Week #13 (11/16-11/20)- Obama's Dead Wrong About the Paris Attacks (US News & World Report)

First off the president should acknowledge that this atrocity was committed by Islamic jihadis.

It can happen here too.

By Christopher HullNov. 14, 2015 | 4:55 p.m. EST+ More

Paris is my favorite city in the world.

Ernest Hemingway once wrote "if you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast." I was lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, and Hemingway, if only on this, was right.

So during the Paris attacks my heart broke watching helplessly as reports came from the scene of the Bataclan club massacre. One apparent club-goer, who was himself wounded, posted on Facebook that the terrorists were slaughtering people, "one by one."

But we are not helpless. Not yet, anyway.

[READ Reaction from around the world to Paris attacks]

President Barack Obama would have you believe, "This is an attack on all of humanity and the universal values that we share."

But he's flat, dead wrong. All of humanity does not share Western values, or the Paris attack wouldn't have happened.

Specifically, though the president painfully and repeatedly refuses to say so, Islamic jihadis do not share Western values.

If they did, President Obama's cowardly withdrawal from Iraq and refusal to enforce his own red line in Syria would not have led to Islamic State's rise in the first place – and the resultant surge of refugees into Europe, including, reportedly, at least one Paris attacker.

Yet President Obama would also have you believe that his limp and increasingly unpopular response to Islamic State has "contained" the jihadi army and kept it from "gaining strength," as he claimed literally hours before the Paris attacks.

Of course, he would also have you believe that climate change is a bigger threat than (Islamic) terror. He insists, "There's no greater threat to our planet than climate change." Well, Paris – and New Yorkon 9/11 and Beirut in 1983 and well, New York in 1993 and Beirut last week and Paris earlier this year – are trying over and over to teach us different. The truth is, and the Western world is united in believing it, here's no greater threat to our planet than Islamic jihad.

And here's where this matters to you. The Obama White House would also have you believe that the 10,000 Syrian refugees the president is in the process of bringing to America this year alone will "go through the most robust security process of anybody who's contemplating travel to the United States." Just last week, the administration acknowledged that it was bringing online refugee screening outposts in the Middle East to "push out really ambitious goals" to "increase the channels" for bringing Syrians to America.

Unfortunately, President Obama's own FBI director, James Comey, says the U.S. can't properly vet Syrians for ties to Islamic jihad. Likewise, the assistant director for the FBI, Michael Steinback, has told Congress that when it comes to Syrian refugees, "We don't have it under control."

"Absolutely, we're doing the best we can," he testified in February before the House. "If I were to say that we had it under control, then I would say I know of every single individual traveling. I don't. And I don't know every person there and I don't know everyone coming back. So it's not even close to being under control."

Alabama GOP Sen. Jeff Sessions, who chairs the Senate Immigration and the National Interest subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee, repeatedly asked Matthew Emrich, associate director of the Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, to confirm or deny Mr. Steinback's claim that Syrian refugees were "clearly a population of concern" and that U.S. databases don't have information on them. Emmrich eventually fell silent.

[MORE: Editorial Cartoons on the Islamic State Group]

But you don't have to. This is where we are not yet helpless.

Refugees – amusingly called "migrants" by sympathetic news outlets trying to finesse that they are generally both illegal and immigrants – have swept through Europe and permeated the national media, as well. The image of Aylan Kurdi, a three-year-old Kurdish refugee washed up on a Turkish beachtouched heartstrings around the world, including mine. He looked painfully like my two-year-old boy Thomas.

However, in a sadly goofy way, so did little Martin Richard, the boy killed in the Boston Marathon Bombing by Chechen refugees. In fact, refugees and asylees have played key roles in terror activities from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing to the ongoing flow of al-Shabab recruits from Minnesota.

And it will get worse if we ignore the threat, as Paris suggests. "Just wait," says an Islamic State group operative, who claims that ISIS has successfully smuggled 4,000 jihadis into Europe hidden among refugees. More to come – in Paris, and if we make the mistake of believing our president, here as well.

