The FBI released today a partial transcript of the Orlando shooter’s mid-massacre calls to 911. It was sanitized to conform to the Obama party line: The attack has no connection to the Islamic State or, for that matter, to Islam.
As Attorney General Loretta Lynch Lynch put it: “What we’re not going to do is further proclaim this man’s pledges of allegiance to terrorist groups, and further his propaganda.”
So, transcribed evidence that “this man,” Omar Mateen, swore loyalty to ISIS, shouted “allahu akhbar” as he killed his victims, or otherwise embraced the totalitarian, homophobic doctrine adherents like him call “sharia” is not going to be made public. This will facilitate the narrative actively promoted over the past week (notably, on part of what Ben Rhodes called Team Obama’s “echo chamber“) to the effect that Mateen: had “behavioral problems”; engaged in “domestic violence”; was into controlling, as well as abusing, his first and second wives; and had “problems with his sexuality,” including “a latent attraction to men.”
The trouble is, those attributes are present in much of the teaching and practice of sharia-compliant Islam. If you are a law enforcement agency like the FBI and you are not allowed to know anything about Islam or sharia or jihad, then all you have is behavior that is deeply problematic. Predicting it, let alone stopping it before it happens, becomes virtually impossible.
What makes such behavior so singularly dangerous is if millions of people engage in it because they believe it is Allah’s will and their obligation. Those charged with protecting us are left wholly ill-prepared to do their jobs if they cannot identify, let alone take into account, what is fostering and impelling those people to murder large numbers of homosexuals, or Jews, or Christians, or apostates or other innocents.
In other words, when President Obama makes it impermissible – and, as a practical matter, a career-ending offense (see, for example, DHS whistleblower Philip Haney, and his new book See Something, Say Nothing) – for police, military personnel, intelligence and homeland security officers to look for and factor into their work Islamic supremacism, you have a formula for a lot more Fort Hoods, San Bernardinos and Orlandos. (For more on how this has worked in practice, download for free at www.SecureFreedom.org the new book by Clare Lopez and me entitled See No Sharia: ‘Countering Violent Extremism’ and the Disarming of America’s First Lines of Defense.)
The President and his apologists would have us believe that only by exercising such self-restraint can we avoid empowering the inexplicably motivated “violent extremists.” They insist that, were we to declare our enemies are, instead, part of a global jihad movement, and that its wellspring is sharia, we would legitimate their claim to religious authority and bring on a clash of civilizations.
Unfortunately, the jihadists know that their supremacist conduct has religious legitimacy. So do the authorities of their faith. And so do many of the Muslims who do not embrace or want to live under sharia – let alone impose it on the rest of us.
As with Obama’s insistence that he could unilaterally end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, declaring that “we are not, and never will be, at war with Islam” does not alter the indisputable fact that those Muslims who follow its sharia strictures are and – unless defeated, deterred or destroyed – always will be at war with us.
If America persists in its “see no sharia” approach, not only will we surely be caught flatfooted as this country and our allies are subjected to many more, and far worse, jihadist attacks. We will have invited them.
That’s right. When jihadists perceive us to be capitulating – whether we call our accommodations “political correctness,” “multiculturalism” or “diversity sensitivity” – they view it as “submission.” And according to the Koran, the appropriate response for the believer is to make the infidel “feel subdued.” That can only translate into more violence aimed at achieving our complete and irreversible subordination to their permanent supremacy.
Americans are entitled to the full transcript of the Mateen 911 calls – and to an immediate termination of Obama’s “see no sharia” approach. In its place we urgently need the adoption of a robust, fact-driven counterterrorism policy, one that actually has a chance of keeping us safe.
Frank Gaffney is President of the Center for Security Policy and the author of the forward to Warning Order from which this article is adapted.
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