Denying the Jihad in the Boulder Jihad.
Editors’ note: As we witness U.S. authorities and the establishment media trying to de-Islamize the Jihad in Boulder and to obscure the fact that the Jihadist perpetrator, Ahmad Al Issa, is a Muslim migrant ISIS sympathizer, a vital question confronts us: why does the Left consistently engage in Jihad Denial? Why is it so invested in denying the Islamic roots of Islamic Jihad?
This is, without doubt, one of the most pertinent questions of our time, especially now with the Boulder Jihad — and its tragic victims — hovering right before our very eyes. Frontpage Mag editors have therefore deemed it vital to run, below, an excerpt from Jamie Glazov’s book, Jihadist Psychopath: How He is Charming, Seducing, and Devouring Us.
The excerpt, which includes sections of Chapter 1 of the book (‘The Case’), details the Obama administration’s horrific record of trying to hide and camouflage the true sources of Islamic terror — an effort that spawned catastrophic consequences.
This documentation equips us with the understanding of why Jihadists like Ahmad Al Issa are able to sow the destruction that they do today — and so easily. It also sets the foundation for our insight into why exactly the Left practices Jihad Denial — and what all the specious ingredients of that denial entail. These facts will all be unveiled in several published segments of Jihadist Psychopath in our forthcoming issues of Frontpage Mag.
Don’t miss this essay below.
[To read the chapter on what the Left actually is — and why it aids and abets Jihad — read Utopian Virus: HERE. The Virus in Power, meanwhile, explores how the Left took power in America — and why it had such an easy time doing so. Read it: HERE. The introduction crystallizes the general nature of Jihad Denial: HERE.]
The Case.
On May 13, 2010, Attorney General Eric Holder had an incredulous and perplexed expression on his face as he sat before the House Judiciary Committee. He just couldn’t understand what Representative Lamar Smith, the ranking Republican on the Committee, was asking him, over and over again. Specifically, Smith wanted to know if Holder thought that “Radical Islam” had any connection to Jihadist attacks perpetrated against the United States. Rep. Smith had to ask the same question, repeated in different ways, six times while Holder looked confused and uttered short rejoinders about how Rep. Smith’s questions weren’t making sense to him. Finally, apparently realizing that Rep. Smith would not desist, Holder affirmed that whatever it was that the congressman was talking about (Holder would not pronounce the words), it was definitely not connected to the attacks to which Smith was referring. [1]
Holder’s behavior before the House Judiciary Committee clearly reflected the position of the Obama administration on the terror war — a position that the administration had made conspicuously evident from the moment it took office. It would be the Hear No Islam/See No Islam position when it came to terrorism. Whenever Jihadists would strike, Jihad Denial would be the name of the game. This, of course, was central to the Left’s cause, since denying Jihad and its true roots helps to advance the progressives’ goal of making America more vulnerable to Jihad. And now the progressive dream had come true: the Left had its own Radical-in-Chief in the White House who was faithfully executing its destructive agenda.
Obama’s new path of Jihad Denial and romancing the Muslim Brotherhood took on devastating significance in October 2011, when his administration dutifully followed Muslim Brotherhood “requests” and purged all FBI and other intelligence agencies’ training manuals of any mention of Islam and Jihad.[2]
The Department of Defense followed suit and enforced a purge of all individuals who didn’t toe the new Party Line. New disciplinary action and re-education was made mandatory for anyone in the government who dared to acknowledge Islam’s role in the terror war.[3] Those who courageously told the truth about Islam, such as the scholar Robert Spencer, were removed from their positions as trainers of FBI and military personnel on the jihad threat and were replaced by members of Muslim Brotherhood front groups such as CAIR and ISNA.[4]
In the State Department, meanwhile, officials would be forbidden from asking Muslim immigrants about their views on Sharia and Jihad before approving their visa applications.[5]
A “counterterrorism” government guide would also tell officials that keeping Muslims out of the country for supporting Sharia Law violated the First Amendment. [6] All American officials and investigators were now permitted to consider only violent or criminal conduct in the terror war. Radical ideology was to be ignored, particularly if it had the veneer of “religious expression.”[7]
It soon became clear that Countering “Violent Extremism” {CVE) was the Obama administration’s primary “focus” in the terror war. It served the administration’s agenda perfectly because, at first glance, no one could point to what it was exactly that was being countered. There was no clear objective or identification of any specific enemy and, unsurprisingly, no mention of Jihad or Islam. Countering “violent extremism” became one of those very vague and ambiguous goals to which the administration could refer when it came time to prove it was doing something about terrorism when, in fact, it was doing absolutely nothing at all.[8]
While the CVE strategy had its nebulous aspects, there was actually something that it very clearly sought to “counter.” Indeed, it became quite evident that there were certain individuals, along with an ideology, that the administration regarded as “extremist” and that it wanted to block. And who were the guilty parties? The truth-tellers about Jihad, of course. The counter-jihad movement represented the true “violent extremism” because, according to the administration, it was instigating all the terrible and racist hatred that was being displayed against Muslims everywhere.[9] The evidence substantiating this supposed reality proved non-existent, but the notion prevailed nonetheless. And it was here that we saw the Left’s upside-down inversion of who the good and bad guys really were: Jihad had somehow become the victim, while the victims of Jihad became the terrorists.
