ISIS Strikes Again, Border Warnings, Jihadi High, Stop The Self-Delusion

Steven J. Sotloff | 2010.
Credit: Mazen Mahdi
via New York Times report

by Gary L. Bauer, Contributing Author: Breaking News - ISIS has released a video purportedly showing the beheading of a second American journalist, Steven Sotloff. ISIS has released a video purportedly showing the beheading of a second American journalist, Steven Sotloff. The jihadist taunted Obama in this video. In that sense, he is a lot like Putin, who regularly taunts the president while he continues his murderous ways in Ukraine. More and more we are seeing that a foreign policy based on reciting "Give peace a chance," doesn't work well in the real world.

NBC reports that Pentagon officials were "apoplectic" over Obama's comment that we are lacking a strategy to deal with ISIS. Why might that be? According to Fox News, Obama has been receiving briefings about ISIS for a year but never followed up or requested additional information.

Border Warnings - As Americans kicked off the Labor Day weekend, a number of conservative news outlets and organizations were reporting stark warnings from federal and state border officials. They were on alert due to intelligence indicating that ISIS, cooperating with drug cartels, might launch car bomb attacks across the border from Ciudad Juarez, next to El Paso.

The Obama Administration said only that it was not aware of any immediate threat. But Fox News reported that "Islamic State militants are keenly aware of the porous U.S.-Mexico border." We can see on the nightly news what happens to nations with porous borders.

By the way, it's not just the borders we need to be worried about. Our entire immigration system is "porous." The federal government has apparently "lost track of more than 6,000 foreign nationals" who came here on student visas. It is beyond breathtaking that 13 years after 9/11 this still remains a major homeland security problem.

Meanwhile, a major Al Qaeda publication has threatened attacks in Las Vegas, Times Square and at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado. All this is happening amid growing concerns in Europe and the U.S. that Westerners are joining jihadist groups and then returning home with combat skills. (See next item.)

Jihadi High - As we reported last week, two former students at Robbinsdale Cooper High School, located in a suburb of Minneapolis, converted to Islam, joined radical groups and died fighting with Islamists on foreign battlefields. They may not be the only jihadists from Robbinsdale Cooper. In 2013, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that a Syrian sniper had been filmed wearing a Robbinsdale Cooper Hawks sweatshirt. That raises the possibility that this single school has produced three jihadists.

No doubt the great majority of graduates from Robbinsdale Cooper are good Americans. But what are the influences in this particular community, which appears to be breeding jihadists? These two individuals have been glibly written off as merely "losers." But that is not a sufficient explanation for why these converts to Islam traveled halfway across the world to join the jihadists of ISIS.

If several boys had graduated from a Birmingham or Biloxi high school and went on to become KKK thugs, there would be an understandable interest in finding out what, if anything, might have been going on at that high school that would cause not one, not two, but perhaps three boys to go down that road of hatred and violence. I suspect there would be considerable media interest in going to the school and interviewing students and teachers. Perhaps it is worth taking a look.

Minnesota's Twin Cities are a stronghold of the secular, radical left. The area is also increasingly a hotbed of radical Islamism. Both worldviews are defined by their hostility to Western civilization and our Judeo-Christian values.

Stop The Self-Delusion - Three churches in Columbus, Indiana, were vandalized over the weekend. The word "Infidels" and various Koranic verses were spray painted in prominent locations. An investigation is underway and the story is troubling on its face. But something else in the reporting caught my attention.

Doug Marcotte, a priest at near-by Saint Bartholomew's Catholic Church, told one local news outlet, "Is this some sort of nasty prank? Is this someone that's trying to incite people against Muslims?"

We don't know who did this. But given the headlines around the world of beheadings, crucifixions, forced conversions, church bombings and attacks on synagogues, I am not sure why Father Marcotte's first reaction to the defacing of the churches is to speculate that someone may be trying to smear Islam.

In recent years, across Europe and increasingly in the U.S., churches and synagogues have been the targets of vandalism. The perpetrators have often been either heavily involved in Satanism and the occult or Islamists.

Father Doug Marcotte also said, "Is there somebody that really believes this, that we're all infidels, so they felt the need to write it all over our church?" With all due respect, father, as we have seen from the news today the answer is yes!

It seems to me that Father Marcotte's reaction is more evidence of why we are in such deep trouble: Too many of our political and cultural elites are in denial about the threat we face.

Sadly, I believe it is likely if we continue down the road we are now traveling that Christians and Jews in America, sooner than we think, will see our places of worship bombed and burned by the jihadists of Islamism.
-------------
Gary Bauer is a conservative family values advocate and serves as president of American Values and chairman of the Campaign for Working Families

---

Tags: ISIS, ISIS Strikes Again, Border Warnings, Jihadi High, Stop The Self-Delusion, Gary Bauer, Campaign for Working Families To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service. and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!