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These Are the Tools We Need to Win the Long War Against Islamist Terrorism

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After the horrible terrorist attack in Nice, France, millions of Americans, Frenchmen, and others around the world are probably asking themselves what can be done to stop the seemingly unending wave of deadly Islamist terrorist attacks from Dhaka, Bangladesh to San Bernardino, California.

These attacks have been conducted using explosives, guns, and now an ordinary vehicle. Here in the U.S., Islamist terrorists have plotted or attacked the U.S. 25 times since the start of 2015, by far the most active period of terrorist activity since 9/11.

Now is not the time for a knee-jerk response, but it is time to take a serious appraisal of the threat and what we can do to stop it here at home.

The U.S. has faced 89 Islamist terror plots or attacks against the homeland since 9/11, with over a quarter of those occurring in the past 18 months.

Seventy-eight of these plots involved a homegrown, U.S.-born terrorist. Eleven plots have been successful, leaving 91 Americans dead while wounding and terrorizing countless more. Five of these successful plots have been in the past 12 months and have killed 68 Americans. Of course, if it were not for the work of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies, other plots would have succeeded, likely killing thousands more.

It is this reality of both success and failure that should drive our future efforts. Our greatest successes have been hard-fought victories achieved through difficult police work and the vigilance of our intelligence community. Undercover agents, wiretaps, examination of computer data, and many other tools have been essential to stopping Islamist terrorists. When we have failed to stop an attack, we often ask why our police and intelligence agencies failed to recognize and stop the threat.

Our greatest asset in preventing terrorism has been, and must continue to be, our law enforcement and intelligence communities armed with the tools and resources they need. Since 9/11, the U.S. has taken important steps in this direction, but we must continue to improve and refine these tools.

This does not mean our government can ignore our rights under the Constitution. Every program and law must meet constitutional scrutiny. But this does mean that within the bounds of the Constitution, strong and proactive investigatory tools should be given to our security forces with careful oversight from all branches of government.

In so doing we can maximize both our security and our liberty, rather than trading one for the other.

Aided by efforts in community outreach, counter radicalization, improved sharing between the FBI and local law enforcement, and other preventative approaches to terrorism, the U.S. can stop more terrorism before its strikes. (For more from the author of “These Are the Tools We Need to Win the Long War Against Islamist Terrorism” please click HERE)

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Time for Political Elites to Stand up to Sharia

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Our political class, which includes both parties, spent an entire month debating gun control and turning a blind eye to the combatants behind those guns and how we have willfully allowed them into our country and have promoted their Muslim Brotherhood lobbyists at the highest levels of government. This past week, in Nice, France, a Tunisian-Muslim immigrant murdered 84 people in a Jihad attack that mainly involved a truck. He also reportedly got out of the car, shouted “Allah Akbar,” and began shooting into the crowd with a firearm he took from the truck, which was loaded with grenades and firearms. France has stricter gun laws than even what Democrats [publicly] want implemented in our country, yet they are suffering even more at the hands of Islamic jihad. What will it take to end the willful blindness on the part of political elites?

The willful blindness of sharia-based Islam – the glue that binds together all jihadists – is endemic of both political parties. Here is the preamble of the “counter-terrorism” legislation Republicans wanted to pass before conservatives rebelled against the effort:

The preeminent terrorist threats to the United States are radical Islamist terrorist networks such as al Qaeda, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, and their allies and affiliate networks, as well as lone-wolf supporters and sympathizers in the United States and around the world.

This is beyond tone-deaf. It’s willful blindness. The Islamic State was created in 2013, long after the modern era of Islamic jihad. We are not at war with networks or tactics; there is a clash of civilization and it is rooted in Sharia-Islam and the dictates of the Hadith, as practiced by millions of Muslims and rooted in a number of nation-states from Iran to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and even the government we established in Afghanistan. It is that motivation that has inspired so many Muslims living in the West to either support jihad or, worse, actually pursue it.

Western leaders have always sought to isolate and decompartmentalize the problem. The jihadists in the Caucuses were “Chechnyians,” the savages in Israel were “Palestinians.” The West sought to legitimize and validate their grievances as rooted in geographical political disputes. In fact, they were all rooted in Jihad as dictated by the Hadith. The West blamed Israel for suffering from suicide bombings and vehicular attacks for years. Tragically, we now see that those tactics have made their way to the West – tactics employed by the same enemy with the same ideology.