The administration’s CVE charade was, in a nutshell, really all about one basic agenda: enforcing Jihad Denial and persecuting the dissidents who violated it. This situation yielded a disaster: the real threat facing America could not be named or labelled. In his book Catastrophic Failure: Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad, author Stephen Coughlin documents how, under Obama, a dire threat was reduced to a “nameless abstraction.” U.S. leaders and intelligence agencies ignored the most basic tenets of intelligence, which included the critical component of threat identification. The problem, notably, began in the Bush administration. Having worked himself in the Joint Chiefs of Staff Intelligence Directorate in the immediate post-9-11 period, Coughlin recalls how he discovered that,
within the division there seemed to be a preference for political correctness over accuracy and for models that were generated not by what the enemy said he was but on what academics and “cultural advisors’ said the enemy needed to be, based on contrived social science theories.[10]
Under Obama, the situation went from bad to worse. Coughlin describes how Islamic supremacists became completely aware of the administration’s calculated self-delusion and, consequently, felt arrogantly at ease in actually molding American leaders’ thinking and policies. Our enemies, Coughlin writes, “successfully calculated that they could win the war by convincing our national security leaders of the immorality of studying and knowing the enemy.”[11] As a result, they became overridingly confident in their ability to fulfill the Muslim Brotherhood’s goal, which the Brotherhood boasted about in its own documents, of sabotaging the United States through the process of “civilization-jihad” and achieving this goal by Americans’ own hands.[12]
Thus, America’s suicidal disposition in the terror war reached a crisis level under Obama, when American officials actually started seeking advice and direction from precisely those forces seeking to destroy the country. As Coughlin shows, while the government identified certain individuals and organizations as providers of material support to terrorism, and as members or allies of the Muslim Brotherhood, it simultaneously sought out “those same people as cultural experts, ‘moderates’ and community outreach partners.”[13]
With Obama in the White House, therefore, the enemy was in effect advising Americans and formulating their policy on how to promote their cause. Obama was also mischaracterizing the conflict America was in. “The public face of Islam in America,” Coughlin notes, “was shaped by the Muslim Brotherhood.” Islam in America, in turn, “took the form favored by the Brotherhood.”[14] This catastrophe was compounded by the surreal fact that many officials in senior positions in the Obama administration didn’t even know anything about Islam and were completely oblivious to the Islamic doctrines that justify and even mandate Jihad against the West.[15]
Suffice it to say that while threat identification is the foundation for any successful war effort and is, therefore, crucial to protecting Americans and enhancing our security, under Obama such identification was impossible. As Coughlin points out, “a postmodern form of relativism” had rendered America “incapable of recognizing existential epistemic threats and hence made it defenseless in the face of them.”[16]
And it got worse. Not only did the Obama administration avoid recognizing the true threats that faced America, it spent a significant amount of time chasing around non-threats on purpose. Immense resources were wasted on investigating harmless non-Muslims solely for the sake of appearing non-racist. “Since 2009 we’ve opened investigations of groups we knew to be harmless,” a Pentagon counterterrorism official revealed, “they weren’t Muslims, and we needed some ‘balance’ in case the White House asked if we were ‘profiling’ potential terrorists.”[17] In this way, the Obama administration could proudly maintain that it was not engaged in “Islamophobia.”[18]
Meanwhile, The Obama administration was not content with solely silencing threat identification within the government. It would cause embarrassment, after all, if the media and American citizens could still talk openly and honestly about the ideology that posed a threat to America and the West. House Democrats, therefore, faithfully sprung to action and launched an effort to criminalize truth-telling about Jihad in the country at large. Their effort produced House Resolution 569, which leading Democrats in the House of Representatives sponsored on December 17, 2015. Referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary, the resolution sought to destroy the First Amendment by condemning hateful rhetoric towards Muslims in the United States.[19]
Conflating truth-telling about Jihad with the supposed hatred of all Muslim people, the resolution sought to criminalize any attempt to accurately identify America’s enemies and the ideology that inspires them. As Robert Spencer notes, the resolution used
the specter of violence against Muslims to try to quash legitimate research into the motives and goals of those who have vowed to destroy us, which will have the effect of allowing the jihad to advance unimpeded and unopposed.[20]
