Paris attacks expose US ‘failures’: lawmakers

The US strategy against Islamic State came under growing fire in Washington Sunday with one prominent Democrat calling it a failure that could lead to more attacks by the extremists like those in Paris.

President Barack Obama and top advisors vowed to stand by France and said they would intensify military coordination and intelligence sharing in the wake of the attacks Friday night, which left 129 dead in the French capital and were claimed by the IS group.

But Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said the administration has already been doing that and it has not been enough.

“I think the implications are this is not just an intelligence failure,” Schiff said on ABC’s “This Week” show.

“It’s a failure also of a coalition campaign because we have allowed ISIS to have sanctuary in Syria and Iraq with too much time to plan and plot, too much resources to be directed against us,” he said, using an alternative acronym for the IS group.

“And unless that changes strategically, we can expect more attacks like this.”

The United States and its allies have been conducting air strikes against the IS group in Iraq and Syria for more than a year, while also picking off its leaders one by one in drone attacks.

But the extremists still hold large swaths of both countries and the attacks in Paris were seen as part of a new, terrifying phase aimed at taking the conflict directly to the West.

Schiff raised the specter of the IS group hitting the US homeland for the first time.     source

Many are confusing freedom of speech, liberty and tolerance with cultural suicide and self-destruction; the question is: do you bend over so far backward in “tolerating” your enemies that you allow them to destroy you?

Peter Reith, writing in The Imaginative Conservative says:there are other models of dealinf with relilgion and religious freedom: 

Unlike in the United States, where the first amendment prohibits Congress from making laws to regulate speech, or France where a separation of Church and State exists, Russia and Poland have laws on the books (and in the case of Poland a constitutional mandate) protecting religion and religious sensibilities—much like the laws in many Muslim countries.