Category Archives: Political Correctness

Denial is still a river in Londonistan

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images (55)By Melanie Phillips:

On one thing the British liberal class is certain – the hacking to death of a soldier in a Woolwich street yesterday had absolutely nothing to do with religion.  The murderers screamed ‘Allahu akhbar’ as they tried to decapitate the soldier (a barbaric hallmark of Islamic terror), announced proudly that ‘We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you’ and quoted the Koran as religious justification.

But the atrocity, we have been repeatedly told, had nothing to do with religion. Ever since 9/11, the UK and US political and media establishment, along with much if not most of the British security service and increasingly the US security establishment, has repeated this mantra. Killing in the name of Islam is a warped hijacking of the religion, a perversion of the religion, the very antithesis of the religion. But based on the precepts of the religion itself? Good heavens, no.

For more than two decades, the British political and security establishment has gone to extreme lengths to deny the true religious nature of the Islamic jihad, or holy war, against the free world and ‘backsliding’ Muslims (who are the jihad’s most numerous victims). There are several reasons for this state of denial, of which in my view the key is that to the official mind a holy war is such a fearsome prospect – it’s uncontrollable, can last for decades, is driven by wholly irrational motives immune to negotiation and is characterised by unmitigated savagery — they cannot admit that this is what it actually is.

So instead they come up with absurd statements like the one made to me some years ago by a very senior security official, who said this couldn’t be an Islamic religious war because to say it was would demonise all Muslims.

This was clearly a risible non sequitur. The fact that many Muslims not only do not support the jihad but are being themselves persecuted by it does not make it any less of a holy war against their perceived backsliding or heresy.

Nor can anyone plausibly claim that the jihad is based on a ‘warped’ or ‘perverted’ form of Islam and is therefore not actually Islam at all. It is clearly an interpretation of Islam which, whatever you may think of it, is grounded in the religion. The fact that many Muslims reject this interpretation – and that there are indeed other rival interpretations — is irrelevant to this point. It is arguably as authentic as more pacific interpretations – and more to the point, dominates the Islamic world today. To deny that is to deny its endorsement by the world’s leading Islamic jurists and scholars – or to pretend that they, too, are somehow not ‘real’ Muslims.

Read more at Melanie’s blog

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There’s a Lot of ‘There’ There

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Here’s the thing:  America must not allow Benghazi or Boston or the next Jihadi obscenity to be about “getting” Hillary Clinton or Obama or any other American. Such self-defeating rot is a goal right out of the Islamists’ playbook.  Benghazi showcases, more than anything else, the inefficacy of our present national security effort.

 

by CAPT. GARY HARRINGTON, US NAVY (RET.)

President Obama, at a May 13, 2013 press conference, explained there’s no “there” there in defending his administration regarding the events surrounding four American deaths in Benghazi on September 11, 2012.  Without a “there” there, that would signal to Congress that their criticism is groundless. But the evidence shows…not so fast, President Obama. Not only was there a “there” there, I propose the “there” was born of an unholy Immaculate Conception.

“You’d better not go into the woods” has been the administration’s refrain in the Benghazi narrative. This theme, from a popular child’s song, is apt since, “If you do, you’re sure of a big surprise because that’s where Teddy Bears have their picnics.”  The Benghazi Jihadi terrorists, not stuffed animals, have long planned “beneath the trees where nobody sees.”  In fact, their plans have influenced our government immensely, having caused this administration to fall for the Jihadi strategy. This is best seen in our recent purge of Islamist words – amazingly – from our own government’s military training materials. This prevailing correctness about language fosters deception, and this lies at the core of the Benghazi story.   “They hide and seek as long as they please…”

Toxic ideological picnics began with medieval Wahhabi and Salafi ideas that aren’t well studied, known or discussed in polite society or in press conferences, which makes them easy to obfuscate.  So to avoid a “big surprise” on the ideological origins of Benghazi, high government officials conceived a not-so-Immaculate Conception:  the You Tube video cover story.  The sperm was Salafi jihad.  The egg was a transnational progressive idea gone bad on the eve of a national election: the “normalization” of Benghazi.  A politically inconvenient truth about a Jihadi attack was deliberately blurred to protect a setback to a State Department pet project.

