LOS ANGELES, California — If they’re saying it, it’s probably true–and the writing has been on the wall this entire time.
That’s the underlying theme behind former Pentagon official Stephen Coughlin’s book, Catastrophic Failure: Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad.
During a recent discussion at a private event hosted by the American Freedom Alliance in Los Angeles, Coughlin detailed the way Islamic doctrines motivate jihadi groups and their attempts to silence America by targeting free speech and thought.
Coughlin, who is an attorney, decorated intelligence officer and noted specialist on Islamic law and ideology, told the captivated crowd that the target of these Islamic jihadist groups “is the destruction of the First Amendment. By controlling the First Amendment, they can control what we are allowed to think. Our free speech will die of suffocation.” Incidents like the recent terrorist attack in Garland, Texas, where jihadis had targeted a Muhammad cartoon contest, are a prime example, he said.
Coughlin explained how merely listening to what terrorist groups say will help determine their goals. The American government has opted instead to downplay and ignore the actual beliefs of these groups, which has resulted in their slow advance being obscured.
In 2008, Coughlin said the appeasement of radical Islam had reached a new level when Michael Chertoff created documents saying members of the intelligence community could not use Islamic terms such as “jihad,” “caliphate,” and “ummah” to describe al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. “We cannot have a strategy to defeat them, so long as we are not allowed to identify them,” Coughlin said.
That was the same year Coughlin was terminated from his government position for revealing the hard facts about radical Islam. Disclosing things known to be true were considered to be hate speech, he said.
“If we view the fact of who the enemy is based on the fact that what they say motivates them and the published documents they follow, they chart an absolutely clear line.”
The Muslim Brotherhood is often touted by the Obama Administration as the “moderate” alternative to al Qaeda, he noted. Coughlin reminded the audience that both the Brotherhood and al Qaeda are cut from the same cloth. He said every major jihadi organization has their origin in the Brotherhood. “The Muslim Brotherhood has basically controlled our decisions on terrorism since 2007,” he said.
Coughlin also discussed the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which is the second-largest intergovernmental organization, second only to the United Nations. The OIC is composed of 56 member states and the Palestinians. In 2005, the group signed a Ten Year Program of Action that seeks to make the defamation of Islam a crime in every jurisdiction in the world, including in the United States, Coughlin said.
Ten years later, the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the terror attacks in Copenhagen and in Garland, Texas shooting were all part of a design that had been programmed by the Ten Year Program of Action, he alleged. The heads of all the Muslim states declare that the decisions they make reflect the Islamic ummah, and the OIC has also declared that it is seeking to become a caliphate in its own right.
On July 15, 2011, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went to Turkey to meet with the head of the OIC and “committed that the State Department [will] use its best efforts to pass U.N. Resolution 16/18 [on speech against religion] which the OIC makes clear is their 10-year Program of Action,” Coughlin said. In December 2011, UNR 16/18 passed.
“She committed, in a foreign country and to a foreign entity, under color of U.S. authority, that she would use old-fashioned techniques of peer-pressure and shaming to attack Americans who would exercise their undisputed First Amendment rights inside the United States,” Coughlin said, noting that Clinton is now seeking the highest office in the world.
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