Posted tagged ‘Homeland Security’

House GOP Leaders Set To Endorse Obama’s Failed Anti-JIhad Strategy

June 16, 2016

House GOP Leaders Set To Endorse Obama’s Failed Anti-JIhad Strategy, BreitbartNeil Munro, June 15, 2016

Domestic-Islamic-Terrorists-Radical-Islam-San-Bernardino-Fort-Hood-Orlando-Boston-Chattanooga-AP-640x480

House GOP leaders are set to endorse President Barack Obama’s failed domestic anti-jihad strategy, according to Texas GOP Rep. Louie Gohmert.

The GOP’s Obama endorsement is hidden in a new bill, titled the ‘‘Countering Terrorist Radicalization Act.” The showpiece bill’s title and language is undermined by numerous exceptions that allow the president to continue his failed “Countering Violent Extremism” strategy,  Gohmert said. 

The bill is a post-Orlando showpiece that actually entrenches Obama’s harmful policies, he said. “All this is doing is giving more and more credibility to this ridiculous term ‘CVE’ instead of describing the killers that were behind 9/11, the Boston bombings, the San Bernardino attack, the Orlando shooting, the bomber in Times Square… all these people who are trying to kill us in America,” he said.

“We’re doing the same thing as the president… we’re not identifying radical Islam” as the enemy which nurtures and motivates attackers, Gohmert. “There is going to be more and more killings of Americans … until we can train our people to recognize radical Islam,” he said.

Under the CVE strategy, Obama has blocked FBI investigators from examining the supposedly non-political and peaceful networks of mosques that actually nurture jihadi attitudes, while redirecting FBI attention to less dangerous non-Islamic groups, such as small-government militias. The strategy has also put FBI agents under the supervision of an oversight panel influenced by Muslim political activists, including an immigrant who reportedly welcomed the slaughter of 3,000 Americans in 2001 by her Muslim co-religionists.  

Moreover, Obama’s tight restrictions on investigators have not earned the expected cooperation from Islamic groups. In fact, many self-segregating Islamic groups have rejected Obama’s proposal to allow local Imams to police their young men in exchange for sharing information about jihadi groups with the FBI.

The GOP endorsement bill is slated for a vote as early as Thursday, June 16.

Under a subtitle, “AMPLIFYING LOCAL EFFORTS TO ROOT OUT TERROR,” the bill simply authorizes extra training, the creation of a committee and establishes some conditional reporting requirements, according to the draft given to Breitbart. The bill does not reform Obama’s CVE strategy, training rules or investigative priorities.

The bill was drafted by staff working for Rep. Michael McCaul,  R-Texas, who is the chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security.  Press aides at the committee declined to comment on the bill, or even if the committee plans to hold oversight hearing on Obama’s failed CVE strategy in the run-up to the 2016 election.

In March, McCaul endorsed Obama’s tacit alliance with U.S-based Islamic religious groups, many of which share overlapping umbrella networks that are exempt from normal FBI anti-terror monitoring.

“The effective thing is … effective outreach to the Muslim community, so you can pull the religious leaders really on to our team, if you will, to protect us from radicalization from within those communities,” he said March 27. “I think we can get good intelligence from the Muslim communities in our outreach efforts, in our working with the religious leaders in the communities in the United States,” he said.

In contrast, federal prosecutors do not offer political favors to let the Catholic priests run law-enforcement tasks in Latino neighborhoods, for example, keeping track of MS-13 and various drug-gangs.

In practice, much of that hoped-for intelligence about emerging jihadis has been blocked by determined opposition from Islamist advocates. For example, Linda Sarsour, a prominent Islamic advocate who is called a “Champion of Change” by Obama’s deputies, is a strong opponent of the information-exchange.

The government’s practice of providing funds to Muslim community partners in the fight against violent extremism has also raised concerns about the true goal of these partnerships. Are they being formed in order to gather intelligence and information about community members, or to actually engage in valuable community outreach about civil rights protections? CVE programs can foster mistrust between government entities and community members.

In December 2015, George Selim, then the  director of the Office for Community Partnerships at the Department of Homeland Security, told NPR that Muslim communities are not identifying emerging jihadis. 

The research and the statistics have all indicated that peers, people that are in close association with subjects that ultimately commit an act like this, see something that’s a little bit out of the norm, but they don’t necessarily report it. And so part of our goal is to create the type of partnerships in which peers know when and how to elevate those type of suspicions.

There’s growing evidence that wife of the Orlando jihadi knew of his pending attack, but did not warn Americans.

Gohmert is trying to reform the McCaul bill before the vote — but he’s skeptical the GOP leadership is willing to fight for an effective anti-jihad strategy.

“There are plenty of representatives who are concerned about this, but the Speaker [Rep. Paul Ryan] and the Majority Leader [Rep. Kevin McCarthy] control what comes to the floor for a vote. and they have no intentions of bringing a bill that says we’ll stop radical Islamists,” he said.

Anti-jihad groups are urging voters to protest the planned bill. “Congress is about to help President Obama whitewash his approach to Counterterrorism to hide any mention or focus on Islamists or their Jihad against the free world,” said Jim Hanson, an executive vice president at the Center for Security Policy. “The Countering Violent Extremism Bill ignores the very Islamic nature of the Sharia ideology that motivates our enemies to slaughter innocents from Paris to Orlando,” he added.

The problems in Obama’s CVE strategy, said Gohmert, include the tight curbs on FBI investigations and training, the gag order to prevent any discussion of Islamic ideas — such as ‘jihad,’ ‘sharia’ or ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ — an intrusive oversight panel staffed by Islamic advocates, the legal shield for Islamic networks and political groups, and an eagerness to direct stigma and investigations against non-Islamic groups, such as “right wing militias,” plus its failure to win cooperation from self-segregating Islamic political groups.

For example, the gag-order means “the FBI is not allowed to learn or discuss or look for the things that radical islamics read, or the type of activities they’re doing when they going through radicalization,” Gohmert said.

In contrast, GOP 2016 candidate Donald Trump has called for more oversight over the Islamic networks. “We have to maybe check, respectfully, the mosques and we have to check other places because this is a problem that, if we don’t solve it, it’s going to eat our country alive,” he said during his June 15 campaign rally in Atlanta, Georgia.

Obama’s CVE strategy also created an advisory group of outsiders who have much influence over FBI investigations.

The committee has pushed for a FBI focus on non-Islamic groups, and just before the Orlando massacre, presented a report to top DHS officials asking for a gag-order that would prevent officials from studying, debating or even recognizing jihadi ideas. Officials should “reject religiously-charged terminology and problematic positioning by using plain meaning American English,” said the report, which also urged officials to use “American English instead of religious, legal and cultural terms like ‘jihad,’ ‘sharia,’ ‘takfir’ or ‘umma,” according to the The Daily Caller

That’s the equivalent of President Franklin Roosevelt and his generals and their soldiers waging war against National Socialist Germany without mentioning “Blitzkrieg,” “U-boat,” “Fuhrer,” “Lebensraum,” “Panzer,” “Stuka,” or “Untermensch” or “Flak,” “Panzerfaust” or “SS.”