A forest and tree cliché is helpful to better conceive the Immaculate Conception. Benghazi is but one tree in the mature, mutating Jihadi forest.  We noticed the Bomb-the-U.S.-Homeland tree at the Boston marathon finish line, as we did earlier the other U.S. Homeland trees of Ft. Hood and Times Square.  In the heart of the forest lie the remains of older trees, some U.S Homeland and some international: the 9/11 tree, the original World Trade Towers tree, the USS Cole, the Marine Barracks and so on. The ghosts of Danny Pearl, Theo Van Gogh, Boston’s little Martin Richard, Ambassador Stevens, Colonel Higgins, Navy Diver Stethem, and so many others, wander “there.”  Aisha’s missing nose is buried “there.”  “There” is a transnational Jihadi forest that makes it hard for some political leaders to see – or even want to see – the trees that comprise it.

Weeds flourish on untended ground and they distract from the clear picture of the forest. They include the variegated flora of parsed talking points (such as “sideshows”), jailed patsy blasphemers, denied State Department Forward Emergency Support Teams (FEST), fired and demoted officials (some innocent of any wrongdoing), FBI, ICE and State Foot Draggers, AP definitions reset, and other troublesome mutants. The lexicon of the forest does not take rocket science to fathom.  We must explore and study it precisely because “tired little teddy bears” in high office have refused to define Islamist strategies and their undergrowth of motivating medieval ideas for decades.  We need to do it for ourselves.

Once the forest clears, you begin to recognize the patterns of the trees in daily headlines, and “catch them unaware” on Oped pages.  Author Dr. Walid Phares has defined these patterns as six distinct Jihadi strategies: Economic, Ideological, Political, Intelligence, Subversive, and Diplomatic.

Read more: Family Security Matters 

Must-See Video: Fort Hood Heroes (Part II)

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Shoebat Foundation:

Last October, a group called Fort Hood Heroes produced an awesome video that featured survivors of Nidal Malik Hasan’s Fort Hood Jihad attack. We have been eager to see Part II ever since and it is now available.

If you haven’t seen Part I yet, click here.

Also, be sure to visit thetruthaboutforthood.com

This is Part II, entitled Broken Promises:

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Homeland Security guidelines advise deference to pro-Shariah Muslim supremacists

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By Charles C. Johnson:

The Department of Homeland Security, which under Secretary Janet Napolitano has shown a keen interest in monitoring and warning about outspoken conservatives, takes a very different approach in monitoring political Islamists, according to a 2011 memo on protecting the free speech rights of pro-Shariah Muslim supremacists.

In a checklist obtained by The Daily Caller entitled “Countering Violent Extremism Dos and Don’ts” the DHS’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties notifies local and national law enforcement officials that it is Obama administration policy to consider specifically Islamic criticism of the American system of government legitimate.

This policy stands in stark contrast to the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis’ 2009 memo “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment” [pdf], which warned of the dangers posed by pro-life advocates, critics of same-sex marriage and groups concerned with abiding by the U.S. Constitution, among others.

The advice of the Dos and Don’ts list is far more conciliatory. “Don’t use training that equates radical thought, religious expression, freedom to protest, or other constitutionally-protected activity, including disliking the U.S. government without being violent,” the manual’s authors write in a section on training being “sensitive to constitutional values.”

The manual, which was produced by an inter-agency working group from DHS and the National Counterterrorism Center, advises, “Trainers who equate the desire for Sharia law with criminal activity violate basic tenets of the First Amendment.”

The checklist also advised against using moderate Muslim “trainers who are self-professed ‘Muslim reformers’” because they “may further an interest group agenda instead of delivering generally accepted, unbiased information.”

The manual advises trainees not to assume Muslim Americans are “using democratic processes, like litigation and free speech, to subvert democracy and install Sharia law.”

