New York attempted terror attack: Luck is not a policy

Luck is not a policy. That’s the mantra we’ve been hearing today on the cable news shows. Even politically-correct New York mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo agreed this morning as they addressed the media that New York had been lucky.

There’s no way you can prevent this type of thing from happening, they suggested. It’s just a fact of life. So let’s all get together and praise our first responders.

Well, sure. The NYPD and the transit police responded admirably and deserve praise, after a wannabe jihadi from Bangladesh tried to blow himself up in Port Authority in an attempt to murder scores of innocents, all in the name of Allah.

Lucky for us he was incompetent and his bomb was either a fizzle or prematurely detonated.

But Mayor Bill de Blasio and his police commissioner, William J. Bratton, deserve a portion of blame, for dismantling effective preventative tools used by the NYPD since 2003 to identify potential Muslim extremists through a sophisticated threat-warning matrix developed in conjunction with the Central Intelligence Agency.

Eventually formalized into a 2007 document called “Radicalization in the West: the Homegrown Threat,” the 90-page primer on jihadi Islam and its telltale outward signs was banned by de Blasio and Bratton in 2014, following an extensive lobbying campaign led by Muslim activist Linda Sarsour and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a group closely associatedwith the Muslim Brotherhood.

Among the mosques previously under surveillance by the NYPD’s since-disbanded “Demographics Unit,” was the Bangladeshi mosque in Paterson, N.J., that was attended by Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, the jihadi terrorist who mowed down innocents along Manhattan’s West Side highway in October, killing eight and wounding at least a dozen more.

As of this writing, we do not know whether this morning’s Bangladeshi terrorist went to that particular mosque. But we do know this: If he attended any mosque in the metropolitan area, De Blasio and Commissioner Bratton have banned the NYPD from keeping it under surveillance or even communicating with mosque leaders to identify potential threats.

And that’s why the NYPD had no warning signs. Mayor de Blasio forbid it. DeBlasio and his politically-correct administration have been focused like a laser on defeating “Islamophobia,” a creation of Islamist activist groups that have successfully shamed Americans from identifying and eradicating Islamic extremism in our midst.

The watchword today from the PC police in New York is “see something, say something.” But that is completely cynical and an outright lie.

Well-meaning Americans who “say something” about Muslim clerics chanting before settling into their seats on domestic airliners, or about a Muslim youth building a clock that resembles a bomb, regularly get excoriated on the national media, and at times, even prosecuted or accused of “hate” speech.

Former Department of Homeland Security officer Philip Haney revealed in a recent memoir that this politically correct “see nothing” culture infected his own agency, where he was ordered to purge immigration records on Muslim green card holders with known ties to jihadi networks.

Rather than “see something, say something,” Haney said the prevailing culture during the Obama administration that continues until today is “see something, say nothing.” The alternative is lose your job, public shaming, prosecution, or all three.

ISIS has been defeated on the ground in Iraq and Syria. That is good news. But as the recently appointed Chief Strategy Officer at the Broadcasting Board of Governors, Haroon K. Ullah reveals in a new book, ISIS has morphed into a worldwide virtual terror organization that uses the Internet to recruit, instruct, and organize terror attacks, even without holding territory.

We will not defeat it by pretending Islam has nothing to do with motivating young Muslim men to commit jihad and kill innocents. Instead, we need to motivate Muslim scholars to repudiate that ideology and to promote alternate “narratives” for young Muslims in their own countries.

The de Blasio option of sticking our heads in the sand and pretending Islam has nothing to do with the jihadi terrorists seeking to murder us, is irresponsible — and deadly.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in The Hill.

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