Committee co-chair Farah Pandith was born in the Muslim-vs.-Hindu battleground of Kashmir. For decades, that area has suffered from Muslim attacks, and many non-Arab Muslims consider that war to be as important as the Arab fight to destroy the Jewish state.

In 2012, co-chair Adnan Kifayat threatened this reporter with criminal charges for asking George Selim about the White House’s many quiet contacts with the Council on American Islamic Relations. “That was wrong… it is really bad form … You’re putting a career at risk by asking [questions] without telling him… you cannot ambush people and expect them to actually cooperate,” Kifayat told this reporter.

The CAIR group is so closely entwined with Islamists and with jihadis that court documents and news reports show that at least five of its people — either board members, employees or former employees — have been jailed or repatriated for various financial and terror-related offenses. Critics show that CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in a Texas-based criminal effort to deliver $12 million to the Jew-hating HAMAS jihad group, and that CAIR was founded with $490,000 from HAMAS.

Another member, Mohamed Elibiary, quit in 2014 after he tweeted that the Islamic empire, dubbed the “caliphate,” will return.

CAIR tweets

Obama’s deputies have recently appointed a young Muslim activist from Syria to the panel, Laila Alawa. She wears a hijab in observance to Islam, has tweeted a message supporting the 9/11 atrocity by her fellow Muslims, and tweeted a series of hateful messages about jihad opponents, according to a new report in The Daily Caller.

Alawa1

Alawa2

The new GOP bill eliminates any GOP oversight or leverage over Obama’s counter-productive CVE strategy by adding numerous loopholes in the weak GOP bill, Gohmert said. For example, the bill says;

COORDINATION.—The Secretary of Homeland Security shall, where appropriate, coordinate the efforts described in subsection (a) with the heads of other Federal departments and agencies, as appropriate, and, to the extent practicable, engage nongovernmental and international partners in the identification and use of testimonials described in such subsection.

But the phrase “to the extent practicable” really means “only if you want to … if it is not too much trouble,” Gohmert said. The phrase “where appropriate” really means “if you feel like you want to,” he said. 

“Shakespeare has the appropriate phrase— much ado about nothing,” he added.

“We all know most Muslims are not terrorists,” said Gohmert. “At the same time, it is ridiculous to not recognize there are radical islamists who are in America, who want to bring this country down and who think they go to paradise if they kill Americans.”

Muslim Privilege Killed 49 People in Orlando

June 16, 2016

Muslim Privilege Killed 49 People in Orlando, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, June 16, 2016

Flowers in Orlando

The deadliest mass shooting in American history happened because of Islamophobia.

Islamophobia killed 49 people in Orlando. It didn’t kill 49 Muslims. Instead it allowed Omar Mateen, a Muslim terrorist, to kill 49 people in the name of his Islamic ideology and the Islamic State.

Omar, like so many other Muslim killers, could have been stopped. He talked about killing people when he worked at G4S Security, a Federal contractor that provided services to the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department. But, according to one of the co-workers he stalked, a former police officer, his employers refused to do anything about it because he was a Muslim.

The FBI conducted an investigation of Omar Mateen. They put him on a watch list and sent informants. They interviewed him and concluded that his claims of Al Qaeda ties and terrorist threats were reactions to “being marginalized because of his Muslim faith.” Omar told the agents that he said those things because “his co-workers were discriminating against him and teasing him because he was Muslim.”

And they believed him.

Poor Omar wasn’t a potential terrorist. He was just a victim of Islamophobia.

Omar got away with homophobic comments that would have gotten Americans fired because he was Muslim. He weathered an “extensive” FBI investigation because he was Muslim.

Anyone who says that there is no such thing as Muslim Privilege ought to look at Omar Mateen.

There is a direct line between Omar’s Muslim privilege and the Pulse massacre. Omar Mateen’s Muslim privilege protected him from consequences. While the media studiously paints the image of a beleaguered population of American Muslims suffering the stigma of constant suspicion, Omar’s Muslim background actually served as a shield and excused behavior that would have been unacceptable for anyone else. Omar Mateen’s Muslim privilege shielded him until he was actually murdering non-Muslims.

And Omar’s case is not unique. The Fort Hood killer, Nidal Hasan, handed out business cards announcing that he was a Jihadist. He delivered a presentation justifying suicide bombings, but no action was taken. Like Omar, the FBI was aware of Hasan. It knew that he was talking to Al Qaeda bigwig Anwar Al-Awlaki, yet nothing was done. Instead of worrying about his future victims, the FBI was concerned that investigating him and interviewing him would “harm Hasan’s career”.

One of his classmates later said that the military authorities, “Don’t want to say anything because it would be considered questioning somebody’s religious belief, or they’re afraid of an equal opportunity lawsuit.”

Would the FBI have been as sensitive if Nidal Hasan had been named Frank Wright? No more than Omar Mateen would have kept his security job if his name had been Joe Johnson.

It’s an increasingly familiar story.

The neighbors of San Bernardino killers Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik noticed that something strange was going on, but they were afraid of profiling Muslims. If they had done the right thing, the 14 victims of the two Muslim killers would still be alive. If the FBI had done the right thing with Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood victims would still be alive and whole. If the FBI had done the right thing with Omar Mateen, his 49 victims would still be alive and those he wounded would still be whole.

We have some basic choices to make. We can empathize with Muslims or with their victims.

We cannot however do both.

After 9/11, Muslims somehow became the biggest victim group in America. And even if you contend that most Muslims are not responsible for the actions of Islamic fundamentalist groups, even if you believe that most Muslims are being wrongly blamed for the actions of a smaller group of radicals, the pernicious myth of Muslim victimhood has become a distorting force that protects terrorists.

Muslim victimhood has elevated Islamist groups such as CAIR to the front row of political discourse alongside legitimate civil rights organizations, despite their terror links and history of obstructing law enforcement efforts to fight Islamic terrorism, while mainstreaming their Islamist agendas.

Muslim victimhood has silenced the victims of Muslim terrorism. Every Muslim terror attack is swiftly diverted to the inevitable “backlash” narrative in which the media turns away from the bodies in the latest terror attack to bring us the stories of the real Muslim victims who fear being blamed for it.

This obscene act of media distraction silences the victims of Muslim terrorism and rewards the enablers and accomplices of Muslim terrorism instead. It is every bit as terrible as claiming that the real victims of a serial killer are his family members who are being blamed for not turning him in, instead of the people he killed and the loved ones they left behind.

Muslim victimhood protects Muslim terrorists like Omar Mateen. It shields them from scrutiny. It invents excuses for them. While Omar made his preparations, while the FBI investigation of him was botched, the media leaped nimbly from a thousand petty claims of Muslim victimhood. And the worst of them may have been Tahera Ahmad, a Muslim woman who claimed she was discriminated against when a flight attendant poured her soda in a cup instead of being given a can. This insane nonsense received days of media coverage. That’s more airtime than any American victim of Islamic terrorism has received.

The media will wait as short a period as it can and turn away from Orlando to some manufactured viral media claim of Muslim discrimination that will be unbearably petty. Meanwhile the next Omar Mateen will be plotting his next act of terror.

It’s time to tell the truth.

Islamic terrorism is caused by Muslim privilege. These acts of violence are motivated by racism and supremacism in Islam. Allahu Akbar, the Islamic battle cry often associated with acts of terror and ethnic cleansing since its origin in Mohammed’s persecution of the Jews, is a statement of Muslim superiority to non-Muslims.

Muslim terrorism is not the groan of an oppressed minority. Its roots run back to racist and supremacist Islamic societies in Saudi Arabia and Egypt where non-Muslims have few if any civil rights. Muslims are a global majority. Islamic terrorism is their way of imposing their religious system on everyone.

Standing in solidarity with Muslims after Orlando makes as much sense as standing in solidarity with Klansmen after the Charleston massacre. No one should be standing in solidarity with hate groups.

Omar wasn’t radicalized by the “internet”. He got his ideas from Islamic clerics who got their ideas from Islam. He was “radicalized” by the holiest texts of Islam. Just like every other Muslim terrorist. His actions weren’t “senseless” or “nihilistic”, he was acting out the Muslim privilege of a bigoted ideology.

Even in this country, the majority of hate crimes are not directed at Muslims. Instead Muslims have disproportionately contributed to persecuting various minority groups. Orlando is only the latest example of this trend. In Europe, Jews are fleeing Sweden and France because of Muslim persecution. In Germany, gay refugees have to be housed separately from Muslim migrants. So do Christian refugees.

This isn’t the behavior of victims. These are the actions of oppressors.

Muslims are not part of the coalition of the oppressed, but of the oppressors. The sooner we recognize that, the sooner we can deal stop Islamic terrorism and protect the victims of Muslim terrorists.

Muslim privilege killed 49 people in Orlando. How many people will it kill next week or next month? How many will it kill in the next decade or the next century?

The Muslim genocide of non-Muslims is already happening in Syria and Iraq. Islam has a long genocidal history. And if we continue to confuse the oppressors and the oppressed, the next genocide we fail to stop may be our own.

Are Democrats Winning the Political Battle over Islamic Terror?

June 15, 2016

Are Democrats Winning the Political Battle over Islamic Terror?, Power LineJohn Hinderaker, June 15, 2016

In the wake of the terrorist attack in Orlando, battle lines were clearly drawn. Donald Trump claimed credit for sounding warnings about Islamic terrorism and called, once again, for a suspension of immigration from predominantly Muslim countries. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton expressed outrage at Trump’s reaction and doubled down on the claim that Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with Islam. That, together with the assertion that being selective about immigration is “not who we are.”

My instinct was that Trump decisively won the political battle. (I also think he is right as a matter of policy, of course.) However, early poll results suggest that assessment may be wrong. A CBS News poll out this morning says that most Americans agree with Barack Obama, not Trump:

A CBS News poll conducted in the days since the attack finds 51 percent of those surveyed said they did not like the way Trump was handling the shooting. … Just 25 percent of those surveyed said they approved of Trump’s reaction.

Ouch.

The numbers for President Barack Obama’s handling of the shooting are much better. Forty-four percent of Americans gave Obama high marks for his response, while 34 percent gave him an unfavorable rating.

I find that rather shocking, given that Trump was right when he said Obama was more angry at Trump than he was at the terrorist.

For whatever reason–perhaps merely the fact that her statements weren’t as widely covered as Trump’s and Obama’s–voters have a less clear reaction to Hillary’s response to the attack:

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s response rating was split, with 36 percent favorable, 34 percent unfavorable and 30 percent of respondents saying they did not know or did not answer.

These results are disturbing. Maybe they confirm, once again, that America is now a center-left country, rather than center-right. Maybe the cause is narrower: the Democrats have succeeded in demonizing Trump to the point that most people will disapprove, no matter what he says. Maybe the problem is partly due to the fact that a number of prominent Republicans have joined in the attacks on Trump, thereby isolating him. In any event, the fact (assuming this CBS poll is representative) most Americans’ first instinct is to side with Obama’s view of terrorism rather than Trump’s is discouraging. This should be Trump’s strongest suit.

Finally: A Realistic Plan for Fighting the Jihad and Protecting Americans

June 14, 2016

Finally: A Realistic Plan for Fighting the Jihad and Protecting Americans, Front Page MagazineRobert Spencer, June 14, 2016

(Please see also, Donald Trump’s Full Speech on National Security/Hillary Clinton in Manchester, NH (6-13-16) — DM)

Trump on Jihad

Trump’s point was sound. In what way was it not? Combining unrestricted immigration and a massive influx of Muslim migrants, among whom the Islamic State has promised to embed jihadis, with a disarmed American population is simply an invitation to jihad massacres on a frequency never hitherto imagined. Could there be an Orlando-style attack every day? Why not, in the America of the near future that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are busy preparing for us? 

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We’ve gotten so used to politically correct obfuscation about Islam being a religion of peace that preaches tolerance and non-violence that Donald Trump’s words in his address Monday were startling: “Many of the principles of radical Islam are incompatible with Western values and institutions. Remember this, radical Islam is anti-woman, anti-gay and anti-American. I refuse to allow America to become a place where gay people, Christian people, Jewish people are targets of persecution and intimation by radical Islamic preachers of hate and violence.”

Trump continued: “This is not just a national security issue. It’s a quality of life issue. If we want to protect the quality of life for all Americans — women and children, gay and straight, Jews and Christians and all people then we need to tell the truth about radical Islam and we need to do it now.”

One may quibble about whether jihad violence and Sharia oppression in Islam are really “radical,” but the fact is that Donald Trump has become the first nominee of either party since 9/11 to reject the usual nonsense about how jihadis believe in and preach a twisted, hijacked version of the religion of peace. Even more importantly, Trump is now the first presidential candidate since maybe John Quincy Adams to recognize that the problem posed by Islam is not just restricted to the specter of violent jihad attacks, but is, given Sharia oppression of women, gays, and non-Muslims, very much, as Trump put it, a “quality of life issue.”

Trump declared his determination to prevent more jihad attacks such as the one in Orlando Saturday night above all by reiterating his proposal temporarily to “suspend immigration from areas of the world where there’s a proven history of terrorism against the United States, Europe or our allies until we fully understand how to end these threats.” CNN huffed: “Critics of Trump’s policies, however, have pointed out that the perpetrator of the Orlando massacre was born in the U.S.”

Those critics are not being honest. What Trump actually said was that the Orlando jihad mass murderer was born “of Afghan parents, who immigrated to the United States.” He noted, quite correctly, that “the bottom line is that the only reason the killer was in America in the first place, was because we allowed his family to come here,” and pointed out, quite rightly, that “we have a dysfunctional immigration system, which does not permit us to know who we let into our country, and it does not permit us to protect our citizens properly….We’re importing radical Islamic terrorism into the West through a failed immigration system and through an intelligence community held back by our president. Even our own FBI director has admitted that we cannot effectively check the backgrounds of people we’re letting into America. ”

Can any truthful person seriously dispute that? Tashfeen Malik, who, along with her husband Syed Rizwan Farook murdered fourteen people at a Christmas party in San Bernardino last December 2, had passed five separate background checks from five different U.S. government agencies. If the U.S. did not have a “dysfunctional immigration system,” she would never have been in the country in the first place. And neither would her husband, about whom Trump noted that he was “the child of immigrants from Pakistan and he brought his wife, the other terrorist from Saudi Arabia through another one of our easily exploited visa programs.”

Trump skewered Hillary Clinton for having “repeatedly refused to even say the words radical Islam until I challenged her yesterday.” He quoted her fatuous words: “Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people, and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism” and opined “she’s in total denial, and her continuing reluctance to ever name the enemy broadcasts weakness across the entire world — true weakness.” Clinton wants, he said, “to take away American’s guns and then admit the very people who want to slaughter us. Let them come into the country, we don’t have guns. Let them come in, let them have all the fun they want….The bottom line is that Hillary supports policies that bring the threat of radical Islam into American and allow it to grow overseas, and it is growing.”

Trump’s point was sound. In what way was it not? Combining unrestricted immigration and a massive influx of Muslim migrants, among whom the Islamic State has promised to embed jihadis, with a disarmed American population is simply an invitation to jihad massacres on a frequency never hitherto imagined. Could there be an Orlando-style attack every day? Why not, in the America of the near future that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are busy preparing for us?

Trump declared: “The burden is on Hillary Clinton to tell us why she believes immigration from these dangerous countries should be increased without any effective system to really to screen.” Again, his point his sound: all those, including Hillary, who are busy excoriating Trump for the “racism” and “bigotry” of his immigration proposal have not bothered to suggest any alternative plan for preventing jihadis from entering the country. The bottom line, to borrow one of Trump’s pet phrases, is that Hillary and the rest of the political and media elites would rather see Americans subjected to jihad mass murder on a huge scale than do anything that is politically incorrect.

Another foray into political incorrectness in Trump’s speech was his insistence that the Muslim community in the U.S. has “to work with us. They have to cooperate with law enforcement and turn in the people who they know are bad. They know it. And they have to do it, and they have to do it forthwith….The Muslims have to work with us. They have to work with us. They know what’s going on. They know that he was bad. They knew the people in San Bernardino were bad. But you know what? They didn’t turn them in. And you know what? We had death, and destruction.”

The Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was furious. CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper claimed that “law enforcement authorities have repeatedly stated that they have tremendous cooperation from the Muslim community.” CAIR’s hypocrisy is astounding, as it has more than once advised Muslims not to cooperate with law enforcement. In January 2011, its San Francisco chapter featured on its website a poster that read, “Build A Wall of Resistance / Don’t Talk to the FBI.” In November 2014, CAIR-Florida’s “14th Annual Banquet Rooted in Faith” in Tampa distributed pamphlets entitled “What to do if the FBI comes for you” and featuring a graphic of a person holding a finger to his lips in the “shhh” signal.

Another CAIR pamphlet, entitled “Know Your Rights: Defending Rights, Defeating Intolerance” featured a graphic of the Statue of Liberty likewise making the “shhh” symbol. Cyrus McGoldrick, a former official of Hamas-linked CAIR’s New York chapter, even threatened informants, tweeting with brutal succinctness: “Snitches get stitches.” Zahra Billoo of CAIR-San Francisco regularly tweets that Muslims have no obligation to talk to the FBI, and should contact Hamas-linked CAIR if the FBI asks to talk to them.

This is the group criticizing Trump for noting that Muslim communities have not been any significant help in rooting out jihadis from among them?

Trump’s most revolutionary proposal was for an overhaul of our entire foreign policy establishment and the assumptions upon which it rests – assumptions that have led us into numerous blind alleys and failed initiatives. He said: “The decision to overthrow the regime in Libya, then pushing for the overthrow of the regime in Syria, among other things, without plans for the day after, have created space for ISIS to expand and grow like nobody has ever seen before. These actions, along with our disastrous Iran deal, have also reduced our ability to work in partnership with our Muslim allies in the region. That is why our new goal must be to defeat Islamic terrorism not nation building. No more nation building. It’s never going to work.”

Indeed. It didn’t work in Iraq. It hasn’t worked in Afghanistan. We have poured billions into Pakistan since 9/11 to help them fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and the Pakistani government has funneled a good deal of that money to al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Trump said it: “And by the way we’ve spent almost $5 trillion over the years on trying to nation build in the Middle East and it has been complete and total disaster.” Yet despite the fact that its policies have failed again and again and again, the foreign policy establishment keeps reappointing and promoting those responsible for those failures, allowing them to make more mistakes in ever-larger arenas. But no candidate has ever challenged that establishment – until now.

Trump offered one more common sense that no establishment politician has thought to or dared to make: he suggested that there needs to be a reconfiguration of our alliances, which are still based on the Cold War. “NATO,” he said, “needs to change its focus and stop terrorism….America must unite the whole civilized world in the fight against Islamic terrorism.”

Indeed. The world is on fire courtesy of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. If America votes in November for more of the same, we will soon be engulfed in those flames as well. On Monday, Donald Trump outlined an unprecedentedly realistic plan for putting out the fire.

In Times of Crisis Ignorance Doesn’t Help

June 14, 2016

In Times of Crisis Ignorance Doesn’t Help, Clarion Project, Raheel Raza, June 14, 2016

[W]e Muslims have a huge crisis of a virus within our ranks which we are not accepting. This problem is increased by the lack of acknowledgement by Western leaders. Reform minded Muslims like us can only expose the problems. It’s up to the authorities to take corrective action.

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In the wake of yet another terror attack by jihadists, this time in Orlando, Florida, we are deeply saddened but not shocked. This attack is not the first or the last. It’s just another checkmark in a string of attacks by the extremists as they gleefully cross off the targets they have destroyed while planning for more attacks.

Once again media pundits and experts are using the language of ‘lone wolf’ and ‘mental issues.’ Even Hillary Clinton in her address to the nation, mentioned that it could be a lone-wolf attack.

Is it just naivety on part of our leadership or is it ignorance? It doesn’t take rocket science to deduce that this is not a lone-wolf attack. This is a premeditated attack, ideologically supported by all the extremist groups around the world who want to destroy the West. Connect the dots from Boston to Brussels to Paris to Ottawa to San Bernardino and now Orlando.

As far as mental issues are concerned, it’s obvious the radical jihadist mindset is the result of a mentally-deranged ideology.

There, I said it. Now you repeat after me: It’s-a-war-on-the-west-stupid!

But no. You can’t. Political correctness, fear or appeasement keeps your lips sealed. And while you, holding on to your white liberal guilt complex are unable to articulate the real cause of terrorist attacks, they will continue unabated. Why? Because the radical jihadists know your weakness and fear of being called an Islamophobe, so they play you like a piano pressing all the right keys while you sing their song.

Meanwhile, Muslim organizations are competing about who will snare the first news conference. Great idea if they plan to slam the Radical Jihadists, or name them and acknowledge (perhaps for the first time) that we have a problem within the House of Islam. But that’s not the rhetoric in this case. Muslim organizations and places of worship are not generally inclined to be warm and fuzzy towards the LGBTQ community and regularly slam those of us who support them.

In Florida, an Islamic religious scholar was caught on YouTube gently and firmly suggesting that it’s compassionate to kill gays. Why is he not in jail?

Raheel Raza hosts By The Numbers:

CAIR (The Council on American-Islamic Relations) came on Fox News very soon after the Orlando attack. The CAIR representative said all the right things about not killing people in the name of God. And then he condemned ISIS saying “1.7 billion people (Muslims) are united in rejecting their (ISIS) extremism, their interpretation, their acts and senseless violence.”

How much can one person lie on public television?  Sadly many people will believe the CAIR representative and of course Muslims are thrilled because he has now absolved all 1.7 billion from any responsibility whatsoever.

If CAIR was really concerned about the Orlando attacks, they would condemn the comments of the religious scholar from Florida, they would speak about ways in which radicalization of our youth can be stemmed and they would openly and publicly reject the concept of “armed jihad” as a 7th Century construct, no longer applicable in the 21st Century. They will never say this because they are part of the problem and not part of the solution.

Herein lies a huge problem which must be addressed. Both Muslims and non-Muslims must understand that while all Muslims are not terrorists, most of the terrorists today are Muslims. The ideology of ISIS is the same as Hamas, al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Are they not represented in the 1.7 billion? After killing four innocent people in Tel Aviv, the Hamas operatives who celebrated the murder are also part of the 1.7 billion Muslims.

According a to Pew Poll shown in the Clarion documentary By the Numbers, there are between 40,000 to 200,00 Muslims who are ‘members’ of ISIS; up to 100,000 al-Qaeda affiliates; 7-9,000 members of Hamas, 15,000 to 100,000 Iranian Revolutionary Guards and about 15,000 members of Hezbollah. All these are terrorist organizations and jihadists who should be included in the 1.7 billion Muslims making ALL Muslims not so peaceful. While these are the overtly violent groups, the mindset of millions of other Muslims (according to the poll) is also skewed towards violence and acceptance of violence against other human beings.

This is all to say that we Muslims have a huge crisis of a virus within our ranks which we are not accepting. This problem is increased by the lack of acknowledgement by Western leaders. Reform minded Muslims like us can only expose the problems. It’s up to the authorities to take corrective action.

It’s taken 15 years for the term ‘Radical’ to become accepted usage. How long more will it take to stop the Radicals from carrying out their nefarious agendas and waging a war on the West?

Stealth Jihadists are Hiding Their Identities Behind the Islamic State

June 13, 2016

Stealth Jihadists are Hiding Their Identities Behind the Islamic State, Jihad Watch

(Imam Obama and many others have told us, repeatedly, that the Islamic State has nothing to do with Islam. Therefore, mass slaughters by Muslims in the name of the Islamic State must have nothing to do with the Religion of Peace and Tolerance either; to say or think that they are based on Islam is Islamophobic. Islamists are the principal victims. That’s the message pushed by CAIR and related Islamist organizations, highly regarded and relied upon by Obama, et al. — DM)

ISIS-has-always-been-here

An American-born man, reported to be 29-year-old Omar Mateen of Fort Pierce, Florida, pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and went on the deadliest mass shooting in American history, described as the worst terror attack since 9/11.

Robert Spencer has been following the media in its the defense of the indefensible, including: ACLU lawyers blaming the Christian Right and the GOP for the Jihadi rampage, while Obama babbled that it was too early to know the precise motivations of the killer. Too late, Mr. President! You already knew that the gunman had identified himself to police and pledged allegiance to the Islamic State on a 911 call, and Mateen was also said to have recited prayers to Allah during the attack.

The victimology machine, as expected, went into high gear, with warnings about the backlash of “Islamophobia” before the crime scene was even cleaned up. The nefarious display of insensitivity on the part of by agenda-driven cads toward the families of the victims who were targeted in this monumental Jihadist attack, as well as the rampant political posturing, is grievous — and sure to continue. Even some of those who were directly affected in the attacks have been regurgitating the “Islamophobia” agenda, which has been shoved down their throats by means of a propagandist message about Muslim victimhood, racism, the past sins of European colonialism, the Crusades, and the present sins of right-wing foreign policies that supposedly provoke Jihadists. I’ll be surprised if the Jews don’t thrown onto the villain list somewhere, somehow.

Combine that focus with the media emphasis on the Islamic State’s “un-Islamic doctrine,” and its fears about where the next target could be. In all this, one group escapes mainstream scrutiny virtually unscathed, and thus continues in its malevolence virtually undetected. That group is the stealth Jihadists, who are using the presence of the Islamic State to hide behind and conceal their own activities. They did well at hiding almost completely — at least up until the Holy Land Foundation case, in which many of them were designated them “unindicted co-conspirators”, thus blowing their cover and showcasing their ties to jihad terrorism. Nonetheless, the mainstream media still gives them immunity from critique and analysis.

Before delving into some of the trickery of the stealth jihadists, it is important to note that Western water-carriers for the Jihad have been psychologically beaten into forgetting that the worst atrocities worldwide are being committed by Jihadists against innocents. These jihadists, who are both homegrown and foreign, are brainwashed by fanatical Islamic clerics — teaching in Western mosques and Islamic institutions — and linked to foreign entities that provide funding and issue fatwas and commands to conquer and kill infidels, along with their fellow Muslims who are deemed apostates. The anti-black racism in the Arab world, discussed at length in this AlJazeera article by an Arab woman, and the historic and current Arab slave trade, are also conveniently ignored.

June is Gay Pride month in America, and Orlando recently wrapped up a festival reported to have drawn up to 150,000 in the LGBT community to theme parks, gay nightclubs and special events.  The Pulse nightclub is well known for its power party atmosphere and its weekly themed performances. Chances are that it hasn’t gone unnoticed by local jihadists.

To delve into the subject of Jihadists operating largely unnoticed on our soil:

Only half an hour’s drive away from the Pulse Club is the Husseini Islamic Center of Sanford, which recently invited a Sheikh who had once called for the murder of gays as an Islamic act of love. His talk was so shockingly violent that prior to his recent visit to the local mosque,  some locals in Sanford were outraged by his invitation to the Center.

Sheikh Dr. Farrokh Sekaleshfar stated in 2013 that the killing of homosexuals is the compassionate thing to do. See the video here.

Sheikh Sekaleshfar also said, in an eerily calming manner, that:

“Death is the sentence.  We know there’s nothing to be embarrassed about this.… We have to have that compassion for people, with homosexuals, it’s the same, out of compassion, let’s get rid of them now.”

He also declared that homosexual sinners are Allah’s creation and that Muslims should never hate, but that the “punishment for the act of homosexuality is one of love”.

Westerners have a hard time grasping how it is that this Jihadist could be welcomed in by the local Husseini Islamic Center of Sanford; a Jihadist who not only believes, but preached that killing homosexuals is an act of love and compassion. And he uttered those vile words using a loving and compassionate tone.

A word to Westerners: when trying to gauge what a Jihadist enemy looks like, or sounds like, preconceived Western notions do not work. Just because a person may be calm, serene, polite, intelligent and charming does not mean that he or she will not murder according to Jihadist ideology.

The Sheikh also justified the murder of gays as a “happy” act, as being something that only looks brutal. So in the mind of Sheikh Sekaleshfar, the Pulse Club massacre only looked violent, but in his ideological belief system, these victims were killed by Mateen as an act of love. He states:

“We see the physical killing as something brutal, and this is the point when human hatred toward the act has to be done out of love….You have to be happy for that person … we believe in an afterlife, we believe in an eternal life … and with this sentence, you will be forgiven and you won’t be accountable in the hereafter.”

Organizations invite speakers that espouse their views, and Sheikh Sekeleshfar was invited by the Husseini Islamic Center of Sanford. What does that reveal about the Center?

The Sheikh also noted that you can’t enter homosexuals’ houses to murder them because they are free inside their houses, and you can’t prove their act, because according to Islamic law, there must be four witnesses to convict a homosexual. Disturbingly, he went on to claim that Islam is not homophobic because there is no hatred against such people.

Anti-gay violence is rooted in Islamic law, so the Pulse massacre is not an aberration of normative Islam. Indeed, there are those Muslims who are genuinely kind, pluralistic, and democratic-minded, and mortified by what took place at the Pulse Club. These Muslims are routinely deemed apostates by their co-religionists, and do not deserve to be targeted as a fallout from Jihadist violence.

One such person is Dr. Sheikh Ahmed Subhy Mansour, founder of the Koranist sect in Egypt, who warned about the danger of blindly accepting a jihadist organization as mainstream without question. He used CAIR as an example of a terrorist organization, warning that the “culture of CAIR is the same as Usama bin Laden, but they have two faces.”

Mansour was ejected from his professorship at Al Azhar University in Egypt for preaching against traditional Islamic doctrines of violence and subjugation. He was subsequently tortured in prison under then President Hosni Mubarek and eventually exiled from Egypt. He settled in Boston, only to report that he found the same violent ideology in a Boston mosque. He stated in an interview:

“I passed by the old mosque and attended the sunset prayer. I found materials in Arabic full of hatred against America and the Jews. It proved that the leaders of that mosque were very fanatical. I have my own painful story of persecution in Egypt from the same fanatics, so I was so scared and I finished my prayer quickly and did not go there anymore.”

The most effective way to battle Jihadist ambitions is for Western authorities, law enforcement and media to target those ambitions vigilantly and assiduously. The more we try to sweep this evil under the carpet, the more innocents will suffer.

Muslims who speak out against Jihadist violence are not necessarily friends. Stealth jihadists routinely speak out against the Islamic State and against violence committed in the name of Islam to make a show, and Westerners are fooled by them. For example, in a striking display of manipulation and hypocrisy , that same Husseini Islamic Center that invited Sheikh Sekeleshfar (who called for the “loving” murder of homosexuals), issued this statement following the Pulse Night Club massacre:

“Members of Husseini Islamic Center  stand united with our fellow Americans in categorically condemning this attack. We share the grief and sorrow of the nation and stand united with the Central Florida community and City of Orlando. Our heartfelt condolences and prayers go out to the families and loved ones who are victims of this tragedy.”

The Orlando regional CAIR chapter also condemned the Pulse Club massacre and called for Muslims to donate blood, a noble gesture — if sincere.

Unfortunately, CAIR is well credited with the bogus “Islamophobia” branding, intended to deflect any criticism of Islam and intimidate those who speak the truth JIhadist ambitions. After the San Bernardino killings, CAIR quickly condemned the violence and once again distanced the murders from Islam. Imam Muzammil Siddiqi, director of the Islamic Society of Orange County, showed up with CAIR in a show of a united front, at which CAIR stated, “We have condemned all violence, everywhere” and urged people to “not implicate Islam or Muslims” at large for the attack. Siddiqi said that “our faith has nothing to do with [the shooting], our faith is against this kind of behavior.”

Muzammil Siddiqi is also the former president of the Islamic Society of North America, an organization (along with CAIR) that was named in the Holy Land Foundation trial as among the entities that were part of the Muslim Brotherhood structure in America.

According to Siddiqi’s current organization’s website, the Islamic Society of Orange County has “earned a prosperous reputation within the Muslim, interfaith, and broader communities”; while Saddiqi is a well-respected and prominent man in the interfaith dialogue business. Some of his impressive interfaith acquisitions……

Current President of the Academy of Judaic-Christian and Islamic Studies at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA).  He has spoken at: the World Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Vancouver – Canada, the World Assembly of Religions, the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago. He has participated in many seminars organized by the National Council of Churches and National Council of Christians and Jews in USA. In September 2001 on the National Day of Prayer and Remembrance he was invited by President George Bush to lead a Muslim Prayer at the Interfaith Prayer Service at Washington National Cathedral. In September 2006 he was again invited by President Bush to lead an interfaith prayer on the 5th Anniversary of 9/11 at Ground Zero in New York.

Yet, when this acclaimed diversity expert Siddiqi spoke about homosexuality, this is what he said:

“Homosexuality is a moral disorder. It is a moral disease, a sin and corruption… No person is born   homosexual, just like no one is born a thief, a liar or murderer. People acquire these evil habits due to a lack of proper guidance and education.”

Recall a so-called “Intelligence Report” by the Southern Poverty Law Center that listed over 1,000 organizations labeled “hate groups.” 17 “anti-gay” ones were singled out, of which the majority were Christian and conservative, yet they bypassed the sheer scorn spewed against gays among Muslim groups.

Some more about the great diversity expert and Islamic Cleric Imam Siddiqi…..

He converted homegrown terrorist, Adam Gadahn, who was killed in a drone strike. Gadahn was dubbed the American face of al-Qaeda, according to the Orange County Register. The New Yorker describes his conversion to Islam: he was sitting in Imam Siddiqi’s office as he recited the Shahada in Arabic at the Islamic Society of Orange County on November 17, 1995.

Three years prior, in 1992, Siddiqi hosted a lecture in his mosque at the Islamic Society of Orange County, where his featured guest was Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (a.k.a. the infamous“Blind Sheikh”). Siddiqi sat beside him and translated his speech in real time. Sheikh Rahman was a longtime spiritual leader of Egypt’s largest Islamic militant group, al-Gama’a al-Islamiya. Eventually, Omar Abdel Rahman was indicted for helping to plot the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. One of his fatwas, issued from prison in 1998, became central to Al Qaeda’s justification of mass violence, as reported in the Investigative Project.

This is what Imam Siddiqi translated from Rahman’s speech in front of his audience: in his lecture, Abdel Rahman dismissed non-violent definitions of jihad as being weak. He stressed a critical message that revealed the violent call to jihad among Muslims. Worthy of alarm is that this message was not being taught by al Qaeda nor the likes of the Islamic State, but was a message to those living among us, organized also by those living in our midst as mainstream Muslim Americans and fooling us with outward condemnations at the time when their very instructions are carried out.

Rahman continued on as Siddiqi translated:

“If you are not going to the jihad, then you are neglecting the rules of Allah.”

He went on to indicate that this call to jihadist war applied anywhere. He then ploughed into victimology propaganda, stating that jihad must be executed upon “those who are taking the wealth of Muslims from petrol or from oil.” He also passed around a red toolbox with a slit cut into its lid for donations. Videotapes of the lecture were brazenly offered for sale at the Islamic Society of Orange County’s bookstore.

Investigator Steven Emerson wrote about  the continuing efforts to present jihadist Muslims as mainstream voices. Our Western democracies, which have evolved into rule of law societies to protect the rights of all citizens, righteously do not permit Muslim witch-hunts, but with that said, it is expedient for Westerners to educate themselves so as not to be duped by these stealth Jihadists.

Another comment, issued from the mainstream Islamic Center of Orlando (twenty minutes away from the Pulse Club), should raise questions. It was issued by Imam Tariq Rasheed following the massacre:

“Over 1.6 billion people are practicing Islam peacefully, and that’s what Islam is all about…It’s a religion of peace and love and we feel these people [Islamic State] have hijacked our peaceful religion and they are manipulating it.”

The world’s Muslim population is 1.6 billion or close to that, so the balderdash in in this statement is to be rejected. Indeed there are peaceful, law-abiding Muslims in our midst, but let’s stop ignoring the 1400 years of violent history in the name of Islam, and the violence that continues to be practiced today in both stealth and violent forms for the objective of global conquest.

Last year, FBI Director James Comey warned that “hundreds, maybe thousands” of people across the country are “receiving recruitment overtures from the terrorist group or directives to attack the U.S.”

But let’s not be fooled: the Islamic State is a Jihadist force that has dramatically and shockingly revealed the brutality of Islamic Jihad in Iraq and Syria and elsewhere, and Saturday night in the U.S.: its ideology has been brought within our borders long before the Islamic State started grabbing headlines with its atrocities in the Middle East. Jihadists, both stealth and violent, work hand-in-hand toward the same goal of conquest.

Importing Terror

May 6, 2016

Importing Terror, Front Page MagazineJoseph Klein, May 6, 2016

Obama with Syrians

President Obama is willing to gamble with the lives of American citizens. He is intent on emptying Guantanamo of as many of the detainees as possible, even as some of the released jihadists have returned to the battlefield to fight against our soldiers. Now the Obama administration is reportedly planning to accelerate the screening process for Syrians claiming refugee status, so that they can be rapidly resettled in communities across the United States.

The Washington Free Beacon has reported that, according to its sources, “The Obama administration has committed to bring at least 10,000 Syrian refugees onto American soil in fiscal year 2016 by accelerating security screening procedures from 18-24 months to around three months.”

The current resettlement vetting process for self-proclaimed refugees begins with an initial screening by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).  The applications of some who make it through this preliminary UN screen are referred to United States authorities for further consideration and possible resettlement. UNCHR’s role in the front end of the vetting process should be reason enough for alarm.

The United Nations has called for more open borders to accommodate the millions of “refugees” and other migrants whom have left the Middle East and North Africa. To this end, UNCHR is said to be looking for alternative avenues to admit Syrian refugees that are faster than the current refugee “resettlement” vetting process. UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi suggested a number of such alternatives last March, at a high-level meeting held in Geneva to discuss “global responsibility sharing through pathways for admission of Syrian refugees.”

Among the alternative “pathways” listed by the UNCHR High Commissioner for Refugees were “labour mobility schemes, student visa and scholarships, as well as visa for medical reasons.” He added, “Resettlement needs vastly outstrip the places that have been made available so far… But humanitarian and student visa, job permits and family reunification would represent safe avenues of admission for many other refugees as well.”

The net effect of expanding the grounds for admitting Syrian refugees to include job and student related visas could be to bump American citizens from jobs and scholarships that are given to the refugees instead.

Apparently, the Obama administration is onboard with looking for alternatives to the current refugee resettlement system that depends on cooperation with the states. Perhaps it is reacting to the fact that numerous states have recently elected to opt out of refugee resettlement programs, including New Jersey.

“The United States joins UNHCR in calling for new ways nations, civil society, the private sector, and individuals can together address the global refugee challenge,” the State Department wrote in a Media Note following the Geneva conference. The State Department added that it has “created a program to allow U.S. citizens and permanent residents to file refugee applications for their Syrian family members.”

Who are such “family members?” Would they include siblings and cousins of fighting age? Do we really want to add more loopholes to the existing visa system, which was already breached by the female jihadist who took part in the San Bernardino massacre after being admitted to the United States on a “fiancé” visa? Apparently so, if the Obama administration gets its way. Speeding up the “refugee” admission process and avoiding state roadblocks in the current refugee resettlement pathway appear to have become its top priority.

Meanwhile, Obama administration officials tell us not to worry. They assure us they have a “robust” screening process in place to vet Syrians claiming to be refugees. Don’t believe them. They are deliberately turning a blind eye to the warnings of experts such as FBI Director James Comey, who said last year, during a House Committee on Homeland Security hearing, that the federal government lacked the data to adequately vet “refugees” seeking entry to the U.S.

“We can only query against that which we have collected,” Comey told the committee. “So if someone has never made a ripple in the pond in Syria in a way that would get their identity or their interest reflected in our database, we can query our database until the cows come home, but there will be nothing show up because we have no record of them.”

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper warned earlier this year that he considered ISIS and its branches to be the number 1 terrorist threat. Clapper pointed to ISIS’s success in “taking advantage of the torrent of migrants to insert operatives into that flow.”

Even those “refugees” who enter the United States without pre-existing ties to ISIS are vulnerable to indoctrination by jihadists already in this country. Somali “refugees” are a prime example. As Andrew Liepman, who was serving as deputy director for intelligence at the National Counterterrorism Center until he retired from government service in 2012, said during the first year of Obama’s presidency: “Despite significant efforts to facilitate their settlement into American communities, many Somali immigrants face isolation.”

Jihadists have been busy “recruiting and radicalizing young people,” Liepman added.

Nevertheless, seven years later, the Obama administration continues to send as many as 700 Somali “refugees” per month to cities across the United States, with the largest number settling in Minnesota where large concentrations of Somalis already live.

Barack Obama has said that it is wrong to “start equating the issue of refugees with the issue of terrorism.” He refuses to associate Islam or jihad with acts of terrorism or with what he calls violent extremism. He rails against “negative stereotypes of Islam” and “those who slander the prophet of Islam.” But telling the truth about the violent and supremacist strains in Islamic ideology, rooted in the Koran and the sayings of Prophet Muhammad, is neither stereotyping nor slander. It is identifying the enemy we are fighting. And wanting to make sure that we have a foolproof vetting system in place before admitting more Muslims from the sectarian conflict-ravaged areas in the Middle East or North Africa is neither fear-mongering nor discrimination. It is common sense defense of the American people from undue risk of attacks in our homeland, which is the primary duty of every U.S. president as commander-in-chief including Barack Obama.

DHS: Airport Workers Suspected of Terror Ties have All been Vetted

April 8, 2016

DHS: Airport Workers Suspected of Terror Ties have All been Vetted, Front Page MagazineRobert Spencer, April 8, 2016

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Relax. After reports surfaced last month that dozens of private airline employees may have had terror ties, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson this week set the record straight: “It’s not that they’re suspected terrorists. It’s that they hadn’t been vetted through all available databases. We have since corrected that problem and the cases have been resolved.” There is just one problem: this is not really a problem that can be corrected.

This came after the Cox Washington News Bureau reported that there were no fewer than 73 airport workers with possible terror ties, working at airports including Sea-Tac Airport in Seattle, Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Atlanta, Logan Airport in Boston, Orlando International Airport in Florida, Memphis International Airport in Tennessee, and others. But Johnson boasted: “We’re doing a better job of consulting all of the right databases when it comes to airport security and a host of other things.”