Read more at Daily Caller

 

 

How Many Americans Has Obama Killed?

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two-senators-were-asked-whether-obama-should-be-impeached-over-benghazi-450x337By Daniel Greenfield:

Three days after the tenth anniversary of September 11, left-wing activist Spencer Ackerman struck a blow for Muslim terrorism by denouncing FBI training materials as Islamophobic.

The training materials dealt with such topics as the doctrinal basis for Jihad and the origins of terrorism in Islamic law. The story spread into the mainstream media, and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, whose leaders had endorsed terrorist groups and helped raise money for terrorists, began pressuring the FBI to recant the threat of Islamic terrorism.

In February of 2012, Amine El Khalifi was arrested for plotting to carry out a suicide bombing in the US Capitol building. Before he began his mission, he visited the Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center, whose former Imam was Al Qaeda leader Anwar Al Awlaki and whose parishioners included Fort Hood terrorist Nidal Hasan. At his sentencing, El Khalifi said, “I just want to say that I love Allah.”

But that did not stop the FBI from announcing a few days later that it had completed purging references to Islamic terrorism from its training materials. A month earlier, Tamerlan Tsarnaev had begun his trip to Russia and by the time he returned, the training materials meant to prepare agents for the reality of the terrorist plot that he and his brother would carry out had been buried out of sight.

Where El Khalifi had failed in Washington, the Tsarnaev brothers would succeed in Boston.

The counterterrorism information purge had been completed by the time the lead Boston bomber returned to America, but it had begun earlier under Obama.

The 9/11 Commission Report had freely used terms like “Jihad,” “Takfir” and “Islam” to define the nature and motivations of the enemy. But the 2009 National Intelligence Strategy did not mention them. Neither did the FBI counterterrorism lexicon. They had been replaced by “violent extremism.”

Violent extremism is generic. Predicting an attack requires specifics. Investigators cannot stop undefined crimes or arrest undefined suspects. The less information they have to work with, the more likely the terrorists are to succeed.

Islam is the crucial link between disparate terrorist groups from Dagestan to Thailand, from Mali to Afghanistan, from Israel to Nigeria and from the United States to Chechnya. Without the Islam factor, there was no reason to suspect that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a threat to anyone except the Russians.

The old FBI training materials had explained what Chechen, Pakistani, Egyptian and Nigerian terrorists had in common. In the new ones there was a great empty space in which facts died and lives were lost.

Read more at Front Page

 

Wolf Legislation Brings Back 9/11 Commission

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Disappearing-CT-language-sm

(Lexicon purge chart by Patrick Poole)

This ought to be interesting. Will we get more hearings with Obama administration officials turning themselves into pretzels trying to avoid the “Forbidden Lexicon”?

IPT, by John Rossomando:

An amendment to the FBI’s appropriations bill signed into law by President Obama may bring back the 9/11 Commission to assess how its recommendations have been implemented since they were issued in 2004.

“We should not miss an opportunity to look at everything and look at anything inappropriate that we may have done differently in the past that we may have to do differently,” amendment sponsor U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., told the Investigative Project on Terrorism. “We need to bring people who have a history of dealing with things like this and bring them in front of the Congress.”

“They would look at everything,” Wolf said. “What is the radicalization issue? What were some of the recommendations made by the 9/11 Commission? How have they all been carried out? Is there anything based on new technology or whatever that we should be doing different to look at everything?”

He hopes the review also will examine the problems leading up to last week’s Boston Marathon bombing.

Much has changed since the recommendations were made and al-Qaida has adapted, shifting toward using lone-wolf terrorists to attack America. It has also uses Internet tools such as al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula’s Inspire magazine for recruiting.

With accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev telling FBI investigators that he and his brother were radicalized online and that they found the design for their bombs in Inspire, the deficiency of traditional counter-terrorism approaches becomes apparent.

Homegrown terrorists such as the Tsarnaev brothers, Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan and Sgt. Jason Naser Abdo show the threat is more difficult to intercept.

