Terrorist seems to be the hardest word

Abdul Artan was a terrorist. That simple sentence is impossible for the left-wing media to utter, but it’s true. Artan was the 18-year-old Somali immigrant who rammed his car into a crowd of students at Ohio State University then hopped out with a butcher knife to stab anyone in sight. He was also a student at Ohio State. 

NBC News reported that Artan had posted on Facebook about reaching the “boiling point” and talked about “lone wolf attacks.” He even cited radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. Then they asked, “Did Ohio State University attacker have terror ties?”

You think?

He complained to the school newspaper that there weren’t enough prayer rooms for Muslims and that he was “kind of scared” to pray in public. In the end, it was everyone else who had cause to be scared of him. 

It almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when radical Muslims complain of feeling alienated then end up killing or trying to kill a bunch of people. I had a girlfriend once who was obsessed with the idea that I was cheating on her. I wasn’t, but nothing I could say would convince her. Our relationship ended when I caught her cheating on me. It seems some of these terror attacks are similar. Paranoid people tend to transfer their paranoia onto other people.

One of the first steps of radicalization is to be thoroughly convinced you’re being persecuted. It’s this sense of persecution—real or imagined—that lays the foundation for your future actions as a terrorist. Artan was a man who graduated cum laude from Columbus State Community College then headed off to Ohio State. Somewhere along the way he learned to be offended by the fact that he was Muslim and most of the people around him weren’t. It’s highly unlikely that his persecution as a Muslim was anything more than a figment of his imagination.

People can literally drive themselves crazy over their perceptions. Radical Islamists prey on those perceptions. Radical Islamists are, by definition, nuts. Their obsession with their religion has driven them to the point of madness. Yes, there are crazy Christians, too, but their psychosis seldom manifests itself in murder.

This is the distinction the politically correct fail to make. Truth be known, we’re all a little bit crazy in our own way. The question is, are our idiosyncrasies a threat to others? It’s foolish to ignore the obvious. When Muslims go nuts they go nuts in a big way. That’s not to say, of course, that all Muslims are crazy. It’s just an obvious observation that crazy Muslims are a bigger threat than crazy people of any other religion.

Knowing that, why on earth do we continue to allow possible ticking time bombs to enter the United States without proper vetting? Artan came to us from Somalia via Pakistan. Was he radicalized along the way? It’s doubtful anyone checked. After all, we don’t want to make anyone feel uncomfortable.

This terrorist came to the United States legally. How many others are coming illegally? And just days before the attack, Ohio State students were protesting in favor of making their campus a sanctuary campus for illegals. They might want to re-think that position. It’s bad enough that we’re letting crazy people in the front door, the last thing we need to be doing is allowing unvetted students to roam freely on American campuses.

There’s a very good reason why we provide a legal avenue of immigration. It’s to weed out the criminals and the terrorists. If we don’t, what good is it?

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.