To the Editor:

The ongoing spasmodic slaughter of children and adults by psychopaths, those with varied levels of mental disorders, gangs, and jihadis makes every citizen across the political spectrum wanting legal changes.The immediately pressing issue of school shooters needs to be placed in a broader context and not allowed to eclipse that context.

A number of recent mass murderers were either on, or just recently coming off, psychiatric meds. Those little-understood mind-altering drugs have fearsome side effects including “suicidal ideation” and  “homicidal ideation.” Mental health restrictions need clarifying: “Which” experts and “what” criteria should decide “who” to restrict — only the seriously-disturbed or, more broadly, everyone who has ever taken prescription drugs for mood control?

As for calls for additional infringements to the Second Amendment and anathematizing the National Rifle Association and other gun-rights groups, we know whatever new restrictions are instituted, there will always be illegal black-market guns around. Several cities with high body counts are also those with some of the toughest gun-control regulations. The disproportionately high gun murder rates in such cities as  New Orleans, Detroit, St. Louis, Baltimore, and Oakland match up with murder rates in some of worst nations in the world in that regard.

Anyone bent on murder can alternatively acquire Home Depot trucks, fertilizer, baseball bats, axes, pressure cookers, varied gases, blades, and gasoline legally.

There is also the sticky question of “rights.” Where do they come from? Are they from a Creator God, as stated in the Declaration of Independence; or are “rights” to be granted, infringed, and/or rescinded by changing government rulers? Bear in mind: Civil rulers possess a legal monopoly on initiating violence when necessary for the perceived interests of their nation-state.

This brings us to the nation-wide “spontaneous” nature of the “Enough! National School Walkout” for raising awareness about gun violence and school safety and new laws. Who organized this nationwide event?

It was the “Women’s March,” a movement closely tied to varied political left-wing and Islamic advocacy groups. For instance, Linda Sarsour, co-chair of the Women’s March and its School Walkout project, advocates Sharia law, which would supersede the United States Constitution. Widely criticized, Sarsour refuses to disavow her mentors, the anti-Semitic, Nazi-admiring hate preacher, the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan. Last May, Sarsour spoke at an Islamist convention encouraging Muslims to wage “jihad” against the Trump administration.

So, what’s behind the Women’s March? What do they stand for? In The New York Times’ “Women in the World” section, Asra Nomani voiced her displeasure with the anti-Trump focus of the march. A self-identified liberal feminist and Trump supporter, she said she did not feel welcome. “I definitely do not conclude that most of the people marching were paid to do so. I believe that most of the people were motivated by sincere political and ideological beliefs. I do believe that most of the participants in the march had genuine concerns. It is not factual that they were paid to march.”

Nomani found, however, that many of the march’s sponsors ‘partners” — including Planned Parenthood, which opposes Trump’s anti-abortion policy, and the National Resource Defense Council, which opposes Trump’s environmental policies — are active in the progressive movement: the extreme hard-left, anti-gun wing of the Democratic Party. For more on their Fabian Society-style of incremental regulatory collectivism consider reading Murray Rothbard’s book, “The Progressive Era.”

Nomani counted 65 such organizations with some sort of tie, not necessarily financial, to George Soros’s liberal-left collectivist philanthropy, the Open Society Foundation.

These marches were largely billed as “spontaneous” and “grassroots.” The reality exposed by Nomani after studying the “funding, politics and talking points of the groups that are ‘partners’ of the march,” is that, contrary to the non-partisan rhetoric used in these marches, they were not really a “Women’s March” but rather “for women who are anti-Trump.”

The leaders are activists in the well-funded liberal-left agitprop network. As is the “Enough! National School Walkout” project. In Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals,” he advised taking genuine human concerns and developing controlled grassroots operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition (such as the NRA).

Commentator Joel Skousen has noted that NRA members haven’t committed any mass shootings, drive-overs, or hijacked airplanes and flown them into buildings. Zero percent of NRA members support mass murder as a legitimate way to defend or advance their beliefs. However, among American Muslims, the Pew Research Center reports that 22 percent of foreign-born Arab Muslims in America approve of suicide bombings.

Whenever a jihadist goes on a killing spree, the Islamophilic, Bibliophobic Left, quickly reminds us that Islamic terrorism is aberrant, in no way reflective of the “religion of peace.”

In fact, jihadist terror is so aberrational to countless mainstream talking heads and scribblers, including the last White House occupant, that they have declared it un-Islamic, claiming that a vast decentralized transnational terrorist army has nothing to do with Islam.

This is miseducated quirkiness when thousands are being slaughtered and enslaved by Fundamentalist Muslims.

Countless Islamic scholars across the planet — learned men who study the Quran, Hadith, and Sira their entire lives — vigorously contradict these leftist pundits and professional apologists, most of whom are not Muslim and have no Quranic expertise (sort of like Dianne Feinstein defining an “assault rifle”). These groups of Islamic scholars say that what jihadi networks are doing is the scriptural duty of every true Muslim. Further, anyone who says differently is either an infidel or a heretic and should be killed.

So, in the broader gun-rights context, what are the specific answers regarding mental disorders; mood-altering prescription drugs; rights (God- or government-given?); lack of enforcement of existing laws; legal and illegal gun availabilities; jihadi violence; school safety; etc.?

“Spontaneous” protest marches are one thing, specific practical solutions another.

Victor Porlier

Berne

Editor’s note: At the 2017 Islamic Society of North American convention, Linda Sarsour read from scripture, “What is the best form of jihad or struggle?” she answered that it was “a word of truth in front of a tyrant ruler or leader.”  She went on about the need for Muslim Americans to defend themselves against the anti-Muslim policies of the Trump administration, saying, “I hope that when we stand up to those who oppress our communities that Allah accepts from us that as a form of jihad, that we are struggling against tyrants and rulers not only abroad in the Middle East or on the other side of the world, but here in these United States of America where you have fascists and white supremacists and Islamophobes reigning in the White House.”

What the Pew Research Center reported in 2017, on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, was this: A significant minority (21%) of Muslim Americans say there is a great deal (6%) or a fair amount (15%) of support for extremism in the Muslim American community. That is far below the proportion of the general public that sees at least a fair amount of support for extremism among U.S. Muslims (40%). And while about a quarter of the public (24%) thinks that Muslim support for extremism is increasing, just 4% of Muslims agree.