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CENTRAL VIEW for Monday, December 14, 2015

by William Hamilton, Ph.D.

Islamic jihad: Constitution vs. Koran

According to The Sunday Times of London, just before they turned their baby daughter over to Farook’s mother, Tashfeen Malik and Syed Farook wolfed down handfuls of Adderall (a stimulant) and Xanax (a sedative) and then left home to kill 14 innocent people and wound 22 others. How else to explain how Malik’s hatred of Christians and Jews was stronger than a mother’s love for her six-month-old child?

Actually, there is an additional explanation. Tashfeen and Syed were under the spell of a violent political ideology that springs from the later passages from Islam’s Koran (AKA the Medina Phase) and Muhammad’s supplements to the Koran, the hate-filled Hadith.

But how do we defend ourselves from a violent, radical form of Islam that wraps itself in the trappings of the Muslim religion which is, as are all religions, protected by the 1st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution? Fortunately, the U.S. Constitution is not a suicide pact. We just need to separate the purely religious aspects of Islam from the violent political aspects of Islam and act accordingly.

Obviously, some violent Islamic jihadist cells are already residing within our borders. But that does not mean we must let in more hate-filled Islamic jihadists. We simply base our immigration laws on quotas by country-of-origin. Without banning adherents of a particular religion, we can ban immigration from those foreign countries that are known to harbor or be supportive of radical Islamic jihad. Granted, given our porous borders and the Obama Administration’s lax enforcement of immigration procedures, some radical Islamists will still slip through. But country-of-origin would be a start that does not violate our Constitution.

So, how are the truly home-grown Islamic jihadists created? Well, let’s say you are a jobless male of military age, surfing social media looking for a girlfriend. Suddenly, a message pops up offering you a job, a salary, an unlimited supply of subservient women, your own AK-47, tons of ammo, a chance to be somebody different than you are, and a chance to strike back at a system you perceive as making you jobless, at loose ends, and living in your parent’s basement. You respond favorably and someone slips you an airline ticket to an exotic foreign land.

Meanwhile, many Americans are rightfully scared. Americans have a constitutional right to be safe in their persons and their possessions. Unfortunately, many have lost confidence in the ability of the national government to perform these first and most important Constitutional duties Gun sales have skyrocketed, with applications to purchase guns soaring to 183,000 on Black Friday alone. Over one million personal firearms have been purchased this year. Practice ranges are crowded. Applications for concealed-carry permits are overwhelming some issuing offices.

The upside is that these terrorist attacks bring renewed interest in the 2d Amendment which guarantees our means of personal self-defense and in the 1st Amendment which is one run-on sentence enshrining five of our most important liberties: freedom of religion (not from religion), speech, press, to assemble peacefully, and to petition government for redress of grievances. Consequently, we would be wise to ignore political wannabes who would subvert our Constitution and look, instead, for leaders who understand how to protect our citizens without a resort to fascism.

Nationally syndicated columnist, William Hamilton, is a laureate of the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame, the Colorado Aviation Hall of Fame, the Oklahoma University Army ROTC Wall of Fame, and is a recipient of the University of Nebraska 2015 Alumni Achievement Award. He was educated at the University of Oklahoma, the George Washington University, the Infantry School, the U.S Naval War College, the University of Nebraska, and Harvard University.

©2015. William Hamilton.

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Email: william@central-view.com

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