Would Mohamed Approve of Mohamed's Behavior?

A knife-wielding student stabbed four people on the campus of UC Merced a couple of days ago. He was identified Thursday as 18-year-old Faisal Mohammad from Santa Clara, California. Why is it so many of these terrorist incidents are committed by people named Mohammad or some derivation thereof? Mohammad apparently never developed a standard spelling for his name.


I got called on the carpet for saying that - apparently it reveals my bigotry, but that's not what I'm trying to incite here. A guy shot another guy in Lakewood and as my friend points out, his name was "Jesse". That's not the same thing at all. In that case a disturbed soldier with some serious issues shoots one guy. Single murders happen all the time and murderers have all kinds of names ranging from Bob Johnson to John DuPont. A knife attack in a school where the guy is stabbing everyone in sight? Not so much. Just seems an awful lot of mass killers (or attempted killers) of late share a common name. Even the kid with the "clock" dressed up as a bomb, who got himself arrested, invited to the White House and then moved to Qatar - home of terrorist training central, shared that same name. 

Here are a few others, just to show you what I mean:

• Chattanooga Terrorist - Mohammed Youssef Abdulazeez
• Jihadi John (DC Sniper) - Mohammed EmwaziFirst Trade Towers bombing -  Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
• Twin Towers pilot - Mohamed Atta, (surprisingly the only one named Mohammed in the bunch)
• Khobar Towers - Abdelkarim Hussein Mohammed al-Nasse along with 5 others named Mohammed
• Beltway Sniper - John Allen Muhammad
• Kenya Garrissa University - Mohamed Mohamud
• Navy Yard Shooter - Mohammed Salem
• Arkansas Recruiting Center - Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad
• Paramatta shootings - Farhad Jabar Khali Mohammad
• Nashville drive by - Mohamed Almahmmody
• Shreveport shootout with police - Mohamed Ibrahim.
• Kansas City Freeway Sniper - Mohammed Pedro Whitaker

I'm not condemning all Muslims here, but the folk involved all come from a common place. I have had good relations with my Muslim colleagues that I've worked with in the past. They are, in my experience, a peace-loving folk, so I have no experience of Muslims who chant death to America an hate us enough to blow themselves up. Still, given the rising tide of terrorist activity, I do have a problem with the fact that we as a nation are ignoring a group, whose members all share a common ethnic and religious orientation, that has declared war on us and that apparently hate us and the horse we rode in on. And I don't think it's an accident that there are an awful lot of "Mohammeds", "Abduls", "Husseins" and "Achmeds" in that group.  Might give you a hint where to look for them.

 My suggestion would be to band together with Muslims who wish to live with us in peace and declare all-out war on the forces of darkness who use that religion (or any religion) as an excuse to terrorize, murder and force others to submit to their will. I think the Muslim community would go for that. It would certainly leave a lot of empty seats in the halls of power that could be filled by honest, peace-loving Muslims. That's really the only way to do it. You have to remove the killers and give the power to honest, peaceful leaders and then you have to back them to the hilt.  You can't just pull out. Every time a terrorist organization rises up, you have to go after them with everything you're got until they are eliminated. You do that by partnering with people you know believe in peaceful coexistence. We did it in Germany and in Japan after WWII and we stood by the South Koreans after the Korean conflict. We didn't do that in Vietnam and hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese were slaughtered when South Vietnam fell to the communists.  You can't get away with destroying your enemy and then leaving a hole in the ground. You have to stay with the job and you have to assure those who help you that you are not going to go off and abandon them.

It's time for the Muslim world to choose sides and for us to make a commitment to those that choose to be with us.
 
I do realize that a comment like mine can incite bigotry in the weak-minded and that, for that reason, I probably shouldn't point out that all those killers were named Mohammed. HOWEVER, that said, we are in a war that the president is ignoring if not abetting. It's never a good idea to pretend your enemy isn't shooting at you.

One bunch of mass murderers we've seen lately are certifiably insane, and there's plenty of talk about what to do about that. Recommendations from strict gun control to loosening the laws on committing folks with severe mental illness have been put forward. This is good. We should talk about ways to prevent severely ill people from shooting their neighbors and families.

BUT, we should, also be dealing with the second problem, which is that there are terrorists among us and they are being recruited and dispatched from specific organizations who have declared war against our country. Pretending there is no war is just stupid. These organizations occupy ground throughout the Middle East and claim to be acting as the leaders of their religion. During George W. Bush's tenure, there were no Muslim attacks on the homeland after 9/11. We took the battle to them so they had no resources to send weapons and recruits here when they were barely staying alive over there.  We did a lot of good, taking out tens of thousands of jihadis and their leaders in the process. We did not, however, finish the war. President Obama simply left Iraq. It's no accident that ISIS is now set up in Iraqi territory.  I like Ben Carson's suggestion for solving the problem - to prosecute war against these people until absolute victory is won. We go to fight a real war; not a ten year police action but an all out attack with the full might and power of the free nations of the Earth.

Also, to a person, every non Muslim mass murderer in the US in the past couple of decades I have found in my research, seems to be a registered Democrat or an avowed progressive socialist, save one notable paranoid schizophrenic whose family had been trying to get him committed for years and the government wouldn't cooperate. Perhaps we need to look at the mental stability of that group instead of training our police and military incessantly to subdue an imaginary terrorist threat from the Tea Party.