So what is to be done?

First, we need to acknowledge that the Ted Kennedy-drafted 1980 law that governs refugee resettlement was, like his 1965 Immigration Act and the Immigration Act of 1990, designed more tomaximize the influx of potential Democrats to the United States than to keep it secure in the face of an enemy like the global Islamic jihad.

So, second, Congress should include in the omnibus spending bill required by December 11, 2015some variation of Texas GOP Rep. Brian Babin's Refugee Accountability National Security Act, which would place a moratorium on refugee resettlement until Congress deems the program has been adequately reviewed, as well as a Government Accountability Office audit of its costs. Even simply defunding all refugee resettlement from Syria would be a start, though the problem of jihadis posing as refugees extends far beyond Syria.

Third, Congress should pass and President Obama should sign the bill sponsored by House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican, which would restore control over how many refugees the U.S. admits each year to the legislative branch, where it belongs.

Fourth, Congress should pass and President Obama should sign the bill sponsored by Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz and Rep. Florida GOP Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart to designate the Muslim Brotherhood a Foreign Terrorist Organization, just as have Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and arguably even Syria.

[MORE Paris Terror Attacks by ISIS Called ‘Act of War’]

Fifth, the U.S. should militarize its southern border. Attempts to "secure the border" started as early as the late 1800s and have by and large failed. After 9/11, however, George W. Bush ordered 6,000 national guardsmen to the border to at long last seal it for security reasons. Yet as the 2004 elections approached, Bush, who favored immigration expansion for political and business interest reasons, gradually relaxed his grip on the border. President Obama, who favored it to pack the country with left-leaning voters, has literally broken the law to bring people across the border and keep them in the country. Today we have what Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly, then acting commander of the U.S. Southern Command, called an "existential" threat to America.

Sixth, the president (and this could not possibly be Barack Obama) should unite the world around a hard-nosed, realist foreign policy that supports Western civilization's allies and devastates its enemies – not just in what we now think of as Syria and Iraq, the source of the current refugee tidal wave, but around the world.

Finally, Congress should pass comprehensive immigration reform – and not the amnesty that both the U.S. Chamber and the Democratic Party use that term to describe. A real reform that would:

1. Reverse the Obama administration's suicidal (not to mention illegal) decision to unilaterally change the law to allow in immigrants with "limited" terror contact
2. Eliminate funding for the so-called voluntary agencies which have turned into lobbies to expand the number of refugees ad infinitum
3. Stop chain migration that immigration forces dub "family reunification" (think about it – why can't families remain unified in the countries where they start out?) and that could be used to expand President Obama's 10,000 Syrians exponentially
4. Give the U.S. control over whom we deem a refugee, not the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which has a rotten record that has led some to speculate about how closely it cooperates with the Organization of Islamic Countries.
5. Eliminate politically correct, politically driven, problem-prone and wildly unsafe "diversity visas" dreamed up by (who else?) the late Senator Kennedy
6. Follow the lead of then-Sen. Joe Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, who once proposedeliminating citizenship for those who join foreign terror organizations
7. Wipe out President Obama's illegal and unconstitutional amnesty to align the rule of law and perceived incentives to break it
8. Likewise, end the practice of having anchor babies that those who otherwise disdain and ignore the Constitution incorrectly call the constitutional guarantee of "birthright citizenship," and which Obama has stood on its head by granting illegal amnesty to parents of these tiny citizens
9. Finally, let's give those from native English speaking countries higher priority in immigration law. They put less of a strain on schools, do better over the long term and, well, are less likely to kill us: 83 percent of alleged terrorist attacks take place outside of native English-speaking countries.

That's a pretty hefty agenda. To even move in that direction, here's one thing that we as a nation – and the entire Western World – must do before anything else: acknowledge that we are in a war with Islamic jihadis who want us dead for ideological reasons and will stop at nothing to kill us.

Otherwise, not only my favorite city will continue to face an ever-greater risk of senseless slaughter at the hands of blood-thirsty Islamic jihadis.

Yours will too.