Walter Pierce

This week in terrifying the Baptists while picking their pockets

by Walter Pierce

The district attorney in Rapides Parish says he’s surprised by objections to a training session targeting Jihadist terrorists for area law enforcement.

Photo Illustration from image by Voice of America/Wikimedia

The district attorney in Rapides Parish says he’s surprised by objections to a training session targeting Jihadist terrorists for area law enforcement conducted by an outside group whose founder has been characterized by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a virulent Islamophobe who cashes in on misplaced hysteria.

The office is spending $12,500 for a training course next week for Central Louisiana law enforcement officers titled “Understanding and Investigating the Jihadi Movement.” The money would be better spent teaching the public how to avoid lightning and sharks, to chew food thoroughly, or to consume less fat and observe highway safety laws. But, Trump.

The course is being presented by a Virginia-based company, Understanding the Threat, founded by a disgraced former FBI agent named John Guandolo. The Southern Poverty Law Center has characterized Guandolo’s training courses for law enforcement as “anti-Muslim witch-hunts, often times targeting and vilifying local Muslim leaders.”

There don’t appear to be too many Muslims in CenLa, much less Jihadists gunning for the succulent Baptist fruit of Louisiana’s bosom. Calls made to the Islamic Society of Central Louisiana and another Muslim group in the area went to numbers that had been disconnected. Maybe they pulled up their tents when they heard Guandolo was headed to Alexandria. The Pew Research Center estimates that Muslims comprise about 1 percent of the United States’ 322 million citizens.

The D.A.’s office released a statement reading in part, “It is simply to educate our law enforcement community to the potential of terrorism faced by our nation. It is critical that we do everything in our power to protect our community from any threat whether it is drug dealing, violent crime or terrorism.”

The taxpayer money the D.A. in Rapides is throwing at the chimera of Jihadist terrorists would be better spent on dozens of other causes of death that imperil the population. Following President Donald Trump’s fear-mongering executive order in late January barring immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries — an order that was almost immediately suspended by a federal judge and upheld by a federal appeals court — the libertarian Cato Institute released a report underscoring what most of us know: Jihadist terror attacks on Americans in America are exceedingly rare, 9-11 notwithstanding.

The study found that the likelihood of an American being killed by an immigrant terrorist strike is extraordinarily rare, even including 9-11: one in 3.64 million odds. In fact, Americans are more likely to die in parachuting accidents, being buried alive and drowning in the bath tub than by a Muslim terrorist.