain Obvious when he said that if elected President, Joe Biden “will open the floodgate to radical Islamic terrorism.” The President declared that “under the Biden plan, the horrifying attacks in France will come to our cities and our towns.”
There are numerous reasons why Trump was right; yet there are also numerous reasons to believe that Joe Biden’s supporters just don’t care.
Trump also stated: “And you saw three days ago what happened, the beheading in France, and today it happened again,” referring to the beheading of a woman and murder of two other people in a French church in retaliation for France’s refusal to condemn and criminalize drawing cartoons of Muhammad.
The woman was beheaded by a Muslim migrant who had just arrived in France days before, which highlighted the relevance of Trump’s statement that “Biden wants to terminate our travel bans and surge refugees from the most dangerous places in the world.”
This is true. Biden has charged that such travel bans are “racist.” Last February he wrote: “The ‘Muslim Ban,’ this new ‘African Ban,’ Trump’s atrocious asylum and refugee policies — they are all designed to make it harder for black and brown people to immigrate to the United States. It’s that simple. They are racist. They are xenophobic.”
“It’s that simple.” National security? The importance, even necessity, of assimilation to ensure societal cohesion? Pah! The Democrats have been consistent in insisting that any concern for national security, any concern whatsoever, in connection with mass migration is “racist.”
And therein lies the key to why Trump’s warning will fall on deaf ears, at least among Democrats. The American Left says that travel bans on countries that are jihadi hotspots and limits to mass migration are preferable to Islamic terrorist attacks is “racist,” and racism is the Left’s Original Sin, the great evil from which all lesser evils emerge.
The Leftist intelligentsia is so indefatigably committed to open-borders internationalism and the eradication of the nation-state that it cannot and will not even entertain the possibility that there might be perfectly good, non-racist reasons to oppose mass migration and particularly migration from countries that cannot or will not provide adequate information about those wishing to enter.
What’s more, the average Biden voter has had it drummed it his/her/xis head for years now that opposition to jihad violence is in itself yet another form of “racism,” and that the root problem is not Islamic terrorism but “Islamophobia,” which provokes terrorism as a response. This idea has permeated all of the mainstream Left’s analysis of jihad terrorism, as major establishment media outlets have confirmed yet again recently in their coverage of the jihad beheadings in France. The New York Times ran a weepy article Thursday entitled: “After Terror Attacks, Muslims Wonder About Their Place in France.” Mehdy Belabbas, the former deputy mayor of Ivry-sur-Seine, captured the tone of the whole article when he said: “After this attack, five or six million people have to justify themselves. But we just don’t know what is expected of us.”
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Not hard to figure out, really. Muslims don’t have to “justify themselves,” but it would be refreshing and reassuring if they took some steps to head off the next beheading. Programs in mosques and Islamic schools teaching the importance of the freedom of speech and the permanent invalidity of Islamic law’s death penalty for blasphemy would be a start. The Muslims who have murdered people in France over Muhammad cartoons are getting the idea somewhere that bloodshed is an appropriate reaction to one’s religion being insulted. What is the Muslim community in France doing to address that? French Muslims are generally charging that requests that they address it at all are “racist” and “Islamophobic.”
And all the establishment media can see is that “Islamophobia.” The Associated Press, determined not to be outdone by the New York Times, opined Saturday that France is “singled out for protests and calls for boycotts across the Muslim world, and so often the target of deadly violence from the extremist margins” because of its “brutal colonial past, staunch secular policies and tough-talking president who is seen as insensitive toward the Muslim faith.”
AP here reflects the common Western assumption that whenever Muslims behave violently, it is the fault of non-Muslims. In an odd manifestation of unconscious ethnocentrism and paternalism, “journalists” such as AP’s Angela Charlton assume that Muslims are passive beings who can do nothing but react to what non-Muslims do. The possibility that they might have reasons of their own to do what they do, reasons that have nothing to do with what non-Muslims are doing, does not seem to occur to her.
Those who have more respect for Muslims as human beings understand that a key reason for the recent jihad violence in France is not memories of French colonialism, but the fact that Islam mandates death for non-Muslim subjects of the Islamic state who mention “something impermissible about Allah, the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace), or Islam” (‘Umdat al-Salik, o11.10), and such laws are based upon passages in the Hadith and Sira in which Muhammad orders the murders of people who have insulted him.
But with the Left seeing all Islamic terrorism as a reaction to “Islamophobia,” it is easy to see why they don’t care that if old Joe (and/or Kamala) gets to the Oval Office, he (or she) will “open the floodgate to radical Islamic terrorism.” Leftists will defuse that threat by being welcoming, loving, and generous toward the newcomers, and by acting against “Islamophobia” will eradicate that terrorism. Won’t they?
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 21 books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book is Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.
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