Make Hashtag, Not War

The "hashtag" is the pound, or number, sign on a keyboard. Many on social medial place the symbol before words, allowing those words to be tracked as keywords on social media. Listeners to my radio show, for example, often tweet with #EERS at the end for "Erick Erickson Radio Show," making it easy for listeners to see each other's tweets.

In 2014, State Department spokes child Jen Psaki held up a sign for twitter showing the #UnitedForUkraine hashtag. She then followed it up a month later tweeting, "The world stands #UnitedforUkraine. Let's hope that the #Kremlin & @mfa_Russia will live by the promise of hashtag." Yes, she wanted Russia to live by the promise of a hashtag.

After Boko Haram, the extremist Islamic group in Nigeria, kidnapped 276 mostly Christian schoolgirls, the Obama Administration took to Twitter, with Michelle Obama and others holding up signs with the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls. In June of 2014, ISIS sympathizers captured a number of American Humvees and began photoshopping Mrs. Obama's picture changing #BringBackOurGirls to #BringBackOurHumvees. The hashtag never recovered the children.

In light of the events in Paris, adults might recognize that "hashtag diplomacy" is no substitute for men with guns. But our foreign policy is controlled by the American left, which descended into self-parody after the attacks in Paris.

CNN's leftwing commentator Sally Kohn tweeted, "Y'all realize ISIS wants to provoke a war, right? If we go to war, we're doing exactly what the terrorists want." Should Kohn, a lesbian, find herself trying to hug it out with ISIS instead of killing ISIS, she would probably find herself in an awful situation, wherein she would want American firepower to save her. But, with Paris halfway around the world from her and ISIS an abstraction to her, she had the luxury of being stupid on twitter. One can only imagine what she would have thought after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.

Rosa Brooks, a law professor at Georgetown University who formerly worked for Barack Obama's State Department, took to Foreign Policy magazine's website to declare the hashtag #LoveWins will conquer ISIS. Her article's title was "Can Gay Marriage Defeat the Islamic State?" She believes it can.

Still, others on the American left believe we have nothing to worry about. Brian Beutler, a writer for The New Republic, tweeted, "There are many more armed loons in the U.S. than committed jihadis. Being scared of the latter, but not the former, is revealed bigotry." In fairness to him, he was shot in Washington, D.C. at a time the District of Columbia was a virtual gun free zone. So his perspective is a bit skewed.

He saw -- first hand -- a young man try to mug him, then shoot him. The attacks on Paris were just something on a television screen halfway around the world. But then that is the problem with the American left today. They are far more worried about gun control in the United States than they are the fact that a group with territory larger than many American states wants us all decapitated. It really is striking that the American left's rhetoric has been far more hostile to their fellow Americans than to ISIS. The former, to the left, are racist bigots for being worried about Syrian refugees. The latter are an abstraction who the President of the United States, on the day of the Paris attack, said was "contained."

Hashtags will not stop ISIS. Gay marriage will not stop ISIS. Sweet thoughts about love will not stop ISIS. The only things that will are men with guns and planes with bombs. The American left can afford to treat ISIS as an abstraction for now. More than one hundred French citizens cannot do so because ISIS killed them. There is evil in the world, and it cannot be hugged or tweeted or gay married to death. Sadly, our nation is governed by a man who blames global warming, not evil, for an enemy he believes was contained the day Paris exploded. I hate to think of the numbers yet to die at the hands of ISIS before the American voter replaces hashtag diplomacy with grownups willing to make serious decisions.

I read this on fb this morning....

THIS IS A POST FROM a Man who Serves OUR COUNTRY>>>

Christopher Allard
November 16 at 8:59pm Â· Edited Â·
I don’t typically go on rants or express my political beliefs here, but I just have to get this off my mind. As some of you know, I’m active duty Army. Aside from that, I am a medic. I’ve spent 3 years of my life overseas in both Afghanistan and Iraq. I’ve seen some pretty atrocious sites caused by war, from both sides. I’ve picked up blown up body parts of friends and I’ve saved the lives of guys who were trying to kill me and my guys right before I was keeping them from their 72 virgins or whatever they believe awaits them on the other side. Here is an unbiased truthful view to the Syrian refugee situation. My first deployment to Iraq, in 2006, my unit voluntarily ran a childrens burn clinic outside of the FOB. It was a constant target for attacks. You would think that people wouldn’t shoot mortars or rockets at their own children, but you would be wrong. We saw hundreds of children, from infants to 18 year olds. The overwhelming majority of the kids we saw (90% or better) were clear cases of abuse. These parents were literally dunking their kids in boiling water, or throwing hot chai at their kids faces... Yes, we’re talking about babies, toddlers, kids not even old enough to understand why their parents would do these things to them. HUNDREDS of kids... We saw quite a few of these kids that were sexually abused, both girls and boys. Their parents acted if nothing was wrong with this, even when confronted by our doctors. This is the mentality of their society, not the viewpoint of a few individuals... these beliefs have been accepted to the vast majority of these people. Many were educated, well dressed, well spoken men, but yet, they still raped their own children, and kept chai boys (if you don’t know what that means, google it.) During that deployment, we also captured the 3rd largest EFP cache that had ever been captured. There were hundreds of copper plates, homemade explosives, fake curbs to house the EFP’s, hundreds of mortars and rockets and howitzer rounds, even an anti-aircraft gun. All of these things came from one place, Syria. Almost every single IED or EFP we found or hit could be traced back to Syria... A lot of the terrorists we captured were from SYRIA... Imagine that. Fast forward a couple years, and I find myself in Helmand Province, in Afghanistan... We had a group of Afghani’s that were paid to help guard our little mud hut in the middle of an Afghan village (I wasn’t on a fob) These guys also kept a “chai boy” A boy, about 11 years old, who was there to serve these guys sexually. We heard him being sexually assaulted many times, but there was nothing we could do about it. We asked the police, the Afghan Army, and we were told the same thing every time.... it’s their culture, and accepted as the norm.... Once again, we captured Syrian made explosives, weapons, and other items... We found Syrian passports during raids... And people out there want us to let these people into the US, with our kids, and near our wives. Near our schools, near our churches, synogogues, malls. Places where we should never have to fear being blown up, shot, kidnapped and tortured... Don’t forget what they did to the Egyptian Coptic Christians, or the Jordanian pilot... Don’t forget about what they do to rape victims! They stone these women to death for being raped! They behead their own people. Do you think they will show mercy to you? Look at the rape statistics in Denmark, Sweden, Belgium. Facts don’t lie... 97% of rapes committed in Sweden were committed by Muslim immigrants... And you want 10,000 of these people here? Even if just 1% of these so called “refugees” were ISIS supporters or active ISIS terrorists, would that be acceptable to you? Chew on it... think about it. Take a good look at your kids or your wife and decide if the risk is worth taking. Feel free to share this if you want.

The sequence of your posts, #3 & #4, speaks volumes.

The ‘intellectuals’ in the current regime have no idea what damage they’ve done to this country and our allies. They have enabled terrorists and their invasion of Europe; and they now seem to be offering first class tickets to America... Even a clueless nobody like me can see that our way of life is becoming increasingly endangered. It wouldn’t be a stretch to believe that our great country suffers a terrorist attack before year’s end. I pray it doesn’t.

The existential problems our country faces require more than a good hashtag campaign to prevent - something the dynamic dingbat duo of Psaki & Harf, and the rest of this corrupt regime are incapable of. Worse, if we are hit... we can have no confidence that these idiots will act decisively, brutally, and conclusively.

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#soflaughter