Over the course of a single day this month, a pattern repeated itself across the West. Two Muslims murdered at least 15 people at a Hanukkah celebration in Sydney. Five Muslims were arrested for plotting an attack on a Christmas market in Germany. French authorities canceled a concert in Paris due to credible threats of an Islamist terror attack. Two Iowa National Guardsmen in Syria were murdered by an Islamist while we play footsie with an illegitimate regime.… Continue Reading

If anyone from a backward and unstable country could be vetted for anti-American hostility, it would have been someone like Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the Afghan national who allegedly shot two National Guardsmen in Washington, D.C., the day before Thanksgiving. He had been vetted by the CIA, worked with our military in Afghanistan, and was later approved for asylum alongside his wife and five children.

And still, he turned his gun on the very country that took him in.… Continue Reading

Who is the victim and who is the aggressor in a conflict between Bashar al-Assad’s Alawites and Sunni “rebel” terrorists in Syria? What happens when ISIS clashes with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, other al-Qaeda factions, Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army fighters, and pockets of Hezbollah militias thrown into the mix?

Under Joe Biden’s insane refugee policies, both sides can claim credible fears of religious or ethnic persecution from their rivals. As a result, we’ve allowed individuals from all these warring groups into our country to live as our neighbors.… Continue Reading

There are many people who do not like the personality of President Donald J. Trump and his unorthodox methods of communicating. Some have even gone so far as to say that they couldn’t vote for him because of his temperament and/or boorishness.

Having concerns about or aversions to President Trump’s style is understandable. You don’t have to like him. When it comes to picking the commander in chief of the United States, we believe that voters should carefully consider President Trump’s record of achievements over the past four years and his goals for a second term.… Continue Reading

There is very little new under the sun. The monument and statue destruction that we are witnessing has been witnessed in other times and other places. A tyrant’s first battlefield is to rewrite history. Most notable were the political purges of Joseph Stalin. The Soviet government erased figures from Soviet history by renaming cities — such as the Imperial capital of St. Petersburg to Petrograd and Leningrad and Stalingrad — and eradicating memories of czarist rule.… Continue Reading

The tragic terrorist bombing in Manchester, England this week reminds us that we cannot just combat radical Muslims, seeking to make our borders secure and fighting them overseas. We must also combat the ideology of radical Islam.

In 2005, after the horrific London train bombings, many Brits were shocked to learn that three of the four terrorists were born in England. The fourth, born in Jamaica, was raised in England from the age of 5.… Continue Reading

Written by Michael Brown

For eight years, we have watched Islamic terrorist attacks take place around the world and on our own shores, with the bloody, gory death toll rising by the day (roughly 30,000 attacks since 9/11). And for eight years, we have listened carefully as our president addressed these horrific acts, studiously avoiding the words that so needed to be spoken: “Islamic terror” or “radical Islam.”

Instead, President Barack Obama and his surrogates spoke of “extremism” or “terrorism” — without any reference to Islam — or, worse still, of “workplace violence.”… Continue Reading

U.S. adversaries are exploiting the void
left by withdrawn American leadership

Written by Sebastian & Katharine Gorka

When President Barack Obama took office, Osama bin Laden was in hiding, al-Qaida in Iraq was in retreat, and the governments of the Middle East, while not necessarily exemplars of democracy, were at least stable.

Today, seven-and-a-half years later, as we near the end of his presidential term, al-Qaida is resurgent under the leadership of Ayman al Zawahiri, the Taliban rules half of Afghanistan, and al-Qaida in Iraq, after becoming ISIS, has declared a caliphate with more territory than the United Kingdom and with “fully operational” affiliates in 18 nations around the world and dozens more groups sympathetic to its totalitarian religious ideology of global jihad.… Continue Reading

Written by Daniel Greenfield

Nation-building has become a very controversial term. And with good reason. Our conviction that we can reconstruct any society into another America is unrealistic. It ignores our own exceptionalism and overlooks the cultural causes of many conflicts. It assumes that a change of government and open elections can transform a tribal Islamic society into America. They can’t and won’t.

But it’s also important to recognize that what we have been doing isn’t nation-building, but Islam-
building.… Continue Reading

Written by Jonah Goldberg

For partisan Democrats, when the word “Benghazi” comes up, the sophisticated thing to do is roll your eyes. If the name Charles Woods comes up, the normal thing to do is say, “Who?”

So let’s talk about Cindy Sheehan for a moment instead. Remember her?

For a while, she was the Joan of Arc of the anti-war Left. The mother of a U.S. Army specialist killed in Iraq, Sheehan held a vigil outside President George W.… Continue Reading

Written by Jonah Goldberg

Dear Reader (Including those of you stunned by the news that Charlie Sheen has a sexually transmitted disease. Not since Jim J. Bullock announced he was gay have I been more shocked),

If you Google “Christian terrorism,” you’re probably a [Leftists] to begin with. But if you do — bidden not by your own drive to [liberalism] but by the natural curiosity inspired by this “news”letter — you’ll find lots of left-wing trollery about how the worst terrorist attacks on American soil have been committed by Christians.… Continue Reading

Written by Ray Nothstine

Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz said that he will push for a ban against Syrian Muslims entering the United States, citing the Obama administration and intelligence agencies inability to identify refugees from terrorists.

“We should not be allowing Muslim refugees from countries where ISIS and al Qaeda have control of significant amounts of territory because of the inability of this administration, the inability of our intelligence sources to distinguish between who is and is not an ISIS terrorist,” Cruz told Jon Karl of ABC News.… Continue Reading

Written by Jeffrey Meyer

During an appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday, Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan strongly rebuked Bernie Sanders’ claim during Saturday’s Democratic presidential debate that climate change has contributed to the rise of ISIS.

Noonan argued that Sanders’ statement “makes him to many people look slightly daffy like someone who doesn’t understand what the real subject is” because “[t]his is about terrorism. This isn’t about climate change and deserts and people migrating because it’s hot.”… Continue Reading

Written by Byron York

Perhaps the most striking thing about the 2015 State of the Union address was not the president at the podium but the audience in the seats. The joint session of Congress listening to President Obama Tuesday night included 83 fewer Democrats than the group that heard Obama’s first address in 2009 — 69 fewer Democrats in the U.S. House and 14 fewer in the U.S. Senate. The scene in the U.S. House Chamber was a graphic reminder of the terrible toll the Obama years have taken on Capitol Hill Democrats.… Continue Reading

Written by Victor Davis Hanson

The last but long gasp of the Obama administration is characterized not so much by deceit and incompetence as by growing chaos. Everything appears to be coming apart. The chariot of state now veers up and down with a terrified Phaethon clueless at the reins. Whether it is ISIS, Ebola, Putin, or Obamacare, the common strain is not simple incompetence, but a maladroitness born of intolerant ideological fundamentalism.

Have our government agencies ever seemed more corrupt or useless or both, staffed by political cronies and leftist zealots?… Continue Reading

Written by IllinoisReview.com