Frank Gaffney: Governments Have Been Appeasing Jihadists, Not Resisting Them

On Wednesday’s Breitbart News Daily, Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney talked about the latest incident of “Ramadan rage,” as SiriusXM host Alex Marlow dubbed the Belgium suicide bombing.

“Well, it’s jihad, is what it is,” said Gaffney. “It’s taking the form of perhaps an inspiration by the Islamic State to do a lot of it in the Ramadan period, and to do it in the West. It’s basically what has been developing now for a long time – the increasing confidence of what I think of as sharia supremacists that they are on a roll, and that they are going to be rewarded for being more aggressive, more violent, more jihadist by governments in the West.”

“Unfortunately, they’ve got a lot of reason for thinking that,” he said ruefully.

Marlow proposed that Western Europe has been slow to learn lessons about jihad that Eastern Europe, with its tighter border controls, seems to have absorbed.

“You know the old line about a conservative being a liberal who’s been mugged by reality,” Gaffney said with a chuckle. “The people in Eastern Europe are what Don Rumsfeld used to call ‘New Europe,’ are people who have spent a lot of time facing totalitarianism – living under it, struggling for freedom from it.”

“By the way, that goes back many, many, many years before, to the totalitarianism meted out by sharia supremacists,” he added. More recently of course it was communism, but I think they were able to perceive in the current crop of totalitarians that kind of communism with a god – which turns out to be a lot more dangerous than the original kind, because people who think the next world is going to be where they get their rewards are not as easily deterred from trying to take us all there as the people who think this is it, this is the only life there is.”

“The point that I’m really trying to get it is, I think that our government agencies in this country, and in particular in Old Europe – the Brits we’ve seen a lot of this lately, the French with the Macron victory, the Germans and so on – have been appeasing these guys, not resisting them. The reaction to that I think increasingly is a real restiveness, shall we say, if not fear on the part of the people who live in those countries and see them slipping away,” he said.

“I’m not making any excuse for it, certainly not endorsing it, but I do think you’re going to see more of the kind of retaliation in kind that we witnessed in London last week at the Finsbury Park mosque,” Gaffney predicted.

He said that reaction would be driven by the perception that “the government isn’t going to stand up for their countries isn’t going to protect their people against these jihadists – of either the violent kind, or sort of the stealthy kind of the Muslim Brotherhood that sets the stage for this sort of sharia supremacism and jihad in due course.”

Gaffney said the spate of Ramadan terrorist attacks was “simply the outcropping of what has been cultivated for a long time” in Old European nations where “they have been indulging in a sort of multiculturalist fantasy, or they’ve been trying to deal with hard demographic realities by accommodating large numbers of people making what is, in the Muslim tradition, called ‘hijrah’ – a kind of colonization, invasion if you will, migration in large numbers.”

“You’re seeing an infrastructure put into place, primarily at the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood, with funding – let’s be honest – by the Saudis and the Qataris and others, that is creating the conditions in which this jihad will manifest,” he warned.

“Finsbury Park Mosque is one of the most virulently jihadist mosques in the world,” he noted by way of example. “It happens that this is where this attack took place. I don’t think that’s entirely an accident.”

“The point is, if our governments are going to continue to be willfully blind about these preconditions to more extremism, more jihadism, more violence, then you’re going to find that the populations in these countries are either going to have to submit – and many are prepared to do that, I guess, look at France at the moment – but doubtless some will fight back, and that’s perhaps the formula for civil war,” Gaffney warned. “We’ve seen a lot of that over the years in Europe, and I fear it may be in prospect again.”

Marlow turned to the return of American hostage Otto Warmbier by North Korea, and the comatose Warmbier’s death soon afterward.

“To be perfectly clear, this young man – this apparently very bright and promising American student – was murdered by the Kim Jong-un regime,” Gaffney declared. “I believe he was taken prisoner on trumped-up charges. I’m not sure there’s any evidence that he actually stole anything. I think he was taken hostage, as the government of North Korea has done repeatedly.”

“It goes back to what we talked about earlier with respect to the Islamists: they have been rewarded for seizing Americans, by both Republican and Democratic administrations,” he charged. “It is no wonder that they continue to do it. The fact that they actually so badly brutalized this guy, that they basically sent him back just prior to his death, is simply the latest example of how horrific this government is. What it does to its own people every day makes that look like a day at the beach, quite frankly.”

“We keep turning a blind eye to it. We keep trying to appease them. We think the Chinese will help us in dealing with them, when the Chinese are the great enablers of this regime. This is as screwed-up a policy, I believe, as we’ve got at the moment, not least because we’ve continued to delude ourselves that somehow, under Bill Clinton notably, and his wife Hillary I guess, we can say we were snookered into thinking that somehow, if we just improved relations with them, they would give up the bomb. They haven’t done it. The threat to us has metastasized,” he warned.

“This is a time for a wholesale relook. The Trump tweet of yesterday about the Chinese deal having not worked out, I hope is the beginning of that kind of fundamental reassessment and redirection,” said Gaffney.

Marlow asked if Gaffney had any idea what really happened in the strange case of a container ship colliding with the USS Fitzgerald near Tokyo Bay on Saturday.

“Not really,” Gaffney replied. “I think all of us are sort of confused by the information that’s available. It certainly seems as though this cargo ship that rammed the destroyer, the Fitzgerald, did some rather dramatic course corrections. In order to do that, it didn’t just happen. I gather the weather wasn’t all that good.”

“The question of what was going on on that ship is one set of issues that has to be addressed, but frankly, what was going on on the bridge of the USS Fitzgerald?” he asked. “This is a formidable, highly equipped warship in the United States Navy. It’s just inconceivable to me that lumbering big freighter just somehow caught this crew by surprise. Somebody was seriously derelict on the Fitzgerald, it sounds like too.”

“Whatever the motivation or the circumstances, here’s the bottom line: that ship, which is an anti-ballistic missile equipped vessel, is critical to the defense of the fleet out in an increasingly dangerous world, in which increasingly the Russians, the Chinese, and even the North Koreans are bringing to bear ballistic missiles that will be capable of attacking our ships,” Gaffney said.

“It’s offline for perhaps as long as a year. Because of the Obama drawdown of our military, particularly our Navy, that is a huge problem. I’m afraid it may be an incentive to others around the world to try to do similar things to our ships at sea,” he added.

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