This willful blindness of focusing myopically on ISIS and Al Qaeda while downright promoting the Islamic supremacist ideology behind it affects our immigration, homeland security, and national security/military policies. For if we are unwilling to acknowledge the enemy and its threatening doctrine, we will pursue dyslexic policies in those three realms.

It is this willful blindness that has led CIA Director John Brennan to conclude this week that “Saudi Arabia is among our closest counterterrorism partners.”

It is this willful blindness that has allowed our military leadership to throw our soldiers into Islamic civil wars to fight one sharia-adherent group of Muslims on behalf of other sharia-adherent Muslims, while shunning true reformist leaders in places like Egypt and Libya who would actually fight Islamic supremacism.

It is this willful blindness that has allowed Islamic supremacist groups with ties to Hamas to become the leaders of American Muslims, obtain security clearances and meet with Congress 325 times in one year.

It is this willful blindness that has allowed countries like France to bring in hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the Middle East who subscribe to the underlying ideology shared by Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the Nice terrorist. And it is this appalling willful blindness that has caused our political leaders to learn nothing from the mistakes of Europe and instead, follow blindly in their footsteps.

What paves the road for endless numbers of Muslims in the West who make the ultimate decision to engage in violent Jihad is the climate of civilization jihad that is rooted in the mosques, schools, and political organizations, mainly run by Muslim Brotherhood groups. The notion that we would allow more individuals into our country who subscribe to this ideology is maniacal and suicidal. There are certainly no constitutional mandates on prospectively bringing in any group of immigrants, and as I explore in two chapters of Stolen Sovereignty, our Founders and early political leaders up until just two generations ago all agreed to only admit those who completely shared our political values. This was the essence of Teddy Roosevelt’s message right before he passed away:

But this is predicated upon the man’s becoming in very fact an American and nothing but an American. If he tries to keep segregated with men of his own origin and separated from the rest of America, then he isn’t doing his part as an American. There can be no divided allegiance here. . . .We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding-house; and we have room for but one soul loyalty, and that is loyalty to the American people

The guiding principle of our immigration policy was to only admit those who unquestionably adhered to our values system. Our contemporary guiding principle is to admit anyone and everyone – in large numbers over short periods of time – from cultures that clash with ours unless they have a card identifying them up front as a member of a known terror group. When our early political leaders in both parties promoted policies that weeded out those immigrants who didn’t share our values, they were dealing with Europeans from Western Civilization. They could have never imagined an ideology that is the complete antithesis of constitutional republicanism being invited in and championed by the political elites on such a large scale. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who was the famed Nuremberg prosecutor, best encapsulated the incompatibility of Sharia with western civilization in a statement published in 1955:

In any broad sense, Islamic Law offers the American lawyer a study in dramatic contrasts. Even casual acquaintance and superficial knowledge — all that most of us at bench or bar will be able to acquire — reveal that its striking features relative to our law are not likenesses but inconsistencies, not similarities but contrarieties. In its source, its scope and its sanctions, the law [i.e., Islamic Law, Sharia] of the Middle East is the antithesis of Western Law…Islamic law, on the contrary, finds its chief source in the will of Allah as revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. It contemplates one community of the faithful, though they may be of various tribes and in widely separated locations. Religion, not nationalism or geography, is the proper cohesive force. The state itself is subordinate to the Qur’an, which leaves little room for additional legislation, none for criticism or dissent. This world is viewed as but the vestibule to another and a better one for the faithful, and the Qur’an lays down rules of behavior towards others and toward society to assure a safe transition. It is not possible to separate political or juristic theories from the teachings of the Prophet, which establish rules of conduct concerning religious, domestic, social, and political life. This results in a law of duties, rather than rights…

In the irony of all ironies, this very statement from Justice Jackson has been purged from our counterterrorism training for federal law enforcement, at the behest of the Muslim Brotherhood’s CVE agenda.

