Violence vs. speech

Recently President Obama criticized Ted Cruz, who has called for heightened policing in Muslim communities in the US:

President Obama on Wednesday delivered a sharply personal rebuke of GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz for his call to institute surveillance on Muslim communities in response to the Brussels terrorist attacks.

During a press conference in Argentina, Obama called such a proposal “wrong and un-American” and said it would undermine the U.S. campaign against Islamic extremists.

Note the word “surveillance” used here, which is usually reserved for targeted spying, such as police stake-outs and wire-tapping–things no police force is able to sustain for long against a single suspect, let alone an entire community. But that’s not what Cruz is calling for:

Cruz touched off a political firestorm Tuesday with his call to “patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods” in the wake of the deadly terrorist attacks in Brussels, for which the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has claimed responsibility.

Patrolling and community policing, not wire-tapping and late-night stake-outs with coffee and binoculars. Now, I will gladly concede that Cruz’s idea is not the greatest and seriously lacking in detail. But it’s disingenuous for the media to purposely mischaracterize Cruz’ idea, and even more so for President Obama to criticize the idea when his own IRS has been tasked with monitoring American churches for political speech, his own NSA is monitoring phone calls of all Americans, his DHS has designated veteran soldiers as a threat group, and whose administration still hasn’t answered for purposely putting guns in the hands of Mexican drug gangs in an attempt to track them. I don’t think President Obama is the best person to be lecturing the rest of us on what is necessary to keep our country safe. Does he seriously believe that checking to see if churches are mentioning politics is a better use of government resources than keeping us safe from terrorist violence? And are we to expect that the IRS is giving the same attention to radical mosques as Christian churches for political speech?

It’s this foolish double-standard that gives rise to people like Trump and Cruz, Mr. President. If you would show for one moment that you take our foreign enemies as seriously as you take your political enemies we wouldn’t be in this position. Your “surveillance for me, but not for thee” attitude is one of the main reasons why so many people are convinced the government either can’t or doesn’t want to keep us safe.