By Charles Moscowitz
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The bizarre liberal policies that facilitated the arrival and atrocities of the Uzbekistan terrorist Sayfullo Saipov, who brutally murdered eight and injured 11 in New York this Halloween, are now being clouded in the usual miasma of confusion and double-talk. To the public policies and those who are culpable in this regard, we must put aside politics and identify the problem to save lives going forward.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio had abolished an NYPD task force, set up by Mayor Rudolf Giuliani after the Sept. 11, 2001, attack, which had developed a comprehensive intelligence network that tracked radicals within the Muslim community. De Blasio ended the task force to stop the profiling of a group that itself is subjected to profiling and is targeted for recruitment by radicals. As a result, the NYPD could no longer surveil the mosque Saipov attended. This insane policy seriously hampered the ability of the NYPD to keep New Yorkers safe.
De Blasio's inexplicable policy, which put the lives of all New Yorkers at risk, represents the flowering of seeds that were first planted by various liberal congressmen in the 1990s, before the 9/11 attack. In 1990, New York then-Rep. Charles Schumer was the guiding light behind the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program a law that changed immigration policy from one based on merit to a that would work like Powerball. If you came from a select country, one the government felt was under-represented, you could one-way ticket to the United States!
This strange idea became law around the same time Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts came up with the brilliant idea that visas should not be denied to immigrants due to their ideology. The only way a visa could be denied, in Frank's 1989 amendment to the immigration and nationality act, was if there was proof that the applicant had been involved in "terrorist activities," something that would be virtually impossible to prove. Bill Clinton's CIA director, James Woolsey, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, described Frank's law as having opened the floodgates to foreign terrorists. Frank would procced, in the 1990s, to spearhead the passage of additional immigration laws that would further hamstring the efforts of embassies and programs to vet immigrants.
These politicians embrace a wrong outlook, one that places some hazy idea of international diversity over the interests and safety of their fellow American citizens. Frank claimed that he pushed the law that would let in terrorists legally because he resented the fact that Colombian poet Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the author of "Memories of my Melancholy Whores," was denied a due to his association with Fidel Castro and Cuban communists. Yet Rep. Frank could have chosen to personally sponsor a trip by the harmless Marquez, and, with State Department approval, Marquez would have been able to launch is tour of liberal colleges where he could sit around the proverbial campfire with trust fund babies who could share their warm and fuzzy feelings about communist dictators.
But instead, Frank sponsored a law, in the name of ending discrimination, that would let in foreignersof all ideological stripes, including anti-Semites, Islamic supremacists, communists and presumably all sorts of anti-American radicals. We should note that there is no such right in international law and custom for a person to go to any sovereign nation. Indeed, one of the most basic functions of national sovereignty, for all sovereign nations, is to decide who enters the national home.
This is the same principle that dictates that the individual and the family has a right to decide who enters their own place of domicile. Animals understand this principle. Try to invade the space of a dog and you will have your proof of this. Yet utopian liberals like Barney Frank, Chuck Schumer and Bill de Blasio seem to think that there is something "progressive" about swinging open the border and letting anyone pour in. They are almost as much to blame for the consequences as are the mass murdering terrorists themselves who accept the invitations offered them.