Can You Shave an Islamist’s Beard With Occam’s Razor?

Not if the barber is Barack Obama. Two days after it was blindingly obvious that the atrocity of San Bernardino was a terrorist attack carried out by Islamists, Obama clung to the possibility that this was workplace violence (yeah, of the Nidal Hasan variety). He also grudgingly admitted that it was possibly terrorism, but even then he would not speak its name. Rather than name the specific ideology that inspired this brutal act, Obama retreated to his usual circumlocution of “people succumbing to violent extremist ideologies.” Then he descended into the vapidity of calling for more gun control: after all, no crisis should go to waste, right?

Truth be told: gun control will do nothing to impede people like Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, who broke numerous state and federal firearms and explosives laws, and who engaged in an attack that they knew would certainly result in their deaths. Such people (and I use that term loosely) are extremely infra marginal demanders of firearms and bombs. The increase in the cost of obtaining these instruments of mass mayhem caused by any even remotely plausible gun laws would still put that cost below their very high willingness to pay, and if they are not deterred by the prospect of violent death, the punishment for violating gun laws is clearly not going to deter them either.

Although Obama has seen fit to lecture us in the aftermath of Charleston, Sandy Hook, Ferguson, and even Louis Gates, for Christ’s sake, his statements in the aftermath of San Bernardino were limited primarily to his weekly radio address, recorded before he went to party down at the White House holiday party, with, among others, BLM luminary Deray McKesson. Priorities, you know.

One of the obvious early tells of the Islamist nature of the attack was that mere hours after Farook had been identified, his family members were participating in a press conference with Muslim Brotherhood front organization CAIR. Another tell came yesterday, when the Farook family’s scumbag lawyers gave a press conference that can be summarized as: “Who is the real victim here?” Hint: Farook, Malik and Muslims generally. After all, somebody teased Farook about his beard, and that might have set him off.

The administration picked up the victimhood narrative, with Attorney General Lynch saying that  her “greatest fear” is the “incredibly disturbing rise of anti-Muslim rhetoric” and promising to prosecute speech that “edges towards violence” (whatever the hell that means). So, along with trashing the Second Amendment, the administration has its sights set on the First. No doubt the 5th can be jettisoned too, if guns or politically incorrect speech are involved.

No doubt the administration’s denial of reality and its attempt to suppress speech has many causes. For one, San Bernardino totally contradicts the administration’s narrative on terrorism. For another, it creates serious problems for the administration’s plans to bring in large numbers of Syrian refugees. Within a few hours of her being named, Tafsheen Malik’s numerous family connections to Islamists in her home country of Pakistan and her adopted country of Saudi Arabia were documented. Pakistani intelligence said that the family had well known extremist connections: Now they tell us. Her father was an extremely conservative and rabidly anti-Shia immigrant to Saudi Arabia.

Yet the State Department and the immigration authorities failed to uncover these facts in their investigations of potential terrorism connections before granting her a fiancee visa. So yes, we can’t vet someone who has lived in countries with functioning governments that are (allegedly) our allies, but we can evaluate the risk of tens of thousands of people coming from a country embroiled in a  civil war, for whom it will be impossible to obtain any documentation whatsoever. And so much for the women pose no risk thing.

With Obama’s obduracy, we can expect more of the same. The demonization of domestic opposition, and the turning of a blind eye to real enemies within and without.