As it states in the Bible, the truth is not in the heaven or in a far off land; it “is very close to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can fulfill it [Deuteronomy 30:14]. We don’t need to conjure up unconstitutional or novel ideas or focus on trucks, guns, and tactics in order to secure this nation. We need to simply recognize the incontrovertible truth and employ basic common sense and stop self-immolating. (For more from the author of “Time for Political Elites to Stand up to Sharia” please click HERE)

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As Turkey Attack Unfolds, Cruz Faults Obama for How He Talks About Terrorism

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As Sen. Ted Cruz convened a hearing intended as a platform to criticize how President Barack Obama talks about Islamist extremism, news broke of suicide bombers attacking an airport in the capital of America’s NATO ally, Turkey.

While families of the 41 people murdered in Turkey mourned, and world leaders and politicians expressed condolences, there was also a rush to try to define the event, which bore the hallmarks of an operation carried out by the Islamic State terrorist group.

With the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, expanding its influence outside the territory it controls in Syria and Iraq, and inspiring attacks throughout the world, the debate over how to talk about terrorism has become more complex and intense.

To the Obama administration, the Cruz-led hearing in Washington was an example of what it views as a counterproductive focus on semantics that distracts from the mission of defeating terrorism.

But for Cruz, R-Texas, among other critics, the administration’s policy of not using the term “radical Islamic terrorism” underemphasizes the seriousness of the threat and showcases a weak counterterrorism strategy that isn’t stopping massacres like the one in Turkey.

“We cannot combat and defeat radical Islamic terrorism without acknowledging it exists and directing our resources to stopping it,” Cruz said at his Senate Judiciary oversight subcommittee hearing Tuesday.

“And an Orwellian doublethink that seeks to excerpt any reference to it, as the administration did to the president of France, or erase pledges of allegiance to ISIS, as the administration did with the Orlando terrorist, is counterproductive to keeping this country safe.”

Cruz was referring to the FBI’s original decision to issue a transcript of a 911 call from the Orlando nightclub attacker, Omar Mateen, that removed references to ISIS and the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

The Texas Republican also referenced how the Obama administration handled its communication of remarks by French President Francois Hollande after the Paris terrorist attacks in November.

Though the FBI reversed itself in the Orlando case, and eventually released a complete transcript that included Mateen’s mentions of ISIS, Cruz accuses the Obama administration of making a deliberate effort to “purge” law enforcement and intelligence material to remove references to Islamist terrorism.

Cruz has made the point repeatedly for more than a year. What he views as an overt attempt at political correctness, however, the administration considers to be smart policy intended to not overgeneralize the ISIS threat and legitimize the terrorist group’s extreme interpretation of Islam.

“What exactly would using this label accomplish? What exactly would it change?” Obama said shortly after the Orlando attack. “Would it make ISIL less committed to trying to kill Americans? Would it bring in more allies? Is there a military strategy that is served by this? The answer, is none of the above. Calling a threat by a different name does not make it go away. This is a political distraction.”

Two top Justice Department counterterrorism officials declined invitations to Cruz’s hearing, so Democrats such as Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware were left to speak for them.

“I utterly reject the notion that there is some sort of political correctness preventing us from fighting our enemies,” Coons said.

He noted that the U.S.-led military campaign against ISIS has included more than 13,000 airstrikes and resulted in the recapture of more than half the terrorist group’s territory in Iraq, and nearly a quarter of it in Syria.

“The president has condemned the threat of ISIS and taken decisive action,” Coons said, adding:

We can and must defeat terrorism without sacrificing our constitutional principles. [To] blame over a billion Muslims for the twisted actions of an extremist few only serves to divide Americans, alienate the Muslim world, and legitimize the murderous groups who falsely claim to speak for Islam. This makes us less safe.

Muslim Americans who spoke at Cruz’s hearing were split on how to talk about the Islamist terrorist threat.

Zuhdi Jasser, president of the Arizona-based American Islamic Forum for Democracy, argues his fellow moderate Muslims need to actively define what their faith stands for.

“I would tell you as a Muslim, we demonize Muslims by letting Islamists speak for the religion,” Jasser said:

It is foolhardy to refuse to acknowledge the role of political Islam. A national security policy of refusing to say Islam has a problem is dangerous. Treat us [Muslims] with tough love, hold us accountable, and bigotry will melt away because [critics] will see us as essential in this fight.

