Hillary Clinton, responding to the knife attack in a St. Cloud, Minnesota mall for which ISIS took credit and the bombing in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood by a gay-hating Afghan-born Islamist who was a naturalized American citizen, warned us not about the dangers of radical Islamic terrorism, but of intolerance to Muslim-Americans:

“[L]et us remember, there are millions and millions of naturalized citizens in America from all over the world. There are millions of law-abiding peaceful Muslim Americans,” Clinton said.

Yes, Hillary, there are a lot of naturalized American citizens, including the 858 from what are euphemistically called “special interest countries”, naturalized by “mistake” due to the use of multiple identities and fingerprints not digitized in any database. This speaks to Donald Trump’s about a cessation of admitting refugees from these countries until we know what we’re doing. Clearly we do not. What other mistakes are being made that will naturalize the next Mohammed Atta?

Dzhokhar Tsanaev became a naturalized citizen before he and his brother used pressure cookers to bomb the Boston Marathon. Ahmad Khan Rahami became a naturalized citizen before he became a jihadi Johnny Appleseed, planting pipe and pressure cooker bombs in New Jersey and New York neighborhoods. Both in effect took up arms against the United States and its citizens, which one would think amounts to a renunciation of their U.S. citizenship. Tamerlan Tsarnaev traveled repeatedly to Dagestan and Chechnya, once spending six months there. Rahami traveled to Afghanistan, returning radicalized. Did anyone care to monitor their movements and motives? Hillary says if you see something, say something, yet is the first to cry “profiling” and “Islamophobia” when we monitor Islamist activities and conduct surveillance radical mosques. The San Bernardino shooters could have been stopped if a neighbor had not been intimidated by political correctness into not reporting their suspicious activity.

There are those who warn against trading liberty for safety and protecting the Constitutional rights of naturalized American citizens. Well, my Constitution has a clause about protecting the rights of all American citizens against our enemies, foreign and domestic. We have a right not to be killed. Naturalized citizens are invited to be American citizens on condition of their loyalty to this country and its beliefs. They do not have a “right” to be here.

There are those who remind us that the Statue of Liberty invites the poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free. We indeed invite those to America who wish to become American, but not those who live in Islamist enclaves in places like Dearborn, Michigan, and Minneapolis. We are Americans who yearn to keep on breathing, unimpeded by shrapnel from exploding pressure cookers, or being stabbed at the mall by an Islamist who sees America as an infidel waiting to be slain. 

Perhaps the goofiest response to Islamist terror was that of Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton, who responded to the St. Cloud knifing attack by issuing a “love it or leave it” order, not to Islamist killers like Dihar Aden, but to American citizens of Minnesota who might be the victims of the next jihadist attack. In response to the stabbing of nine people at the Crossroads Center mall in St. Cloud, Dayton pleaded, not for vigilance, but for tolerance:

“I ask everyone in the St. Cloud area and throughout Minnesota to rise above this atrocity and act to make religious and racial tolerance one of the ways in which Minnesotans again lead our country,” Dayton said.

That will put fear into the heart of ISIS. Tolerance for potential jihadis but not for potential victims who publicly express their fear of unrestricted admission of refugees from hotbeds of terror? The Daily Caller reminds us of what  Dayton said a year before in, of all places, St. Cloud itself:

“Look around you. This is Minnesota,” Dayton said in St. Cloud last October. “Minnesota is not like it was 30, 50 years ago… This is Minnesota and you have every right to be here. And anybody who cannot accept your right to be here, and this is Minnesota, should find another state.”

“If you are that intolerant, if you are that much of a racist or a bigot, then find another state,” he added. “Find a state where the minority population is 1 percent or whatever. It’s not that in Minnesota. It’s not going to be again. It’s not going to be that in St. Cloud, or Rochester or Worthington.”…

There are approximately 30,000 Somalis in Minnesota. There are currently federal charges against nearly a dozen Somalis who were suspected of traveling or trying to travel to join ISIS, a clear sign that radicalization has made serious inroads into the Somali community.

Does Dayton forget the Minneapolis airport worker who gave his life for the Islamic State? As Investor’s Business Daily reported:

Fox affiliate KMSP-TV in Minneapolis-St. Paul has reported the case of Abdirahmaan Muhumed, who, before he went to Syria to fight and die for IS, worked at Delta Global Services, a wholly owned subsidiary of Delta Air Lines. His job was to clean aircraft, and he had a security clearance that gave him unfettered access to the tarmac and passenger jets…

The New York Daily News reports that the 29-year-old Muhumed died in the same battle as 33-year-old Douglas McCain, another Minnesotan recruited by IS. Muhumed and McCain were said to be friends in high school, with Muhumed becoming politically active in the Twin Cities Somali community. He was one of at least 16 Minnesotans, according to Reuters, who have gone overseas to fight and train with IS.

As John Hinderaker notes at his Power Line blog, it wasn't many years ago that Minnesota would not have been a hotbed of Islamist recruiting.

But the mass immigration of Somalis to the area has made it fertile ground for the Islamic State. It appears to be copying the recruiting strategy of al-Shabab, the Somali terrorist group that has been successful in recruiting young men from the Twin Cities region.

Minnesota has indeed become a hotbed of Islamist recruiting, something which Mark Dayton ignores at the peril of his constituents. Tolerance has made it that way. Both he and Hillary are wrong that such jihadists have a “right” to be here. The Constitution is not a suicide pact. Those who go abroad to be radicalized should forfeit both their passport and their citizenship. Those who believe Sharia law trumps the Constitution should not be allowed in. And those who look the other way should never become President of the United States.

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.