The bombings that killed 35 people and wounded 300 in Brussels, Belgium, closing down the capital of the European Union, followed a familiar pattern: Young Muslims born to immigrant parents were inspired by radicals abroad to wage a holy war against Western civilization.
President Obama, attending a baseball game in Cuba when the bombs went off, kept his plans for Argentina, where he performed a tango with a professional dancer. In a prerecorded interview published in the latest issue of The Atlantic, Obama said Americans have an exaggerated fear of terrorism because we are more likely to die by falling into a bathtub.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich told Fox News, “We cannot afford to discourage all the Muslims in the world, who, by the way, condemn this act of murder in overwhelming numbers.” Kasich appeared to be saying that when Muslims engage in jihad, it is our fault that we do something to “discourage” them.
This is such a perfect example of political correctness that it’s no wonder Kasich lost 30 of 31 Republican primaries and caucuses to Donald Trump. And by the way, there’s no evidence to support Kasich’s claim that Muslims around the world condemn terrorism in overwhelming numbers.
Even the New York Times, in its report from Belgium, attributed terrorism to “poorly integrated Muslim immigrants.” We, too, have millions of “poorly integrated” immigrants, mostly from Mexico and Central America. Consider these crimes committed by immigrants in recent weeks.
In Kansas City, Kansas, Pablo Antonio Serrano-Vitorino is accused of shooting four men in a home. He then crossed the state line to New Florence, Missouri, where he killed a fifth man in front of his wife.
After his arrest, we learned that Pablo was an illegal immigrant from Mexico who had been stopped last September for a traffic violation in Overland Park, Kansas. Despite documentation showing he had been previously deported in 2004, ICE sent the detainee to the wrong county and he was released.
In Framingham, Massachusetts, brothers Elmer, Ariel, and Adan Diaz and their friend Marlon Josue Jarquin-Felipe were accused of kidnapping a juvenile woman off the street, gang-raping her and beating her boyfriend who tried to save her. All four of the bandits were illegal immigrants from Guatemala in Central America; two of them had previously been deported after drunken driving convictions.
In South Omaha, Nebraska, Eswin Mejia is accused of street racing under the influence of alcohol, causing a crash that killed 21-year-old Iowa woman Sarah Root. Despite being an illegal immigrant from Honduras, Central America, Mejia was released on bail without being held by ICE because the Obama administration “demoted” deportation of illegal immigrants without prior felony convictions.
Murder, rape, and riots caused by motor vehicles are not the only consequences of immigration from south of the border. We are also battling diseases brought by immigrants, including the dreaded modern Zika virus, as well as ancient diseases like tuberculosis that we thought we had eradicated.
The Centers for Disease Control just reported that cases of tuberculosis rose last year for the first time in 23 years. Contrary to liberals who claim that the disease does not discriminate, most cases of tuberculosis occur in immigrants from Mexico, China, India, Vietnam, and the Philippines and their children born in the United States.
When Hillary Clinton campaigned in Arizona on the eve of the state’s Democratic primary, she boasted that she “voted to secure the border when I was in the Senate” and “I think we did a really good job securing the border.” Like many of Hillary’s statements, nothing could be further from the truth.
Within a week of Hillary’s statement, authorities had discovered a drug-smuggling tunnel built by Mexicans four football fields long, running from a restaurant in Mexicali, Mexico, to a home in Calexico, Calif. Across the border in Hidalgo, Texas, frightened residents invited local television news to film dozens of men passing through their yards each night from Mexico.
The chairman of the National Border Patrol Council told a House subcommittee that the number of people arrested at the border from Afghanistan, Pakistan and China has increased dramatically compared with last year. Brandon Judd also testified that official statistics underestimate the number of “defections,” defined as people seen crossing the border without being detained by U.S. officials.
After returning from dancing tango in Argentina, Obama said in his weekly radio address that the massacres would not change “our openness to refugees” (he still plans to bring in 100,000 Muslim refugees) and promised to “reject any attempts to stigmatize Muslim Americans and the enormous contribution they make to our way of life” because “we are a nation founded on the idea of religious freedom.”
Earlier this week, Obama’s lawyer asked the Supreme Court to sanction the Little Sisters of the Poor for exercising religious freedom not to cover abortion and contraception in its employee health plan. Obama is eager to accommodate the religious freedom of Muslims who want to move to our country from the Middle East, so why not recognize the “enormous contribution to our way of life” made by Catholic nuns who run thousands of American schools, hospitals, and nursing homes?