Farhana Khera, president and executive director of Muslim Advocates in Oakland, California, countered that the process of radicalization in the age of ISIS is nuanced. She pointed out that the profiles of recent terrorists do not fit a neat category.

“We don’t believe there is somehow a pathway to radicalization,” said Khera, who is Muslim, adding:

We know extremist violence takes many forms, and national security experts say the common threat is vulnerable individuals seeking a sense of purpose. There are some people where ideology is a part of it, but it is not the causation for what causes people to engage in terrorism.

(For more from the author of “As Turkey Attack Unfolds, Cruz Faults Obama for How He Talks About Terrorism” please click HERE)

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Orlando Massacre 911 Tapes Are Revealed, Scrubbed of References to Islam

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The Obama administration on Monday released redacted transcripts of Omar Mateen’s 911 calls — sanitizing any and all references to ISIS made by the self-proclaimed radical Islamist terrorist.

Even though authorities have made no secret that Mateen invoked ISIS as his motive for slaughtering 49 people inside a gay nightclub in Orlando last week, 911 transcripts released by the FBI awkwardly worked around mentioning the terror group.

“In the name of God the merciful, the beneficial (in Arabic),” Mateen said during his call at about 2:35 a.m. on June 12.

“Praise be to God, and prayers as well as peace be upon the prophet of (Arabic). I let you know, I’m in Orlando and I did the shootings.” (Read more from “Orlando Massacre 911 Tapes Are Revealed, Scrubbed of References to Islam” HERE)

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‘Radical Islam’ Does Matter in Identifying Enemy, Experts Say

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Using the phrase “radical Islam” to describe the Islamic State or other jihadist groups will not win the war, but is nonetheless relevant in identifying the ideology—not the religion—that America is fighting, experts said.

“I don’t believe the phrase “Islamist extremism” or “Islamist terrorism” is some sort of incantation that’s going to fix everything,” Walter Lohman, director of the Asian Studies Center at The Heritage Foundation, said in an email to The Daily Signal.

“In fact, I don’t even think it’s the most important thing in this whole issue set. What’s most important are the policies that we pursue and the action that we take to defeat it, whatever you want to call it. But it does matter because we—Muslims, as much as other Americans—are engaged in a war of ideas as well as a war on terrorism.”

In a speech Tuesday, President Barack Obama roundly criticized Republicans who have insisted he use the words “radical Islam,” or “Islamist,” to describe the Islamic State.

“What exactly would using this label accomplish? What exactly would it change? Would it make ISIL less committed to try to kill Americans? Would it bring in more allies? Is there a military strategy that is served by this?” Obama said after meeting with his national security team. “The answer is none of the above. Calling a threat by a different name does not make it go away. This is a political distraction.”

Lohman, who last December hosted a forum, “Muslim Voices Against the Islamic State and Islamist Extremism,” said the point is to understand the ideology.

“Islamism is a political ideology and it has to be taken on,” Lohman continued in the email. “If we physically dissuade terrorists from hurting people, we still have to stop Islamists from coercing people into their way of thinking by other means. Actually identifying the ideology is key to that, and unfortunately, that ideology is cast in religious terms. It’s like a Muslim civil society leader in Indonesia told me one time talking about the much more serious threat in her own country, ‘What difference does it make whether they are terrorists or not. They (Islamists) all want the same thing.’”

White House press secretary Josh Earnest later added that, “It is not uncommon on cable TV to see some GOP congressman I’ve never heard of demand to know why the president doesn’t say ‘radical Islam.’”

During his remarks, Obama said, “Not once has an adviser of mine said, ‘Man, if we use that phrase, we are going to turn this whole thing around.’” The president added that the United States doesn’t want to feed the Islamic State’s narrative that the militant group represents true Islam.

“Since before I was president, I have been clear about how extremist groups have perverted Islam to justify terrorism,” Obama said. “As president, I have called on our Muslim friends and allies at home and around the world to work with us to reject this twisted interpretation of one of the world’s great religions.”

But the “radical” in “radical Islam” is an obvious distinction from mainstream Islam, and it’s Obama that doesn’t seem to recognize that, said James Carafano, vice president for the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute at The Heritage Foundation.