In pointing out the Mohamed thing, I'm just saying that some folk out there are making Mohamed look bad.  And in case you want to point out that the Roseberg Oregon college shooter wasn't named Mohamed, that's true. Interestingly by the way, the kid hated Christianity and lined up and shot anyone who admitted he or she was a Christian in the head. So he had that whole "kill Christians" thing in common with the Jihadis who are exterminating Christians across the Middle-East. 

The thing is there are a couple of common threads in these mass shootings that it would do us well to pay attention to and to explore with the whole problem of mass murder. If we're going to reduce the incidence of this sort of violence, we're going to need some tools besides political correctness, denial and bending over backwards not to offend anybody to address the problem.  

Gun-free zones surely aren't working.

And by the way - Mohamed, if his actions and statements in the Koran are to be believed would thoroughly approve of the actions of all those Mohameds out there engaging in terrorism. I've read it in their own book. It's true that the Koran is all about peace - peace, that is, once all us infidels are dead or have submitted to Shariah law. These guys have a different definition of peace than I do.

Tom King
(c) 2015

War on Drugs/War on Terror - A Waste of Time?

If the War on Drugs created more drug users, then will the War on Terror create more terrorists?

That's one proposition being posted all over the web lately by the usual libs (liberals and libertarians).

It's flawed logic.  It's the classic propaganda ploy.  Start with a "truth" that isn't true and then extrapolate a false logic conclusion from it.  In this case, if the War on Drugs created fewer drug users, the premise would fall flat.  And there's no evidence that the war on drugs "created" any more drug users.

Reducing the supply of anything, even drugs makes that thing more expensive.  Nothing will get rid of drug use or people willing to supply drugs.  That's true, But let's look at the current administration's relentless efforts to reduce the price of oil and gas in order to raise the price and force us to reduce our consumption.  It follows that if that works, then if you deliberately reduce the supply of drugs and the price will go up and people will have to either quit or use less. 

Making it all okay and safe to peddle drugs as liberals and libertarians suggest only makes for more drug users we have to take care of in the end.  Besides, contrary to the mythology, Prohibition actually worked.  A recent article in the American Journal of Public Health argues that Prohibition actually was a success in many ways and only failed politically.  Prohibition changed the larger culture from one in which alcohol was pervasive to one in which the majority of the Prohibition-era children were raised in alcohol free homes.  It took years for alcohol consumption to rise and again become pervasive in the culture.  We're only now seeing alcoholism rising again and we will bear the health care costs that go with it if we don't continue to insist upon temperance efforts like the prohibition on advertising addictive substances like alcohol and cigarettes.  If we hope to stem the tide, history shows you have to build levees and dikes. 

Repeal was caused by political failures, the Depression and false promises of greatly increased tax revenues.  It passed, sort or, even though prohibition was still widely supported.  The rate of alcoholism remained low for some years after Repeal because many states and counties kept prohibition laws in place and alcohol had been dislodged from its once ubiquitous place in American homes.  I lived in two counties in Texas that are still "dry", 80 plus years after Prohibition. If you drink, you have to really, really want to drink in Smith and Johnson Counties. The nearest liquor store is in the next county.

Legalization didn't reduce either crime or alcoholism.  The criminals simply found other criminal activities to take up.  It became easier for folk who were already alcoholics to get booze.  But the culture that once surrounded alcohol consumption had been taken out of the mainstream in a big way.  Repeal brought some alcohol use back into the culture, but the experience of Prohibition forever attached a stigma to drinking.

In the same way repealing drug laws will only serve to make drugs more "acceptable" in American culture and make it easier for people to become drug addicts. Prohibition it turns out, did a lot of good and actually helped stem a rising tide of alcoholism in the United States that would soon have done irreparable damage to our economy and culture.  Do we really want to see the rates of alcoholism in our nation rivaled by rates of drug addiction?

With addictive substances, you can be certain that the more of it that's out there, the more addicts these substances will create.  Studies showed, for instance, that rhesus monkeys given unlimited access to cocaine, took so much they laid down, quit eating and died. That's a problem with availability. The monkeys didn't take more coke because it was denied to them.  The forbidden fruit theory only works so far as the fruit doesn't become too costly.

With terrorism, taking out the supply caches and leadership makes it harder and more expensive to conduct acts of terror.  The 9/11 operation cost Al Quaeda a good deal of money and manpower to pull off.  Without the money, the operations get tougher to do, so you get fewer terrorist attacks no matter how badly they want to carry them out.  When President Bush was pounding Al Quaeda strongholds and taking out Al Quaeda operatives, there were fewer terror attacks on Americans.  So they started blowing each other up because it was more convenient and attacking American soldiers who shoot back with deadly accuracy. 

Since Obama has let up on the war on terror, terror attacks have only increased and come home to an America perceived as weak once more.  

How many more attacks will America have to endure before the President decides we've all been punished enough for America's "sins" and starts doing something serious about it instead of merely excusing terrorism and blaming it on some video no one ever saw.

I'm just sayin'

Tom King (c) 2013