by Jane M. Orient, M.D.

Medical personnel have to have training in CPR, and many other citizens are signing up for classes. This is excellent and may help you save a life if somebody has a heart attack near you. It is, however, useless in situations like Manchester, or the Boston Marathon, or Orlando, or the Brussels Airport, or the one that might be on the news tonight.

Doctors need to check their backpacks. Do you have a proper tourniquet? (Belts don’t work.) Dressing materials to pack a bleeding wound, or seal a sucking chest wound? Do you know how to improvise? These days civilians can get battlefield-type injuries, and bleed to death in minutes from a severed limb. Compact “Blow-Out” kits are available. Civilian training guidelines can be found at C-TECC.org.

We are very fortunate to live in a society with 9-1-1 responders, but they may not be able to get to victims in a crowded arena, or the police may have to block their entry because of ongoing mayhem. Somebody’s life may depend on you.

Every time there is an incident, we have public mourning, flowers, candles, and exhortations to “come together” and pray for victims and their families. If the perpetrator turns out to be Muslim, as is almost invariable with suicide bombers, we are warned not to succumb to “Islamophobia.” But if he was a white, non-hyphenated American, like the deranged  individual who shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and  a number of others in Tucson, we are warned about “right-wing extremists” allegedly incited by conservative talk-show hosts.

Instead of displays of emotion and virtue signalling, we need seriousness. That includes buying life-saving medical gear and learning to use it. It includes self-defense training, starting with situational awareness. Do you see an unattended bag? A person dressed in inappropriately bulky clothing? And it means demanding accountability from government.

Why is nothing done about known jihadists? There may be 23,000 jihadists in Britain. The one who ran over pedestrian near Westminster Palace and stabbed a police constable to death had been reported as suspicious but was not under active surveillance. Two Muslim suspects were arrested in Minnesota with an arsenal in their car, including bomb-making devices; one has already been released. We know that some Islamic nations fund terrorists, but Western taxpayers might also be contributing. The Manchester bomber may have been using his student loans to fund his terror plot, including trips to Libya to study bomb-making.

With their vast surveillance powers to track every phone conversation and every financial transaction, Western governments have the power to defeat an Islamist invasion whose foot soldiers kill children at concerts. Is it fear of Islamophobia that stops them? A deep respect for religious faith, even if it calls for murdering nonbelievers? (This respect does not carry over to Christian believers who just want to preach and live by the Bible.) Genuine humanitarian concern for refugees fleeing warfare (Muslims but not Christians, and predominantly men of military age)? Or is it something else?

The U.S. court system is a barrier to certain types of law enforcement. Judges are barring President Trump’s attempts to prevent entry of potential terrorists. The Fourth Circuit Court is even creating a right for Muslims not to feel stigmatized—a right that overrides national security considerations.

While jihadists may have faith so strong that it causes them to embrace death, the vast majority of judges and government officials who are enabling and even inviting Islamist terror, and their media allies, do not believe in Allah—or God. They just share a common enemy with the jihadists: Western civilization and American sovereignty. The enemies of America throughout the establishment share a common goal: overturning the American system and seizing the reins of power. They also fund and instigate student riots in protest of free speech, assassinations of police officers, and other types of civil disorder.

American values need CPR. And as American liberty and resources are increasingly bled away by Progressive government policy, more Americans will literally hemorrhage to death in the civil unrest. We need tourniquets both literal and figurative.

 Jane M. Orient, M.D. obtained her undergraduate degrees in chemistry and mathematics from the University of Arizona in Tucson, and her M.D. from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1974. She completed an internal medicine residency at Parkland Memorial Hospital and University of Arizona Affiliated Hospitals and then became an Instructor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine and a staff physician at the Tucson Veterans Administration Hospital. She has been in solo private practice since 1981 and has served as Executive Director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) since 1989. She is currently president of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness. Since 1988, she has been chairman of the Public Health Committee of the Pima County (Arizona) Medical Society. She is the author of YOUR Doctor Is Not In: Healthy Skepticism about National Healthcare, and the second through fourth editions of Sapira's Art and Science of Bedside Diagnosis published by Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins. She authored books for schoolchildren, Professor Klugimkopf’s Old-Fashioned English Grammar and Professor Klugimkopf’s Spelling Method, published by Robinson Books, and coauthored two novels published as Kindle books, Neomorts and Moonshine. More than 100 of her papers have been published in the scientific and popular literature on a variety of subjects including risk assessment, natural and technological hazards and nonhazards, and medical economics and ethics. She is the editor of AAPS News, the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness Newsletter, and Civil Defense Perspectives, and is the managing editor of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.