Obama's Complacency About Radical Islam
By _Victor Davis Hanson_
(http://www.realclearpolitics.com/authors/victor_davis_hanson/) - May 1, 2013
_www.realclearpolitics.com_ (http://www.realclearpolitics.com)
In Star Trek lore, the Borg was a collective of servile drone operatives
that sought to assimilate other species into its “hive mind.”
Something akin to that creepy groupthink arose when the Obama
administration took power and sought to reformulate the so-called war on
terror. Almost
immediately, Obama operatives suggested that radical Islamists were no more
likely than any other group to commit acts of terrorism. In fact, the very
idea of terrorism — not to mention a war against it — was supposedly a
Bush-administration construct unfairly aimed at Muslims.
Obama apparently sincerely believed that there was no intrinsic connection
between Islamism and terror; or, if there was, Islamic radicalism was no
more dangerous than right-wing or supposedly Christian-inspired terror. Or if
Islamic radicalism did arise, it might be mitigated by multicultural
sympathy and outreach, mostly by contextualizing the violence as an inevitable
result of prior Western culpability.
Precisely because the Bush-Cheney protocols had thwarted over 40 post-9/11
Islamist plots, Senator Obama had the latitude, in 2008, to campaign for
the presidency on the premise that these measures were both unlawful and
superfluous. After he became president and learned of their utility — and
assumed the political responsibility for the consequences of abandoning his
effective anti-terrorism inheritance — Obama squared the circle of embracing or
expanding all the elements of the war against terror by politically
correct euphemism.
The result has been that ever since 2009, various members of the
administration collective have sought, each according to his station, to bring
us
into the network of not associating Islamism with terror. And the Borg have
certainly been diverse, as all sorts of political appointees, opportunists,
and career officers plugged themselves into the hive. Obama may have killed
ten times as many suspected Muslim terrorists by drone as did Bush, but we
were to assume that the fact that there were no Christian, Jewish, or
Buddhist victims of Hellfire missiles was irrelevant.
Shortly after assuming office as the head of Homeland Security, Janet
Napolitano associated the prior “war on terror” with a “politics of fear”: “In
my speech, although I did not use the word ‘terrorism,’ I referred to ‘
man-caused’ disasters. That is perhaps only a nuance, but it demonstrates
that we want to move away from the politics of fear toward a policy of being
prepared for all risks that can occur.” Again, one wishes to ask her how
many Christians have been targeted by Obama-administration Predator drones.
Various members of the Defense Department soon were plugged into the new
narrative of “this administration” and, as good automatons, were eager to
spread the Borg directives. A memo sent by the Defense Department’s security
office to Pentagon staff members read, “This administration prefers to
avoid using the term ‘Long War’ or ‘Global War on Terror.’ Please use ‘
Overseas Contingency Operation.’”
After the Fort Hood shootings, the Defense Department characterized the
murders as “workplace violence,” despite the known fact that Major Hasan had
been interviewed by the FBI because of his correspondence with the radical
imam _Anwar al-Awlaki_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki) ,
and even though he yelled “_Allahu Akbar_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takbir) !” as he killed twelve soldiers and one
civilian and wounded more than 30
others. The military was absorbed into the non-Islamic groupthink to such
a degree that Army Chief of Staff George Casey editorialized of the mass
murder of his soldiers: “Our diversity, not only in our Army, but in our
country, is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity
becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.” Dismantling the “diversity
program” would be worse than the slaughter at Fort Hood? These days our
martyrs
are to die not on the altar of freedom, but on the altar of diversity?
The hive thinking quickly spread throughout the Obama administration’s
intelligence apparat, as even those who once worked for George W. Bush and, in
fact, had been deeply embedded in the Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism efforts
were drawn into the Borg — quite willingly and for careerist reasons. Despite
the Muslim Brotherhood’s long history of Islamist-inspired violence, and
its decades-long anti-American efforts, James Clapper, director of national
intelligence (who had worked for the Bush administration and defended its
launching the Iraq War by claiming that Saddam Hussein had sent his WMD
stockpiles to Syria on the eve of the American invasion), offered an absurd
illustration of hive thinking: “The term ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ is an umbrella
term for a variety of movements. In the case of Egypt, a very heterogeneous
group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has decried
al-Qaeda as a perversion of Islam.”
John Brennan — who, like Clapper, in his pre-Borg days both worked in the
Bush administration and was criticized for his anti-Islamic-terrorism
zealotry (among other things, for supposedly promoting enhanced interrogations
in Guantanamo of the now-politically-incorrect category of “enemy combatants”
) — also was rewired when he became Obama’s counter-terrorism advisor.
Soon he duly opined of the now-taboo idea of jihadism, “Jihad is holy
struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam meaning to purify oneself or one’s
community.
” Apparently the Tsarnaevs got a bit out of hand as they were purifying
themselves in their holy struggle on the streets of Boston.
Sometimes the Borg drew in those well outside the military, intelligence,
and national-security communities. According to _NASA_
(http://www.foxnews.com/topics/space/nasa.htm#r_src=ramp) Administrator
_Charles Bolden_
(http://www.foxnews.com/topics/politics/charles-bolden.htm#r_src=ramp) , when
President Obama set out the “foremost” task of NASA, it had nothing to do with
space exploration. Rather, the president “wanted me to find a way to reach
out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim
nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science . .
.
and math and engineering.” I think the Borg logic here is something like
the following: Thanks to the legacy of Averroes, America can still get to
Mars — and thanks to our recognition of that debt, the Tsarnaevs and Hasans of
the world will “feel good” and are going to celebrate diversity rather
than kill lots of innocent people.
These examples of the Borg could be vastly expanded, from Homeland Security’
s warning of future violence not from Muslim males but rather from “
right-wing extremism” — emanating from returning war veterans and
anti-abortion
activists — to the mandatory substitution of “militant extremism” and “
violent extremism” for “Islamic extremism.”
When so many in government have been recircuited into the hive, it is no
surprise that the FBI in the field has dropped its proper focus on militant
Islam, or that the thug Vladimir Putin proved more helpful than did our own
FBI and CIA directors in the Tsarnaev case. After all, the FBI had
interviewed, but not detained, a number of men who later proved to be Islamic
terrorists, such as the Tsarnaevs, Nidal Hasan, Anwar al-Awlaki, Abdulhakim
Mujahid Muhammad, and David Coleman Headley. One wonders what common complaint
or malady these subjects shared — anti-abortion zealotry, tax resistance,
homophobia, secret tea-party sympathies, several tours in Anbar Province,
nativist anger at illegal immigrants, or simple head injuries?
What will break up the Borg? Tragically, it may take another Boston-style
bombing to send enough rogue voltage through the system to explode the
circuitry and free the drones from the hive.
--
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