When I got back from lunch on July 16, 2015, and saw a Muslim terrorist had murdered five servicemen in Chattanooga, I believed it would be a wake-up call to everyone.
The important stuff just does not get reported. We all know about Ted Cruz's wife vs. Donald Trump's wife and how Hillary thinks it's so shocking. Garbage. Much media attention was focused on the 32 people killed in the Brussels bombing. We heard about it for weeks. A Muslim terrorist killed 35 Christians on Easter in Pakistan, and it was news for merely hours.
This local attack took the Obama administration until Dec. 16, 2015, to determine it was a terrorist act. It's clear this administration doesn't take imported Muslim attackers seriously. The words "lone wolf" are used, and everyone acts surprised when the attacker is another imported Muslim jihadist. The Boston bomber terrorists, "the brothers Tsarnaev," are Chechen Muslims who came to America as tourists, and San Bernardino, Calif., killer Syed Farook took a wife terrorist from Pakistan on a visa.
We know two things. We are bringing people here to America - some migrants, others tourists, some called refugees. I don't care what we call them. We are in a war. Call it ISIS, al Qaida, Daesh, Boko Haram, Kata'ib Hezbollah, whatever. It's usually some Islamic terrorist with an immediate history from the Middle East.
Worldwide, about 6-20 percent of Muslims, mostly concentrated in the Middle East, believe in jihad and have more than just terrorist sympathies. The U.S. State Department has identified more than 50 terrorist Islamic groups from the Middle East. FBI, Homeland Security and top federal lawmakers say we cannot vet the tens of thousands of Middle East immigrants this administration wants to welcome to this country. Is it coincidence that Japan, China, Russia, Qatar, Kuwait, UAE and Saudi Arabia all have banned almost all Middle East immigration? They just send their problems to America, which is opening its doors wider under the Obama administration.
If this administration really cared about the rag-tag army that seeks to move from troubled lands to America, it would send money for food. We can feed 20 refugees for a year in the Middle East for what it costs to bring one Syrian to the U.S. But no, we have hundreds of millions of dollars available for welfare services once these refugees arrive here and billions of dollars more for war materiel to fight the wars the administration claims helped create these immigrants with terrorist tendencies.
Our alternative is not to worry about the terrorists coming to America. Just put every U.S. citizen under a microscope. It seems our government's solution is to hire thousands of TSA inspectors to inspect our underwear, more state troopers to give citations for seat belt violations, drones to watch all of us, NSA to listen to our phone calls, Homeland Security to check our emails, and to spend a million dollars to hack one phone.
Whatever happened to keeping the bad guys out and protecting American citizens' freedom and privacy? Today we have to worry about a terrorist blowing up the grid, bringing in a dirty bomb, carrying a bioweapon from the Mideast, and of course flying a plane into a building.
When are we going to get serious and stop terrorism at the source? No one should be allowed to come to this country who can cause these disasters. Even those who crave "open borders" for our country because it's "who we are" as a freedom-loving people must realize letting terrorists in is a solution for no one and dangerous for the very survival of our nation.
Jim Folkner is a local businessman.