We’re just two days removed from the worst terror attack in the history of Belgium, and already the international left is guaranteeing that more Westerners will die. That’s particularly true of American leftists, who seem hell-bent on enshrining political correctness at the cost of American lives.
Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and members of the media have spent the last 24 hours fulminating against Senator Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) suggestion that law enforcement ought to focus its efforts where the terrorists are: namely, heavily Muslim communities. Here’s what Cruz said: “We need to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized.”
Obama quickly responded with his usual level of dripping, puerile virtue signaling:
As far as the notion of having surveillance of neighborhoods where Muslims are present, I just left a country that engages in that kind of neighborhood surveillance, which by the way, the father of Sen. Cruz escaped for America, the land of the free. The notion that we would start down that slippery slope makes absolutely no sense. It’s contrary to who we are. And it’s not going to help us defeat ISIL.
Obama, of course, had no such harsh words to say to the actual Cuban authorities imprisoning dissidents in order to clean up the streets for his imperial visit. Nonetheless, Hillary Clinton followed that line, as did wildly incompetent New York Mayor Bill De Blasio, who called Cruz’s comments “reprehensible.” Senator Bernie Sanders (Socialist-Loonbagia) said, “That would be unconstitutional. It would be wrong. We are fighting a terrorist organization, a barbaric organization that is killing innocent people. We are not fighting a religion.”
All of this will get Americans killed. Law enforcement resources are scarce. Utilizing them among populations unlikely to commit acts of terrorism is a surefire way to ensure more terrorism, as the authorities learned in Brussels. The Daily Beast reported this comment from a “frustrated US intelligence official”:
Even with the EU in general, there’s an infiltration of jihadists that’s been happening for two decades. And now they’re just starting to work on this. When we have to contact these people or send our guys over to talk to them, we’re essentially talking with people who are—I’m just going to put it bluntly—children. They are not pro-active, they don’t know what’s going on. They’re in such denial. It’s such a frightening thing to admit their country is being taken over.
As Cruz said, “It is standard good policing to direct your resources to where the threat is coming from. We should do the exact same thing with radical Islamic terrorism.”
Israel has utilized racial, religious and behavioral profiling for decades to tamp down terrorism. They’ve also built a massive anti-terror fence that will stretch hundreds of miles in order to prevent terrorist infiltration. All of this works. Israel is the number one target for terrorists on planet earth, and they’ve been able to decrease suicide bombings dramatically and reduce their terrorist enemies to random stabbing attacks on the streets.
France has begun to adopt the same policies in the aftermath of two devastating terror attacks inside a year. As Eli Lake reports at Bloomberg:
Since the attacks in Paris last November, the socialist government of President Francois Hollande has placed his country under a state of emergency. France’s national guard has been deployed to protect sensitive religious sites and other “soft targets.” The country of Voltaire, Diderot and Camus is in 2016 the police state that critics warn Cruz or Trump would bring about if given the chance.”
Bernard Cazeneueve, the French interior minister, said, “We are monitoring several thousand people, individuals, not all of them are necessarily terrorists.
And in New York, Michael Bloomberg utilized similar polices in a program shut down by De Blasio in 2012 as part of his Make Crime Great Again campaign. The left likes to pretend the program was ineffective, but that’s untrue. As David Marcus points out over at The Federalists, the program was “successful.” Mitchell Silber of Commentary magazine wrote about the program in 2012:
Only public locations were visited. Doing so was perfectly within the purview of the NYPD….the Demographics Unit was critical in identifying the Islamic Books and Tapes bookstore in Brooklyn as a venue for radicalization. Information the unit collected about the store provided a predicate for an investigation that thwarted a 2004 plot against the Herald Square subway station. The unit also played a role in forming the initiation of an investigation that led to the 2008 identification of Abdel Hameed Shehadeh, a New Yorker who was arrested and is currently facing federal charges for allegedly lying about his plans to travel to Afghanistan in order to kill U.S. servicemen.
The left’s allegiance to political correctness is their top priority, and it will result in body parts strewn across Western capitals. That’s why if there’s a terrorist attack anytime near a presidential election, the Republican will win – Americans just aren’t willing to frontally lobotomize themselves to basic risk assessment in order to uphold mythical fantasies about equality of terror risk among different religious populations.