The Left’s effort with House Resolution 569 was an extension of U.N. Resolution 16/18, the effort pushed by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (O.I.C.), the 57-nation alliance of Muslim states, to stifle free speech about Islam globally by implementing a U.N. rule against the so-called “defamation of religions.” The real aim of U.N. Resolution 16/18 is, of course, to shut down “Islamophobia,” which means to curtail any truth-telling about Islam and to impose Islamic blasphemy laws worldwide.[21]
Any law applied in the U.S. that is based on House Resolution 569 or U.N. Resolution 16/18 would be a violation of the U.S. First Amendment. But this doesn’t concern leftists very much, since that is precisely their objective. This explains why Hillary Clinton personally committed the State Department to impose U.N. Resolution 16/18 on the United States in her meeting with the General Secretary of the O.I.C. in July 2011, while she was serving as Secretary of State. Clinton also affirmed that, until the effort could become U.S. law, there would be action undertaken — by means of “peer pressure and shaming” — to intimidate Americans who engaged in the kind of speech that U.N. Resolution 16/18 sought to end. Then, tellingly enough, in June 2012, when Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez was asked by the Chairman of the House Subcommittee on the Constitution to confirm that the Obama administration would “never entertain or advance a proposal that criminalizes speech against any religion,” he refused to answer.[22]
While the Obama administration and its leftist loyalists were busy trying to impose Islamic blasphemy laws on the United States, other American progressive forces empowered Islamic supremacism in other realms. The leftist leadership of New York City, for instance, became busy accommodating Muslim Brotherhood directives by preventing the New York Police Department from focusing on Muslims in fighting Jihad. The process started in 2012, when the Muslim Students Association (MSA), a Muslim Brotherhood front group, filed a federal lawsuit (along with a few other Muslim Brotherhood plaintiffs) against the NYPD. In its complaint, the MSA charged that the civil rights of Muslims were being violated by the NYPD’s use of informants and plainclothes detectives to monitor various Islamic institutions — particularly MSA chapters — in the New York/New Jersey area.[23]
In early January 2016, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police Commissioner William Bratton agreed to a settlement that would exempt Muslims from NYPD surveillance. The new guidelines explicitly barred police officers from basing any future law-enforcement investigations on race, ethnicity, or, as in the case of the MSA, religion.[24] As part of the settlement, New York City also deleted from the department’s website an exhaustive NYPD report, titled “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat,” which provided a crucial tutorial for all law enforcement organizations seeking to understand how an individual is moved to Islamic radicalization.[25]
The NYPD’s traditional practice of cultivating informants and using undercover investigators within the Muslim community had undeniably prevented many Jihadist attacks.
But now, with more than thirty thousand worldwide Muslim terrorist attacks inspired by Islamic texts since 9/11,[26] with Jihadist attacks on the rise globally, and with the FBI recently stating that it was investigating as many as 900 open cases on individuals suspected of being ISIS operatives,[27] it has become illegal for the NYPD to single out anyone in the Muslim community for surveillance and undercover operations. As writer Daniel Greenfield noted regarding this development, “if a successful terror attack occurs in New York, it will be because Bill de Blasio crippled the NYPD at the behest of Islamic groups.”[28]
In America, we see how the Left succeeded through Obama in enforcing Jihad Denial and in enabling the strength of Islamic supremacist forces. In achieving this feat, progressives empowered the advance of Jihad and Sharia in the United States, which made the nation vastly more vulnerable to its enemy’s attacks.
It is undeniable that the Jihadist attacks that occurred on American soil throughout the Obama years could have easily been prevented. This fact will be heavily documented later in our story, but for now we will cite just one illustrative example: the Boston Marathon Massacre that the Tsarnaev brothers perpetrated on April 15, 2013, did not have to happen. The Russians, after all, had warned the FBI about the Tsarnaevs before the massacre, but the intelligence agency found nothing after its “investigation” of the two brothers. This is because the Bureau had its hands tied behind its back with the Jihad Denial rules of the administration. It couldn’t ask the right questions, nor pursue the right and necessary leads.
Jamie Glazov holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Russian, U.S. and Canadian foreign policy. He is the editor of Frontpagemag.com, the author of the critically-acclaimed, United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror, and the host of the web-tv show, The Glazov Gang. His new book is Jihadist Psychopath: How He is Charming, Seducing, and Devouring Us. Visit his site at JamieGlazov.com, follow him on Twitter: @JamieGlazov, and reach him at jamieglazov11@gmail.com.
Notes:
[1] Stephen Dinan, “Holder balks at blaming ‘radical Islam’,” The Washington Times, May 14, 2010. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/may/14/holder-balks-at-blaming-radical-islam/#ixzz30MluWyrS
[2] Robert Spencer, “Hillary Lets the Jihadist Cat Out of the Bag,” Frontpagemag.com, January 24, 2013. http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/robert-spencer/hillary-lets-the-jihadist-cat-out-of-bag/print/
[3] Stephen Coughlin, Catastrophic Failure: Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad, (Center for Security Policy Press: Washington D.C., 2015), pp.21.
[4] Robert Spencer, Arab Winter Comes to America: The Truth About the War We’re In, (Washington, D.C: Regnery, 2015), pp. xiii-xvi; Frank Gaffney, The Muslim Brotherhood in the Obama Administration, (Sherman Oaks, CA, David Horowitz Freedom Center: 2012).
[5] Leo Hohmann, “Exploding Muslim immigration overwhelms FBI,” WorldNetDaily.com, July 17, 2015. http://www.wnd.com/2015/07/exploding-muslim-immigration-overwhelms-fbi/#vJezltXyYmuQXX0j.99
[6] Daniel Greenfield, “Counterterrorism Gov Guide: Keeping Out Muslims for Sharia Law Violates First Amendment,” The Point, Frontpagemag.com, December 16, 2015. http://www.frontpagemag.com/point/261149/counterterrorism-gov-guide-keeping-out-muslims-daniel-greenfield
[7] Ibid.
[8] For an authoritative account of the CVE strategy, see Stephen Coughlin Interview, “The Hoax of ‘Countering Violent Extremism’” on The Glazov Gang, JamieGlazov.com, April 12, 2016. http://jamieglazov.com/2016/04/12/the-hoax-of-countering-violent-extremism-on-the-glazov-gang/
[9] Ibid.
[10] Coughlin, p.12.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid, p.13.
[14] Ibid, p.17.
[15] Ibid., p.14.
[16] Ibid., p.17.
[17] John R. Schindler, “The Intelligence Lessons of San Bernardino,” Observer.com, December 14, 2015. http://observer.com/2015/12/the-intelligence-lessons-of-san-bernardino/
[18] Ibid.
[19] Robert Spencer, “House Democrats Move to Criminalize Criticism of Islam,” Frontpagemag.com, December 29, 2015. http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/261268/house-democrats-move-criminalize-criticism-islam-robert-spencer
[20] Ibid.
[21] Deborah Weiss, “Democrats Castigate ‘Anti-Muslim’ Speech in Proposed Legislation,” Frontpagemag.com, January 26, 2016. http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/261550/democrats-castigate-anti-muslim-speech-proposed-deborah-weiss; Robert Spencer, “Secretary of State Clinton says State Department will coordinate with OIC on legal ways to implement UN’s resolution criminalizing ‘defamation of religion’”, JihadWatch.org, August 3, 2011. http://www.jihadwatch.org/2011/08/secretary-of-state-clinton-says-state-department-will-coordinate-with-oic-on-legal-ways-to-implement
[22] Melanie Arter, “DOJ Official Won’t Say Whether Justice Department Would ‘Criminalize Speech against Any Religion’”, CNSNews.com, July 26, 2012. http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/doj-official-won-t-say-whether-justice-department-would-criminalize-speech-against-any. See also Coughlin, p.22.
[23] John Perazzo, “The MSA Defeats New York,” Frontpagemag.com, January 12, 2016.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/261427/msa-defeats-new-york-john-perazzo; for documentation of the MSA being a Muslim Brotherhood front group, see the profile on the MSA at DiscovertheNetworks.org: http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6175
[24] Ibid.
[25] Paul Sperry, “The purge of a report on radical Islam has put NYC at risk,” NYPost.com, April 15, 2017. http://nypost.com/2017/04/15/the-purge-of-a-report-on-radical-islam-has-put-nyc-at-risk/; Patrick Dunleavy, “NYPD Caves to Political Correctness,” InvestigativeProject.org, January 8, 2016. http://www.investigativeproject.org/5121/nypd-caves-to-political-correctness
[26] See the website thereligionofpeace.com which keeps a track of the number of Islamic terrorist attacks since 9/11.
[27] Kevin Johnson, “Comey: Feds have roughly 900 domestic probes about Islamic State operatives, other extremists,” UsaToday.com, October 23, 2015. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2015/10/23/fbi-comey-isil-domestic-probes/74455460/
[28] Daniel Greenfield, “Bill de Blasio Cripples NYPD Surveillance of Muslim Terrorism,” The Point at Frontpagemag.com, January 7, 2016. http://www.frontpagemag.com/point/261384/bill-de-blasio-cripples-nypd-surveillance-muslim-daniel-greenfield
