Monday on his nationally syndicated radio show, conservative talker Rush Limbaugh took a call from Louisville, KY making the point that the FBI was quick to rule out ISIS’s involvement in a mass shooting that had left at least 59 dead and 527 injured in Las Vegas, NV a night earlier.
The caller also noted, however, the FBI has been slow to rule conclusively on President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign colluding with the Russian government to change the outcome of last year’s presidential election.
Limbaugh acknowledged the point and noted the tendency within the government to disassociate violence with Islam.
Transcript as follows (courtesy of RushLimbaugh.com):
LIMBAUGH: Here’s Joe in Louisville. Great to have you on the program, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Thank you so much for everything that you do. Longtime listener, first-time caller.
LIMBAUGH: I appreciate that. Thank you.
CALLER: So I just wanted to point out that within 12 hours our FBI has announced that so far in this investigation the shooter has no ties to ISIS, and almost nine months into the Trump presidency and we’re still being told he may have ties to Russia.
LIMBAUGH: (laughing) You know, I love going to the phones. You people are some of the most creative, inventive, informed, educated. It’s not even been 12 hours, you’re right, not even six hours — how many hours is it? Approaching 12, and already we can conclusively say no evidence it’s ISIS, but after a year we’re still not sure about Trump. When did you think of that? At what stage of this did that occur to you?
CALLER: I was on my way in to work this morning and, you know, my first initial thought is always, “Please don’t let this be someone who is of Christian faith,” which is really kind of crazy to me because it never is. But after I heard that ISIS had claimed credit, after you played that clip, I thought, how strange it was that our FBI is already confident enough to say that this man certainly has no ties to ISIS, when they’ve only had 12 hours to really kind of look at who this person was —
LIMBAUGH: Hang on just a second. Let me further muddy the waters by repeating something I said mere moments ago. All during the Obama presidency there wasn’t any such thing as militant Islamic terrorism. It wasn’t that they wouldn’t just say it. There wasn’t any. The active position of the Obama government, including the State Department, the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security was that Islam is a religion of peace, so there isn’t any such thing as militant Islamic terrorism. They are a bunch of frauds or fakers, that was the official position of the Obama administration.
We also know that the State Department has routinely, in the days of both terms of Obama, they issued white papers for Homeland Security warning them that the most dangerous terror threats domestically were extreme right-wing groups. Do you remember this? I’m sure you do, having heard me mention it now. And I think one of those was — who was it? Who was over at Homeland Security or State? It was a woman, I don’t want to say Loretta Lynch, but it might have been. The attorney general, might have been. I’ll find out. I’ll research this and look it up.
But in both terms of Obama’s presidency there was a report issued internally that was made public by some law enforcement agency, might have been State Department, Homeland Security, that they real danger when it came to domestic terrorism was not militant Islam but rather extreme right-wing groups. I’m going somewhere with this, folks. Hang in there. Stick with me.
So we know that there are many Obama embeds remaining and Clinton embeds remaining in various areas, levels of the bureaucracy where that belief was official government policy, that there is no such thing as militant Islamic terrorism. It’s why Trump made a big deal during the campaign of actually calling it out and has called it out numerous times in official presidential speeches, statements, and remarks since being inaugurated.
My point is that at many levels of our government, there is a predisposition and a prejudice, maybe a bias, if you will, that militant Islamic terrorism is a false concept, that there isn’t any such thing as militant Islamic terror. Now, people who believe that who were responsible for articulating that as government policy, many of them are probably still there. I’m telling you that there are still many who want that to continue to be the basis on which law enforcement and the rest of us proceed.
The short version of this is that there are a lot of people who, the moment that happens, can’t wait to say it is not militant Islamic terrorism because they don’t want it to be, because they have said there isn’t any. And so our caller here from Louisville points out that they’re able to claim with relative certitude, in a matter of hours, that there’s no evidence to suggest any association with ISIS, but despite no evidence in over a year, they are still trying to pin Trump’s election to collusion with Russia. An interesting point.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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