“A label may seem superficial. American soldiers in Normandy didn’t care whether they were fighting Germans or Nazis,” Carafano told The Daily Signal. “The real fear is that the president is not prosecuting the war to win. It’s horrible to imply using the word ‘Islam’ is racist. ‘Radical Islam’ refers to an Islamist ideology, and is by definition a distinction from Islam.” (For more from the author of “‘Radical Islam’ Does Matter in Identifying Enemy, Experts Say” please click HERE)

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The Obama-Clinton Ban on Muslims

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For all indignation from the Democrats over the so-called “Muslim ban” proposed by GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, one would think they’ve never supported such a thing. Wrong.

According to a investigative report from ABC News published in 2013, the Obama-Clinton State Department stopped processing Iraqi refugee requests for six months in 2011 after it was discovered that two al Qaeda-Iraq terrorists, who had previously attacked US soldiers in Iraq and were trained in bomb making, entered the country as refugees and were living in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

Given the majority of the population in Iraq is Muslim, this should be considered the Obama-Clinton Muslim ban–much those bans proposed towards Syria and other countries in the aftermath of the Paris massacre.

The State Department, which Clinton led at that time, was directly in charge of refugee requests when the Iraq ban was imposed. The Obama Administration took this action after it was discovered two Iraqi men, Waad Ramadan Alwan and Mohammed Shareef Hammadi, who had claimed persecution, revealed to undercover officials their plans to use “a bomb to assassinate an Army captain they’d known in Bayji, who was now back home – and to possibly attack other homeland targets.”

In fact, Alwan had built bombs in Iraq that were targeted at US soldiers in the past. ABC News reported that the “FBI found his fingerprints on a cordless phone base that U.S. soldiers dug up in a gravel pile south of Bayji, Iraq on Sept. 1, 2005. The phone base had been wired to unexploded bombs buried in a nearby road.”

Still, he was permitted to come to Bowling Green and live with Hammadi, where Alwan was living in public housing and receiving public assistance.

Listening to President Obama and now presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton yesterday, however, one would think they’ve never tried to stop such men from entering the United States.

Obama and Clinton gave Trump a one-two punch on Sunday and Monday over Trump’s so-called “Muslim ban.”

“That’s not the America we want,” President Obama said Monday. “It doesn’t reflect our democratic ideals. It will make us less safe.” That followed remarks from Clinton, who said, “Inflammatory anti-Muslim rhetoric and threatening to ban the families and friends of Muslims Americans as well as millions of Muslim business people and tourists from entering our country hurts the vast majority of Muslims who love freedom and hate terror.“

Their attacks were not only hypocritical, but not entirely fair to Trump either.

Although some of Trump’s language is regrettable, he has recently recalibrated to echo language from his former presidential primary rival Ted Cruz to temporarily block refugees from nations where there are terror-related concerns. (More specifically, Cruz offered legislation to allow governors to decline to accept Syrian refugees until the State Department could provide adequate assurances that the refugees posed no security threat.)

But nuance has been largely cast aside in the name of politics. Meanwhile, un-vetted refugees continue to pose a threat to the United States and its allies.

Earlier this month, Germany arrested three men, one of them a Syrian refugee, on suspicion of an ISIS-plot to bomb and “take out as many bystanders as possible.” In January, US officials arrested two refugees on terror-related charges, too.

The bare fact remains that both Obama and Clinton have supported a ban against refugees from a Muslim country in the name of protecting the homeland.

Surely they must have believed it made America more secure.

The question for both of them today is, with ISIS explicitly infiltrating refugee flows in 2016, why wouldn’t similar action continue keeping us safe? (For more from the author of “The Obama-Clinton Ban on Muslims” please click HERE)

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US Being Destroyed by a Global Conspiracy: The Marriage of Convenience Between the Left and Radical Islam

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In order to lessen the likelihood of terrorist attacks like Orlando, San Bernardino and the Boston Marathon and eliminate radical Islam as an existential threat to the United States, we must, first and foremost, defeat the prevailing Islamo-Marxist ideology within our own government and the willing accomplices who sustain it by willful blindness to the danger we face.

If you are still asking the question: how can Orlando happen?

Ask no more.

Stated simply, it is a sad truth that there are people in national leadership positions, who don’t want America to win or who don’t care much if we lose, as long as they can somehow preserve their own personal power and profit.