“You don’t get the chatter that you normally would if it was al-Qaida,” Wolf said. “Some are impacted by abroad and some are impacted by just reading the magazine that’s online.

Many questions remain about Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and their ability to carry out the Boston attack without the FBI and other government agencies detecting them.

Among those is the FBI’s handling of a January 2011 inquiry triggered by contact from Russia’s Federal Security Bureau (FSB) about Tamerlan’s Islamic extremism.

The fact that the FBI didn’t learn about Tamerlan’s travel to Russia despite knowledge within the Department of Homeland Security underscores some of the problems that have remained unsolved since the 9/11 Commission issued its report.

A Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee report on the terrorism watch list from last July found that the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) lacked access to all intelligence databases despite the 9/11 Commission’s desire to break down the walls between various agencies.

Wolf blames a comprehensive political correctness that he says has consumed all aspects of the Obama administration. Involving the American Muslim community in finding the extremists before they strike is an important part of preventing future attacks, he said, but the message emanating from come Muslim groups hinders that, he said. “[Muslims] should be out there speaking out on this, but if you recall you had CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations) urging … young Somalians in the Minneapolis area and their families with this line of not to participate and not deal with the FBI.”

Wolf has long been a critic of CAIR’s effort to blind the FBI, DHS and other national security agencies in their quest to catch homegrown Islamic extremists before they turn to terror.

In a 2009 floor speech, he took CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad to task for his stated support for Hamas in a 1994 speech at Berry University and nailed CAIR officials for giving aid and comfort to such international terrorist groups.

His amendment would ensure the FBI’s policy about limiting contacts with CAIR continues. “They have been more of a hindrance than a help,” Wolf said.

Russia’s Multiple Warnings About Tamerlan Tsarnaev

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97736196-tamerlan-tsarnaev-444x350By :

Russian authorities warned the Obama administration repeatedly — not merely once — that Boston Marathon bombing mastermind Tamerlan Tsarnaev could be an Islamic terrorist, but those admonitions went unheeded in Washington, D.C.

It’s a depressingly familiar tale of intelligence failures, official lies, politically correct posturing, and bureaucratic bungles coming from an administration that has little interest in protecting Americans from the Islamic terrorist threat, a danger President Obama refuses even to acknowledge.

Time magazine previously reported that Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) warned the U.S. government about Tsarnaev a single time two years ago, after he frequented a radical mosque in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, during a six-month visit to that politically unstable, jihadist-friendly Russian republic. The mosque is reportedly a terrorist hangout.

But the Boston Globe now reports there were several such warnings.

On Tuesday, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee were told during a briefing closed to the public that Russia made “multiple contacts” with the United States regarding Tsarnaev, including “at least once since October 2011,’’ Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) told reporters.

The FBI previously acknowledged its investigators interviewed Tsarnaev in early 2011 but did not determine him to be a threat. He was not placed on the “no-fly” list.

As FrontPage reported last September, FBI agents aren’t allowed to treat individuals associated with terrorist groups as potential threats to the nation.

The fact that a terrorism suspect is associated with a terrorist group officially means nothing, according to the FBI document, “Guiding Principles: Touchstone Document on Training.”

After first handcuffing FBI agents investigating terrorism, the “Touchstone” document also invokes the gods of political correctness by making agents afraid of asking useful questions that might produce actionable information.

“Training must emphasize that no investigative or intelligence collection activity may be based solely on race, ethnicity, national origin, or religious affiliation,” the Touchstone document reads, borrowing some language from civil rights legislation.

“Specifically, training must focus on behavioral indicators that have a potential nexus to terrorist or criminal activity, while making clear that religious expression, protest activity, and the espousing of political or ideological beliefs are constitutionally protected activities that must not be equated with terrorism or criminality absent other indicia of such offenses.”

It’s not that much of an exaggeration to say that the FBI could not have done anything about Tsarnaev unless he strapped on a suicide vest in front of them, called them “infidels,” and detailed his abominable plans. Diverting attention away from the Obama White House, the Boston Globe article fatuously editorializes that the new revelation of multiple warnings from the FSB raises “new questions about whether the FBI should have focused more attention on the suspected Boston Marathon bomber.”

