The Paris attacks exposed not only the vulnerabilities of free societies and weaknesses in our immigration, refugee and security policies, but also the insanity of the left-wing mind.

For example, Secretary of State John Kerry suggested [Tuesday] that there was some “rationale” behind the January attacks on the Charlie Hebdo headquarters. Here’s the quote:

“There’s something different about what happened [on Friday] from Charlie Hebdo… There was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of — not a legitimacy — but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, ‘Okay, they’re really angry because of this or that.’ This Friday was absolutely indiscriminate.”

What Kerry does not understand is that Friday’s attacks were not indiscriminate. They had a “rationale” behind them. They were carried out by a death cult that will kill the infidel anytime, anywhere he can be found.

Obama Does It Again

President Obama continued his petulant attacks on critics of his refugee policy during a press conference in the Philippines [yesterday]. “We are not well served when, in response to a terrorist attack, we descend into fear and panic,” Obama said. “Apparently they [conservatives] are scared of widows and orphans coming into the United States of America.”

Has anyone told the president about the woman who tried to blow up Paris police officers [Wednesday] morning? Has he seen the videos out of Gaza featuring children being trained in jihad? Has he missed the photos of children holding severed heads while their proud jihadist fathers laugh? Can he be anymore clueless?

But Obama wasn’t done. “When individuals say we should have a religious test and that only Christians, proven Christians, should be admitted, that’s offensive.” Earlier he labeled such recommendations “shameful.”

Let me breakdown Mr. Obama’s remarks.

• We know from U.N. statistics that the vast majority of migrants entering Europe are Muslim men, not women and orphans. Many claiming to be Syrian war refugees are not Syrian.

• The director of the FBI and the secretary of Homeland Security have publicly acknowledged the severe limitations on vetting these refugees. By the way, Obama’s secretary of defense says we need to be watching our southern border too.

• One ISIS operative has claimed that “more than 4,000 covert ISIS gunmen had made it into western nations, hidden among innocent refugees.” Turkish authorities [yesterday] detained eight “refugees” at the Istanbul airport suspected of being ISIS fighters.

• According to one analysis, nearly 70 individuals have been arrested in America and charged with supporting ISIS, including several “refugees.” Remember the Boston Marathon bombers, the Tsarnaev brothers? They came here as refugees. They became killers.

• When the president says we don’t have religious tests for refugee policies, he’s wrong. The Jackson-Vanik amendment in the 1970s pressured the Soviet Union to allow Jews to emigrate. The Lautenberg amendment adopted in 1989 was meant to assist Jews fleeing parts of the former Soviet Union. It was expanded in recent years to help Jews, Christians and other religious minorities escape Iran.



What is shameful and offensive are accusations that those raising legitimate concerns about our national security are un-American.




Left-Wing Arguments



President Obama also argued that calls for a moratorium on refugees from Syria were a “potent recruitment tool for [ISIS].” That is utterly absurd!



Legitimate refugees are refugees because they have seen Hamas, Hezbollah and ISIS kill, rape and behead people. Muslims in the Middle East are not waking up one morning and deciding to wage jihad over U.S. refugee policy.



It is just as ludicrous as left’s oft-repeated claim that Gitmo is a recruiting tool. Radical Islamists do not care about due process of law. On the weekend Parisians died by the scores, Obama released five more prisoners from Gitmo. Clearly, that gesture of goodwill didn’t cause the militants to reconsider their plans.



ISIS is recruiting more jihadists because of its success in killing infidels. Just consider the events of the past three weeks: ISIS took down a Russian airliner on October 31st. On November 12th, ISIS carried out twin suicide bombings in Beirut. A day later, it struck Paris. Far from being “contained,” as Obama said, ISIS is on the march.



I want to revisit an incredible column that ran in The Atlantic earlier this year. (I will come back to this article in the days ahead too.) The author interviewed an Australian Muslim, Musa Cerantonio, who had tried to join the Islamic State but was stopped by security officials.

Cerantonio told the reporter about “the joy he felt when” ISIS declared its caliphate. “I saw the declaration on television,” Cerantonio said. “And I was just amazed, and I’m like, ‘Why am I stuck here in this bloody room?’”



What is attracting ISIS recruits is not our refugee policy or our prison in Cuba, but the administration’s unwillingness to actually destroy the Islamic State — a huge magnet attracting radical Muslims to jihad.

About That Vetting Process…



There is a shocking video of a soccer game between Greece and Turkey that was held in Istanbul [Tuesday]. The overwhelmingly Muslim audience booed during a moment of silence recognizing the Paris attacks and chanted, “Allahu akbar.”



For the sake of argument, let’s assume there were just five people in this crowd of thousands who might actually take up an AK-47 and attack a shopping mall. Now assume we’re facing a wave of immigration from Turkey but we’ve got technology that allows us to identify those five potential terrorists so we can prevent them from entering the country.

That is what President Obama is essentially telling us — that his bureaucrats can so narrow the refugee vetting process that any concerns we might have about security are shameful and offensive.

But here’s the key question: What about the jihadi sympathizers? Do we really want any of the other people in the stadium whose hatred of the West is so profound that they booed a moment of silence for the Paris dead?



Just what is the clearance process that weeds out the thousands who harbor shameful and offensive anti-Semitic, anti-Christian and anti-American hatred?