It is not a question of politics. It is an issue of patriotism.

The United States faces an assault by a global conspiracy, a marriage of convenience between two totalitarian ideologies, radical Islam and the political left. They have been brought together by the traits they share; their hatred of Western civilization and a commitment to the destruction of capitalistic, Judeo-Christian-based democracy.

In part, Orlando happens because the federal government practices Sharia, deliberately downplaying the menace of radical Islam and intentionally stripping law enforcement of its ability to directly counter the threat.

Kerry Picket of the Daily Caller asks: could the FBI’s purge of training material relating to Islamic terrorism have led to the agency dropping the ball on Florida nightclub shooter Omar Mateen?

The FBI’s training on handling possible Islamic terror suspects was turned upside down five years ago, when the Obama administration began a purge of training material that would remove references to Islam that Muslim subject matter experts, hired by the Justice Department, found offensive.

It is also fair question to ask, whether the conditions for and the handling of the Orlando attack were affected by the Obama Administration’s relentless attacks on the nation’s police officers and criminal-justice system, routinely and repeatedly charging that cops and the courts are awash in racial bias and Islamophobia?

The Islamic terrorist and registered Democrat Mateen was a US citizen of Afghan decent, who pledged his allegiance to ISIS and between 2011 and 2012 traveled to Saudi Arabia for Umrah, a Muslim religious pilgrimage. He was investigated by the FBI in 2013 and 2014 for inflammatory statements and his link to Moner Mohammad Abu Salha, an American radical who traveled to Syria and committed a suicide bombing.

Yet, according to recent reports, Mateen was a repeat visitor at Orlando gay nightclub before his killing spree, occasionally got drunk, may have been gay and used the gay dating and chat application Jack’d.

In the apple not falling far from the tree department, Seddique Mir Mateen, the father of the mass murderer, is a supporter of the Afghan Taliban with his own internet program, where he made radical anti-LGBT statements.

Was the murderer Mateen’s motive religious or political or both? Does it matter? I don’t think so.

In part, Orlando happens because radical Islam thinks it is winning. How many ISIS recruits would there be if they were doing the dying instead of us?

Practically speaking, the religious extremism and brutality of ISIS is not unlike that of Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan.

At the onset of World War II, the ordinary American Marine and soldier were unprepared for the fanaticism and cruelty of the Japanese Army.

Eugene B. Sledge, in his celebrated memoir “With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa,” describes one instance in which he and a comrade came across the mutilated bodies of three Marines, butchered with severed genitals stuffed into their mouths.

An ideology is a system of ideas, but ideas don’t kill people, Islamists kill people.

You may not be able to eradicate an ideology, but you can certainly exterminate those who violently wield that ideology against you.

Like Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, the ideology of radical Islam has little chance to thrive, if there are few left eager to practice it.

It also obviates the need for winning any hearts and minds. (For more from the author of “US Being Destroyed by a Global Conspiracy: The Marriage of Convenience Between the Left and Radical Islam” please click HERE)

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Here’s the Left’s ‘Official Lie’ About the Orlando Terrorist Attack

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Reacting Monday to the ISIS-inspired terrorist attack in Orlando, Mark Steyn—filling in for Rush Limbaugh—said that the “official lie” of the Left is that gun-toting “right” wing extremists are responsible for the shooting and radical Islamic terrorism is not.

The fact, Steyn said, is a radical Muslim killed 49 in a terror attack and the Left doesn’t know how to cope with the “internal contradictions of the rainbow coalition.”

Listen:

Steyn read the American headlines reporting the event which showed a stark contrast with international headlines by reporting a deadly “mass shooting” instead of an ISIS-inspired “terror attack.”

While the Left is clamoring for more gun control and screaming at the NRA, it is ignoring that radical Islam is responsible for the attack and only wants to destroy what the Left believes in. “The arithmetic isn’t complicated,” Steyn explained, “the more Islam, the fewer gays.” (For more from the author of “Here’s the Left’s ‘Official Lie’ About the Orlando Terrorist Attack” please click HERE)

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4 Reasons Why We Need Another 9/11 Commission After Orlando

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How many red flags does it take to see that Islamist-related terror is increasing?