There is much more at Front Page

Terrorism Without Motive

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blindfoldedby Daniel Greenfield:

Means, opportunity and motive are the three crucial elements of investigating a crime and establishing the guilt of its perpetrator. Means and opportunity tell us how the crime could have been committed while motive tells us why it was committed. Many crimes cannot be narrowed down by motive until a suspect is on the scene; but acts of terrorism can be. Almost anyone might be responsible for a random killing; but political killings are carried out by those who subscribe to common beliefs.

Eliminate motive from terrorism and it becomes no different than investigating a random killing. If investigators are not allowed to profile potential terrorists based on shared beliefs rooted in violence, that makes it harder to catch terrorists after an act of terror and incredibly difficult before the act of terror takes place.

The roadblock isn’t only technical; it’s conceptual. Investigations consist of connecting the dots. If you can’t conceive of a connection, then the investigation is stuck. If you can’t make the leap from A to B or add two to two and get four, then you are dependent on lucky breaks. And lucky breaks go both ways. Sometimes investigators get lucky and other times the terrorists get lucky.

Federal law enforcement was repeatedly warned by the Russians that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was dangerous, but operating under the influence of a political culture that refused to see Islam as a motive for terrorism, it failed to connect the dots between Chechen violence in Russia and potential terrorism in the United States, and because it could not see Islam as a motive, as a causal factor rather than a casual factor, it could find no reason why Tamerlan was a threat not just to Russia, but also to the United States.

The missing motive factor has led to a rash of lone wolf terrorists whose acts are classified as individual crimes. Nidal Hasan’s killing spree at Fort Hood was put down to workplace violence, but workplace violence isn’t a motive, it’s a bland description. The motive was obvious in Hasan’s background and his behavior; but the military, an organization that by its nature has to be able to predict the actions of the enemy, had been crippled and left unable to see Islam as a motive.

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PC Forces Busy Explaining Away the Boston Attack

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BostonNewsIPBostoners listen to media reports as news comes in about the identity of the bombers. (Photo: Reuters)

By Barry Rubin

Now that the two (main at least) terrorists from the Boston Marathon attack have been killed or captured we enter a new phase, the phase in which the dominant Politically Correct (but Factually Incorrect) forces try to explain away the attack.

Can this be done? Will they really try? Well, yes. True, as one of my correspondents remarked it is much easier to obfuscate far distant Benghazi than the total shutdown and horror in the middle of a major American city. Yet the spin-masters are already at work.

The first step must be, in part, a stalling technique but it sets the pattern for what is to come.  As, in the words of a Reuters story, the “Boston Marathon bombing investigation turns to motive,” the motive must be obfuscated.

The Reuters piece is a good start. The article spends seven paragraphs discussing the parents’ claim that the two brothers were framed. This suggests that the mass media and politicians will not shrink from suggesting—perhaps I should say, gives fair hearing—to bizarre conspiracy theories and doubts. People shouldn’t believe these completely, is the theme, but you just can’t be too sure that two young Muslims would have any reason to harm Americans.

Indeed, there are now witnesses who heard the two terrorists’ mother claiming that September 11 was a U.S. plot to make people hate Muslims. That’s where playing with that kind of fire leads.

In the article, the word “Islam” is not mentioned, except to say that they once lived in one predominantly Muslim country and another place they lived, Dagestan, is “a southern Russian province that lies at the heart of a violent Islamist insurgency.” Here, we have another technique, minimize Islam as a factor and turn it into background noise.

Obviously, this will not apply completely both because the elephant in the room is too big and there is still some journalistic integrity in places. Both the Washington Post and Mother Jones took a lead in exposing the You-Tube likes of one of the terrorists which showed a propensity for Al-Qaeda views to say the least.

There are a lot of other quivers, however, in the arsenal of denial.

Read more at The Clarion Project