Obama's Porous Borders, School Safety and Security Moms

By Ken Blackwell, CP Op-Ed Contributor Friday, October 10, 2014

Ken Blackwell is the Senior Fellow for Family Empowerment at the Family Research Council, and the Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow for Public Policy at the Buckeye Institute in Columbus, Ohio

An incident in suburban Maryland occurred this week that should serve as a wake-up call to all concerned mothers (and dads). An Anne Arundel County, Maryland, school bus was stolen by two drunken pranksters who said they were looking for cigarette money. Bus 874 was trashed and smashed up and left in the woods in Davidsonville. Local moms are incensed—and they should be. How can we know that these people would not have driven around picking up special needs kids? For them the bus would have seemed a safe and welcoming sight. How could anyone gain access to a school bus parking lot under cover of darkness and make off with a bright yellow vehicle without being stopped at locked gates?

We should remember that our open society and our free press give ample coverage to such capers. They seem to us a one-day story. But to terrorists who have crossed our porous borders, these stories give ideas. Let's not forget that the 1971 airline hijacking by "D.B. Cooper" gained worldwide publicity. Soon, Yasser Arafat's PLO guerillas and their subcontractors were hijacking commercial jets and taking their passengers hostage to advance his political agenda.

We should use this drunken joy ride on an unoccupied school bus in Maryland to prepare ourselves. How secure are our schoolyards and bus parking lots from just this kind of event? What assurance do we have that we will not see a school massacre like the one that occurred in 2004 in Beslan, Russia? There, some 350 people, most of them little children, died when Chechen Islamists seized the school and held the children and their teachers hostage for three days. Russian President Vladimir Putin's bungling, brutal rescue mission was largely responsible for the high casualty figures.

With liberals here yelling about a supposed "war on women" this election year, the real danger that concerns women (and men) is the casual view this administration takes on border security. President Obama has brazenly promised major action after the midterms to grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens. What kind of security checks will these people go through? Will it be the kind of politically correct screening that allowed the Tsarnaev brothers to shuttle back and forth to their Islamist homeland before returning to plant a bomb at the Boston Marathon?

Will these illegal aliens get the kind of wave-off that the son of a major Obama donor got during the investigation of the Cartagena Secret Service prostitution scandal? Even The Washington Post is reporting that the Obama administration managed to keep the lid on this story until after Mr. Obama was safely re-elected. This story—from the reliably liberal Post-- demonstrates that President Obama is more than willing to let security take a back seat to politics.

Terrorists seizing schools or school buses and taking hostages is just one of the threats this administration would ignore by granting blanket amnesty post-election. Its virtual invitation to children to trek across the entire length of Mexico to crowd our borders is another example of an unconscionable lack of attention to security. A quick look at a map of Mexico should prove to even the most skeptical that children from Honduras and Guatemala do not make that arduous passage alone. "Coyotes"—those who exploit and victimize children—are using them as human shields. They may be doing it to profit from the drug trade. They may be doing it to traffic these children. But there is nothing to stop "Wolves"—ISIS and Iranian terrorists--from using these well-worn pathways to penetrate our borders.

One thing we learned from the recent Gaza War waged by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is that Hamas was building a huge system of tunnels to undermine Israel's borders.

They had every intention of employing Metro-size tunnels to burrow under Israeli kindergartens. Then, they could have burst out during Rosh Hashanah for a spectacularly grisly attack on an Israeli school.

And yet this administration continues to peddle the line that it is only reacting to humanitarian concerns when it refuses to enforce our immigration laws and when it created an artificial crisis at the border with thousands of children dumped on our doorstep.

"What difference does it make at this point, senator?" That was the infamous reply of Sec. Hillary Clinton to urgent calls for transparency in the Benghazi scandal. Madame Secretary, this is the difference it makes: When American lives, American territory, and American honor are not protected by this administration, the repercussions are deadly—abroad and at home.

What is to stop ISIS from coming across our border, seizing a school, and beheading kindergarteners? Nothing this administration has done should give us confidence that they have taken the necessary steps. They can't even secure the front door of the White House!

This is why the Security Moms may be heard from again this election cycle. Chris Matthews calls the Democrats the "mommy party" and the Republicans the "daddy party." And Moms are the first to feel it when security lapses.

Ken Blackwell is the Senior Fellow for Family Empowerment at the Family Research Council. He serves on the board of directors of the Club for Growth and the National Taxpayers Union. He is also a member of the public affairs committee of the NRA. Mr. Blackwell is also the former Mayor of Cincinnati and a former Ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission.