If Americans were shocked by the recent terrorist massacre in Orlando committed by Omar Mateen in the name of ISIS and other Islamist jihadis, they should be even more alarmed by the Obama administration’s response, which once again sought to obfuscate the role of Islamist ideology in motivating that terrorist attack -- the largest on U.S. soil since 9/11.
In spite of Islamists having established an unparalleled record of terrorism -- some 20,000 assaults globally in the name of Islam since 9/11 – U.S. law enforcement, intelligence and national armed forces have for many years been operating partially blindfolded and with one hand tied behind their backs by the politically correct posture of protecting Islam and Muslims.
The tentacles of the Muslim Brotherhood, with its myriad front groups, was established in the U.S. long before 9/11. We know this from the successful trial of the Holy Land Foundation in 2008. Uncovered in the discovery treasure-trove for the HLF trial was a 1991 strategy plan of the Muslim Brotherhood to overthrow the U.S. Constitution via stealth “civilization jihad" and to "destroy the Western civilization from within," the precondition to establishing a Sharia-ruled Caliphate.
The extent of penetration of Muslim influence in the Bush administration can be understood by way of a cursory comparative analysis. The lexicon found in the 2004 9/11 Commission Report, which contained hundreds of instances of the use of words like "Jihad," "Muslim," and "Islam," was basically eliminated by the end of the Bush administration. In 2008 when the FBI published its unclassified Counterterrorism Lexicon, those words were entirely missing. It marked a major step in the post-9/11 world of disconnecting radical Islamist ideology from terrorism and limiting the U.S. in its investigative tools, intelligence collection, law enforcement, and war-fighting capabilities.
The process of separating terrorism from its radical Islamist roots took on new momentum in the first year of the Obama administration, simultaneous with the president’s Middle East apology tour in the spring of 2009. According to Philip Haney -- a founder of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2003, established in response to 9/11 -- DHS superiors brought in by the Obama administration ordered him in November 2009 to scrub and delete hundreds of records of individuals tied to designated Islamist terror groups affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, such as Hamas, from the Treasury Enforcement Communications System database.
These records are of course the basis for Immigration Control and Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, and the Terrorist Screening Center to “connect the dots” and identify individuals associated with known terrorist affiliations who should be denied entry to the U.S., be put on the terrorist watch list, or the no-fly list.
When self-described “soldier of Allah” Nidal Hassan killed 13 in the November 2009 Fort Hood shooting spree, many were dumbfounded that the Defense Department recorded and has since maintained this incident as “workplace violence.” What most don’t know is that the DOD bureaucracy had no other choice, as it was then in the midst of a politically-correct purge at West Point and the Naval War College of all “vital references to Islamist ideology driving terrorism or conflating terrorism with Islam.”
The 2013 Islamist Boston Marathon bomber, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, had a high-risk profile due to six months of travel to a known Islamist terrorist training center in the Dagestan-Chechnya area in Islamic Russia. But the FBI suspended its investigation of Tsarnaev in 2011 because of insufficient evidence of terrorist activity but also because Bureau leadership was accommodating and encouraging leniency toward Muslims, being then in the midst of the final stages of purging some 900 pages of FBI counterterrorism training manuals that were considered offensive to Muslims. So Tsarnaev could take his time and pick his spot to strike.
The December 2, 2015 ISIS-inspired San Bernardino killing spree, committed by the Islamist terrorist married couple Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, might also have been prevented. Former DHS official Haney points out that the San Bernardino terror attack might have been averted if Farook’s ties to the terror group Tablighi Jamaat had been known. Unfortunately, those records were among the sixty-seven deleted from the key federal database -- the Treasury Enforcement Communications System -- in the politically-correct purge of 2009. Those ties would have put Farook on the “no-fly list,” and would have prevented him from traveling to Saudi Arabia. Additionally, his pending fiancée, Malik, would have been denied a visa to enter the U.S. Thus, the dynamics and circumstances that led to their coordinated attack in San Bernardino would not have developed.
Then there was also the neighbor of Farook and Malik, who disclosed that in the weeks before the terrorist couple’s killings, there had been a flurry of activity at their home -- with a multitude of package deliveries and Middle Eastern individuals coming and going at all hours. Yet that neighbor chose not to alert the police for fear of being labeled racist or Islamophobic.
There can be no doubt now, in the aftermath of the Orlando massacre, that political correctness puts the United States in grave danger, and it is a wonder that PC has been accepted for as long as it has.
After the orchestrated deception of blaming the September 11, 2012 killing of Ambassador Stevens and three others in Benghazi on a “blasphemous” internet video rather than the pre-planned terrorist attack that it was, it was contemptible that the Obama Justice Department would initially attempt a deception replay with regard to the Orlando nightclub massacre -- the worst since 9/11. Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s initial censorship of the record of Omar Mateen’s many statements of solidarity with ISIS and the cause of radical Islam brought on such widespread criticism, that Obama tactically reversed course within 24 hours and decided to release a good portion of Mateen’s transcripts uncensored.
However, the strategy of maintaining the hegemony of political correctness to frame the Islamist terrorist threat shows no sign of being abandoned or diminished and is likely to continue through the balance of the Obama administration.
And the black flags will surely keep coming under a Hillary Clinton presidency. Having learned nothing from the spate of Islamist terrorist attacks, Clinton has recently stated she plans to massively increase immigration from the Middle East even without a screening plan, including a 500% increase in Syrian refugees.
It may be an irony of history, perhaps a blessing in disguise, that an unconventional presidential candidate has been raised up to break the shackles of political correctness and shock the American people into facing reality. Donald Trump’s candidacy for president raises uncertainties of various kinds in the minds of many voters. But there should be considerable certainty that Mr. Trump won’t be easily snookered on the causes of terrorism and other challenges facing the United States, nor will his resolve to win in the cause of patriotism be easily shaken.
Scott Powell is senior fellow at Seattle-based Discovery Institute and managing partner at Remington Rand LLC. Reach him at scottp@discovery.org
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There can be no doubt, in the aftermath of Orlando, that political correctness puts us in grave danger.