Center for Security Policy president Frank Gaffney discussed the Manchester attack and its aftermath with SiriusXM host Raheem Kassam on Wednesday’s Breitbart News Daily.
“As Donald Trump said in the course of the campaign, I think we have to get clarity as to the nature of the problem we’re facing. It behooves us, before we start contorting ourselves even more than we have of late, to be honest about the nature of the threat,” Gaffney said.
“I think during the course of the campaign, Candidate Trump made great strides in trying to do that. He used the term ‘radical Islamic terrorism.’ We can quibble about that. I think a more accurate way to depict it – as we’ve discussed before, Raheem – is ‘sharia supremacism,’” he suggested.
Gaffney went on to define sharia supremacism as not merely a personal dedication to following Islamic law, but a divine obligation “to impose it on everybody else.”
Kassam noted that “sharia, in and of itself as a word, implies supremacy.”
“It does, and it actually explicitly commands its adherents to engage in supremacism, so there is a certain redundancy,” Gaffney acknowledged.
“But I think it is the active nature of this that is the problem we have to come to grips with,” he added. “And when we hear the British government – or, for that matter, President Trump of late – talking about the threat in terms of extremism, or in terms of ‘lone wolves’ or people who have no connection with organized efforts, or are otherwise cast in terms that I think obscure their fidelity to this agenda, which is unfortunately part and parcel of what authoritative Islam describes, it is I think a formula for more loss of life and more distortion of our societies. Because as a practical matter, it comes down to our submission, and that’s really the rub of the issue.”
Kassam cited reports that National Security Adviser General H.R. McMaster is one of the leading voices in the Trump administration seeking to divorce Islam from terrorism by defining it as inherently “un-Islamic.”
“I believe he is not the only promoter of this notion,” Gaffney said. “I think that there are large numbers of people who previously advanced this mistaken and seriously ill-advised characterization of the problem that are holdovers from the previous administration.”
“In addition to General McMaster, there are some that have been brought in by the president, I think to his great detriment,” he continued. “To my way of thinking, he had this right before he came to office in the early days. I think since then, this has become much, much less clear, and to some extent has now become obscured in part, let’s be honest, by the notion that we’re going to find ourselves forging common cause with folks like the Saudis and the Qataris, the Turks, who include among them – let us be clear – sharia supremacists.”
“In fact, it is the stated policy of all of those governments to promote that goal of worldwide submission to this totalitarian program. There are lots of Muslims who don’t want to live under it any more than the rest of us do. Unfortunately, we’re making now the mistake that the Obama administration made, the Bush administration before it made, I think the Clinton administration before it made, to misperceive the threat,” he warned.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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