Quote of the Day:

Investigators are looking into whether religious extremism motivated the attack.

NBC News

A gunman kills fifty and wounds another fifty in a Florida nightclub rampage minutes after reportedly having called 911 to record a pledge of loyalty to  Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, and authorities are  looking into whether religious extremism motivated the attack.

Omar Mir Seddique Mateen,Mateen reportedly was shouting “allahu Akbar” as he slaughtered people in Orlando's Pulse nightclub.

Nevertheless, Mateen's father states categorically that religion had nothing to do with his son's rampage. But the elder Mateen may not be the most reliable source:

The Washington Post reports that, in one video, the elder Mateen praised the Taliban: “Our brothers in Waziristan, our warrior brothers in [the] Taliban movement and national Afghan Taliban are rising up,” he said.

Meanwhile, the FBI looked into  Mateen in 2013 after co-workers where he was a security guard (!) reported  "inflammatory" comments about radical Islam. The FBI two years later again looked into his ties with Moner Abusalha, an American who lived in Florida and went on to become a suicide bomber in Syria. Apparently, the FBI closed the case on Mateen.

An editorial in the Wall Street Journal reports:

This is reminiscent of the way the FBI misjudged Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who came to its attention after a trip abroad and later with his brother blew up the Boston marathon. The oversight points to how difficult it is in a free society to pinpoint when someone is becoming radicalized enough to kill.

Second-guessing is easy. But one conclusion we’d draw is that the FBI is right to use “sting” operations against Americans who show jihadist leanings on social media or with friends. One way to stop a Mateen before he strikes is to have an undercover agent invite him to take a step toward violence. If he refuses, then he is probably not a threat. If he accepts, then it’s fair to conclude he might have acted on his own eventually.

The political left has begun to criticize these undercover operations in the same way it has attacked surveillance and interrogations. “They’re manufacturing terrorism cases,” Michael German of the anti-antiterror Brennan Center for Justice recently told the New York Times. “These people are five steps away from being a danger to the United States.” Tell that to the families of those killed in the Pulse nightclub, Mr. German.

President Obama could also help if he weren’t so reluctant to acknowledge the domestic danger from ISIS. Mr. Obama did say in his Sunday remarks that this was “an act of terror,” though he still can’t muster the words Islam or jihad or Islamic State. The truest words he uttered were that Orlando “could have been any one of our communities.”

Perhaps he meant gun violence, but his point applies to Islamist terror too. A federal official disclosed that Mateen bought his weapons legally in recent days, and no doubt Democrats will make much of this politically in the coming days. But if the FBI doesn’t identify someone as a terror threat, then basic rights can’t be denied. Mateen was also a licensed security guard, and a determined jihadist will always be able to find firearms.

The distressing truth is that no amount of domestic vigilance can stop every ISIS-inspired act of terror. That’s why the only real solution is to destroy Islamic State in its havens abroad so young Muslims around the world won’t see it as the vanguard of the future.

Part of President Obama’s legacy will be that Islamic State grew so dangerous on his watch, prospering in the political vacuum that was created when he chose to withdraw from Iraq and then do little in Syria. The job of the next President will be to repair the damage done by those two historic mistakes.

We have freedom of speech in this country, but I am willing to bet that it wasn't the right to free speech that led the FBI to close the books on Mateen.

Wanna bet it was political correctness?