Is that so? How reassuring. Presumably Johnson and his team have consulted their extensive database of card-carrying Islamic State members, and have diligently compared it to their list of airport employees, and have removed those who appeared on both lists. The only problem with this scenario, of course, is that there is no such database, or anything comparable to it. There is simply no database that Johnson could consult that would enable the Department of Homeland Security to remove everyone with terror ties from airport jobs.

The impossibility of doing this is compounded by the fact that the Islamic State deliberately recruits people who have no criminal records, and instructs its operatives to blend in with the larger society, not wearing caftans or carrying around Qur’ans or even going to mosque – in other words, to obscure any possible information that might show up on DHS databases.

Compounding the impossibility of screening out people with terror ties from airport jobs is the fact that the Obama administration is bound as a matter of policy to ignore and deny the terrorists’ motivating ideology – so how can it vet for it? This goes back to October 19, 2011, Farhana Khera of Muslim Advocates, wrote a letter to John Brennan, who was then the Assistant to the President on National Security for Homeland Security and Counter Terrorism. The letter was signed not just by Khera, but by the leaders of virtually all the significant Islamic groups in the United States: 57 Muslim, Arab, and South Asian organizations, many with ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, including the CAIR, ISNA, MAS, the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), Islamic Relief USA; and MPAC.

The letter denounced what it characterized as U.S. government agencies’ “use of biased, false and highly offensive training materials about Muslims and Islam,” and emphasized that this was an issue of the utmost importance: “The seriousness of this issue cannot be overstated, and we request that the White House immediately create an interagency task force to address this problem, with a fair and transparent mechanism for input from the Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities, including civil rights lawyers, religious leaders, and law enforcement experts.”

The task force was needed because “while recent news reports have highlighted the FBI’s use of biased experts and training materials, we have learned that this problem extends far beyond the FBI and has infected other government agencies, including the U.S. Attorney’s Anti-Terrorism Advisory Councils, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Army. Furthermore, by the FBI’s own admission, the use of bigoted and distorted materials in its trainings has not been an isolated occurrence. Since last year, reports have surfaced that the FBI, and other federal agencies, are using or supporting the use of biased trainers and materials in presentations to law enforcement officials.”

Khera complained that my books could be found in “the FBI’s library at the FBI training academy in Quantico, Virginia”; that a reading list accompanying a powerpoint presentation by the FBI’s Law Enforcement Communications Unit recommended my book The Truth About Muhammad; and that in July 2010 I “presented a two-hour seminar on ‘the belief system of Islamic jihadists’ to the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) in Tidewater, Virginia,” and “presented a similar lecture to the U.S. Attorney’s Anti-Terrorism Advisory Council, which is co-hosted by the FBI’s Norfolk Field Office.”

These were supposed to be terrible things because I was bigoted and hateful. But many of the examples Khera adduced of “bigoted and distorted materials” involved statements that were not actually bigoted and distorted at all, but simply accurate. What was distorted was Khera’s representation of them. For instance, Khera stated,

A 2006 FBI intelligence report stating that individuals who convert to Islam are on the path to becoming “Homegrown Islamic Extremists,” if they exhibit any of the following behavior:

  • “Wearing traditional Muslim attire”
  • “Growing facial hair”
  • “Frequent attendance at a mosque or a prayer group”
  • “Travel to a Muslim country”
  • “Increased activity in a pro-Muslim social group or political cause”

But the FBI intelligence report Khera purported to be describing didn’t actually say that converts to Islam were necessarily “on the path” to becoming “extremists” if they wore traditional Muslim attire, grew facial hair, and frequently attended a mosque; it simply included these behaviors among a list of fourteen indicators to “identify an individual going through the radicalization process.” Others included “travel without obvious source of funds’; “suspicious purchases of bomb making paraphernalia or weapons”; “large transfer of funds, from or to overseas”; and “formation of operational cells.” Khera selectively quoted and misrepresented the list to give the impression that the FBI was saying that devout observance of Islam led inevitably and in every case to “extremism.”

Despite the factual accuracy of the material about which they were complaining, the Muslim groups signing the letter demanded that the task force “purge all federal government training materials of biased materials”; “implement a mandatory re-training program for FBI agents, U.S. Army officers, and all federal, state and local law enforcement who have been subjected to biased training”; and moreto ensure that all that law enforcement officials would learn about Islam and jihad would be what the signatories wanted them to learn.

Brennan seemed amenable to that. He took Khera’s complaints as his marching orders. In a November 3, 2011, letter to Khera, thatsignificantlywas written on White House stationery, Brennan made no attempt to defend counter-terror materials and procedures, but instead accepted Khera’s criticisms without a murmur of protest and assured her of his readiness to comply. “Please allow me to share with you the specific steps we are taking,” Brennan wrote to Khera, “to ensure that federal officials and state, local and tribal partners receive accurate, evidence-based information in these crucial areas.”

“I am aware,” Brennan went on, “of recent unfortunate incidents that have highlighted substandard and offensive training that some United States Government elements have either sponsored or delivered. Any and all such training runs completely counter to our values, our commitment to strong partnerships with communities across the country, our specific approach to countering violent extremist recruitment and radicalization, and our broader counterterrorism (CT) efforts. Our National Strategy for Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States highlights competent training as an area of primary focus and states that ‘misinformation about the threat and dynamics of radicalization to violence can harm our security by sending local stakeholders in the wrong direction and unnecessarily creating tensions with potential community partners.’ It also emphasizes that our security is ‘inextricably linked to our values,’ including ‘the promotion of an inclusive society.’”

Brennan assured Khera that all her demands would be met: “Your letter requests that ‘the White House immediately create an interagency task force to address this problem,’ and we agree that this is necessary.” He then detailed other specific actions being undertaken, including “collecting all training materials that contain cultural or religious content, including information related to Islam or Muslims.” In reality this material wouldn’t just be “collected”; it would be purged of anything that Farhana Khera and others like her found offensivethat is, any honest discussion of how Islamic jihadists use Islamic teachings to justify violence. Brennan assured Khera that he saw the problem just as she did, and that remedies were being implemented quickly: “We share your concern over these recent unfortunate incidents, and are moving forward to ensure problems are addressed with a keen sense of urgency. They do not reflect the vision that the President has put forward, nor do they represent the kind of approach that builds the partnerships that are necessary to counter violent extremism, and to protect our young people and our homeland. America’s greatest strength is its values, and we are committed to pursuing policies and approaches that draw strength from our values and our people irrespective of their race, religion or ethnic background.”

The alacrity with which Brennan complied was unfortunate on many levels. Numerous books and presentations that gave a perfectly accurate view of Islam and jihad were purged and the Assistant to the President on National Security for Homeland Security and Counter Terrorism was complying with demands from quarters that could hardly be considered authentically moderate. Now, four and a half years later, this entrenched policy of the U.S. government ensures that people with potential terror ties simply cannot be vetted, since the administration is bound as a matter of policy to ignore what in saner times would be taken as warning signs.

Johnson’s soothing words are thus null and void. There could be jihadis working in airports all over the U.S. – and no one will know until they strike.