In the past seven months there have been high-profile terror attacks in Paris, San Bernardino, Brussels, and in Orlando.

In the U.S. the number and frequency of Islamist plots has been growing. Before Orlando, the U.S. alone has been the target of at least 85 Islamist-related terrorist plots since Sept. 11, 2001.

The attack in Orlando is the 22nd plot since 2015. To put this increase in perspective, more than a quarter of domestic terror plots in the U.S. since 2001 have occurred in the last 18 months.

With this serious threat not diminishing, it is time for a nonpartisan sober assessment of the threat of terrorism to the United States.

Fourteen years ago, President George W. Bush and Congress set up the 9/11 Commission to look at the attacks of 2001. Now it is time for Congress to convene another report. The horrific terrorist attack in Orlando only reinforces that it is past time for this.

Here are four main reasons why:

1. The threat has changed. When the 9/11 Commission looked at the threat of terrorism in 2010, the face of terrorism looked very different then it does today. Back then the U.S. was principally focused on al-Qaeda, rather than the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.

Today, the transnational terrorist threat has rebounded, and the clear breakpoint for this was in 2010. One of the indicators is the flood of foreign fighters moving around the world.

2. What we are doing now isn’t working. In 2010, the Obama administration embarked on a counterterrorism strategy ill-suited to deal with present threats. It is obviously not working.

It is therefore time for a fresh, nonpartisan appraisal of what works and what doesn’t.

3. The Obama administration has lost credibility on this issue. In January my colleague Jim Phillips noted that:

The Obama administration’s lack of a sense of urgency in the face of the ISIS onslaught has been breathtaking. The president even proclaimed the day before the Nov. 13 Paris terrorist attacks that ISIS was contained.

The immediate angry reaction many American’s expressed to President Barack Obama’s statement on the Orlando attack points to the growing distrust many have with how his administration has responded to the threat of global terrorism.

4. The 9/11 Commission worked. The commission’s hearings and findings helped Americans understand the nature of the global terrorist threat. The final report became a national bestseller—and with good reason.

The commission delivered a frank, credible, nonpartisan assessment.

Arguably, there is an even great need for such clarity now. Americans are more confused, divided, frustrated, and uncertain about how to deal with transnational terrorism than they were a decade ago. (For more from the author of “4 Reasons Why We Need Another 9/11 Commission After Orlando” please click HERE)

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Reality: Trump on Islam

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Former NSA head Michael Hayden recently joined a chorus of Trump’s critics blasting him for offending Muslims. “The jihadist narrative is that there is undying enmity between Islam and the modern world, so when Trump says they all hate us, he’s using their narrative,” he said.

That’s true. It’s also meaningless because in this case the narrative is reality.

Jihadists do hate us. Islam has viewed the rest of the world with undying enmity for over a thousand years. Some might quibble over whether a 7th century obsession really counts as “undying”, but it’s a whole lot older than Hayden, the United States of America, our entire language and much of our civilization.

Islam divides the world into the Dar Al-Islam and the Dar Al-Harb, the House of Islam and the House of War. This is not just the jihadist narrative, it is the Islamic narrative and we would be fools to ignore it.

The White House is extremely fond of narratives. The past month featured Ben Rhodes, Obama’s foreign policy guru, taking a victory lap for successfully pushing his “narrative” on the Iran deal. Rhodes takes pride in his narratives. His media allies love narratives. But none of the narratives change the fact that Iran is moving closer to getting a nuclear bomb. Narratives don’t change reality. They’re a delusion.

Narratives only work on the people you fool. They don’t remove the underlying danger. All they do is postpone the ultimate recognition of the problem with catastrophic results.

Islamic terrorism is a reality. Erase all the narratives and the fact of its existence remains.

Instead of fighting a war against the reality of Islamic terrorism, our leaders have chosen to fight a war against reality. They don’t have a plan for defeating Islamic terrorism, but for defeating reality.
So far they have fought reality to a draw. Ten thousand Americans are dead at the hands of Islamic terrorists and Muslim migration to America has doubled. Islamic terrorists are carving out their own countries and our leaders are focused on defeating their “narratives” on social media.

Hayden repeats the familiar nonsense that recognizing reality plays into the enemy narrative. And then the only way to defeat Islamic terrorism is by refusing to recognize its existence out of fear that we might play into its narrative. But Islamic terrorism doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it.

You don’t have to believe in a bomb or a bullet for it to kill you. A plane headed for your office building or a machete at your neck is not a narrative, it is reality. If we can’t tell the difference between reality and what we believe, then reality will kill us. And nothing we believe will change that.

We are not fighting a war of narratives with Islam. This is a war of bombs and bullets, planes crashing into buildings and blades digging into necks. And yet the men in charge of fighting this war remain obsessed with winning a battle of narratives inside the Muslim world. They have no plans for winning the war. Instead they are occupied with managing the intensity of the conflict, taking out the occasional terrorist leader, bombing only when a jihadist group like ISIS has become too powerful, while waiting for their moderate Muslim allies to win the war of narratives for them by discrediting the jihadists.

The narrative mistake is understandable. The left remains convinced that it can get its way through propaganda. Its record is certainly impressive. But it’s strictly a domestic record. Getting Americans to believe seven strictly irrational social justice things before breakfast is very different than convincing the members of a devout tribal society with a deep sense of history that they really don’t want to kill Americans. All that the narrative war accomplished was to show that the propagandists who convinced Americans to vote for their own exploitation have no idea how to even begin convincing Muslims to do anything. Think Again Turn Away was an embarrassment. Various outreach efforts failed miserably. American politicians devoutly apologize for any disrespect to Islam, but Muslims don’t care.

Hayden isn’t wrong that there is a narrative. But Nazism also had a narrative. Once the Nazis had power, they began acting on it and their narrative became a reality that had to be stopped by armed force. But at a deeper level he is wrong because he isn’t reciting the Islamic or even the jihadist narrative, but a deceptive narrative aimed at us in order to block recognition of the problem of Islamic terrorism.

The Islamic narrative isn’t just that we hate them. More importantly, it’s that they hate us. Muslim terrorists are not passively reacting to us. They carry a hatred that is far older than our country. That hatred is encoded in the holy books of Islam. But that hatred is only a means to an end.

Hatred is the means. Conquest is the end.

Assuming that Muslims are oppressed minorities is a profound intellectual error crippling our ability to defend ourselves. Islamic terrorism is not an anti-colonial movement, but a colonial one. ISIS and its Islamic ilk are not oppressed minorities, but oppressive majorities. Islamic terror does not react to us, as men like Hayden insist. Instead we react to Islam. And our obsession with playing into enemy narratives is a typically reactive response. Rising forces generate their own narratives. Politically defeated movements typically obsess about not making things worse by playing into the narratives that their enemies have spread about them. That is why Republicans panic over any accusation of racism. Or why the vanilla center of the pro-Israel movement winces every time Israel shoots a terrorist.

Western leaders claim to be fighting narratives, but they have no interest in actually challenging the Islamic narrative of superiority that is the root cause of this conflict. Instead they take great pains not to offend Muslims. This does not challenge the Islamic supremacist narrative, instead it affirms it.

Rather than challenging Islamic narratives, they are stuck in an Islamic narrative. They are trapped by the Muslim Brotherhood’s narrative of “Good Islamist” and “Bad Islamist” convinced that the only way to win is to appeal to the “Good Islamist” and team up with him to fight the “Bad Islamist”.

The “moderate” Muslim majority who are our only hope for stopping Islamic terrorism is an enemy narrative manufactured and distributed by an Islamic supremacist organization. When we repeat it, we distort our strategy and our thinking in ways that allow us to be manipulated and controlled.

It isn’t Trump who is playing into jihadist narratives, but Hayden and everyone who claims that recognizing Islamic terrorism plays into enemy narratives while failing to recognize that what they are saying is an enemy narrative.

The very notion that the good opinion of the enemy should constrain our military operations, our thinking and even our ability to recognize reality is an enemy narrative of unprecedented effect.

And this is the narrative that our leaders and the leaders of the world have knelt in submission to.

Narratives only have the power that we assign to them. No narrative is stronger than reality unless we believe in it. Not only have our leaders chosen to play into the enemy narrative, but they have accepted its premise as the only way to win. And so they are bound to lose until they break out of the narrative. (For more from the author of “Reality: Trump on Islam” please click HERE)

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