Will
we ever learn? Obama White House can't admit Paris attacks 'Islamic
terrorism'
by Steven Emerson
Fox News.com
January 7, 2015
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Note: This article originally was published at FoxNews.com.
They shouted in Arabic "Allahu Akbar" (Allah is
Greatest) and "We are avenging the Prophet Mohammed" as
they sprayed their victims with hundreds of bullets from their
semi-automatic weapons.
Their "victims" were the top editorial cartoonists of the
satirical Charlie Hebdo magazine, who had dared to practice their right of
free speech. Their offense? Publishing cartoons deemed "offensive"
by Muslim leaders around the world. The perpetrators? Islamic terrorists.
Yet in the immediate hours after the murders in Paris, the response from
western leaders was scurrilously predictable in their refusal to describe
the attack as an "Islamic terrorist attack."
Phrasing the problem
of "violent extremism," as the Obama administration has done
repeatedly, of being a problem exclusively of only Al Qaeda and now ISIS,
is intellectually spurious and truly dangerous to our national security.
Indeed, the responses from our own president, French President Hollande
and British Prime Minster David Cameron all spouted the same empty pabulum
in asserting that the Paris attack had nothing to do with Islam or any
religion for that matter. But the hollow comments coming from our own
leaders are steeped in the stench of appeasement and cowardice.
The first comments came from Josh Earnest, the White House spokesman,
who refused to even call the massacre an act of terrorism, but made sure to
add the now typical non-sequitor which now routinely follows Islamic
terrorist attacks, that "Islam is a religion of peace" and
therefore no should associate with the "extremists" in Paris with
Islam.
Then President Obama issued his own statement, but in keeping with his
administration's 6 year old prohibition on using the term "Islamic
terrorism," he simply referred to the attack as "terrorism"
-- a vanilla term conspicuously devoid of any descriptive term explaining
the motivation behind the attack. Thus, to the proverbial Martian it
literally could have been eco-terrorism, white supremacist terrorism, or narco-terrorism.
(But admittedly, calling this an act of "terrorism" was a step up
from the classification of Major Nidal Hassan's similar massacre at Fort
Hood as "workplace violence.")
Then in live comments delivered later, both President Obama and Secretary
of State John Kerry gave blustery defenses of the U.S. determination to
protect the right of free speech and vowed that neither the French nor
anyone in the West would be cowed into silence by terrorism.
Secretary Kerry said as follows:
"Today, tomorrow, in Paris, in France, or across the world, the
freedom of expression that this magazine, no matter what your feelings were
about it, the freedom of expression that it represented is not able to be
killed by this kind of act of terror." Nice words of bravado.
I hate to disabuse our secretary of state, but indeed "freedom of
expression" has indeed already been killed by acts of Islamic
terrorism.
Notwithstanding the secretary's nice words of bravado today, the views
in 2012 of the Obama administration on the very same French magazine were
markedly differently "We are aware that a French magazine published
cartoons featuring a figure resembling the prophet Muhammad, and obviously
we have questions about the judgment of publishing something like this,"
said Jay Carney, the White House spokesman. "We know these images will
be deeply offensive to many and have the potential to be
inflammatory."
The president himself, before the United Nations, revealed his own
appeasement of Islamic terrorists and hoodlums when he declared in
September 2012:
"The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of
Islam."
Where was his moral insistence that we would never give into terrorists
who would employ violence to intimidate us in suppressing our right to free
speech?
Just imagine if, amidst the recent North Korean campaign to intimidate
Sony into not showing its film that offended North Korea, the president had
stated, "The future must not belong to those who slander Kim
Jong-un."
The issue we face is not, as Islamist groups falsely claim in the United
States -- ironically the very ones invited to the White House, Homeland
Security, Department of Justice, and State Department -- that using the
term Islamic terrorism connotes a generalization that all Muslims are terrorists
any more than using the term "Hispanic drug cartels" means that
all Hispanics are druggies or that the term "Italian mafia" means
that all Italians are mobsters or that the term "German Nazis"
mean that all Germans were Nazis.
The term Islamic terrorism mean just that: terrorist attacks with an
Islamic motivation -- whether they attempts to silence critics of Islam,
impose Sharia, punish Western "crusaders," commit genocide of
non-Muslims, establish Islamic supremacy (or Caliphate), or destroy any non
Muslim peoples (e.g. the Jews and Christians) that are "occupying
Muslim lands."
And so in refusing to use the term Islamic terrorism, the administration
and their multiculturalist western leaders go along with the patently false
charade that Islamic terrorism simply does not exist.
This has profound national security implications not only for
non-Muslims, but for Muslim victims of Islamic terrorism. If you cannot
name your enemy, how can you expect to defeat him?
In buying into the notion that uttering the term "radical
Islam" is somehow racist, the real scandal here is that our
administration and other Western leaders in general are in fact taking a
page out of the playbook written by Muslim Brotherhood front groups like
the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim Public
Affairs Council (MPAC).
Those groups, in turn, are ideological derivatives in the West of the
Muslim Brotherhood which itself the parent of all Islamic Sunni terrorist
groups—from Al Shabab to ISIS to Al Qaeada to Hamas. And in the West, those
Muslim Brotherhood front groups have managed to perpetuate one of the
biggest and most dangerous national security frauds of the past 30 years:
that use of the term Islamic terrorism is tantamount to a racist
generalization that all Muslims are terrorist. And that any criticism of
Islam means you are an Islamophobe.
Four weeks ago, the United Arab Emirates, a distinctly observant Muslim
country, had the courage to designate the Muslim Brotherhood and 83 other
Islamist groups including CAIR in the U.S. as Islamic terrorist groups.
And our reaction? To our everlasting shame, the Obama administration
came to the defense of CAIR, which has been described as a front for Hamas
by the FBI and was designated an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest
terrorist money laundering trial in U.S. history that resulted in the
closure of the Holy Land Foundation and the conviction of its leaders for
laundering money to Hamas.
Phrasing the problem of "violent extremism," as the Obama
administration has done repeatedly, of being a problem exclusively of only
Al Qaeda and now ISIS, is intellectually spurious and truly dangerous to
our national security.
Most recently, in describing ISIS, the Obama administration has
categorically defined the group as having "nothing to do with
Islam."
It's time for our leaders to stop this nonsense. Islamic terrorism and
extremism are brutal realities that have killed tens of thousands of
people, mostly Muslims.
Islamic extremism cannot be confined to groups we don't like. Islamic
extremism is now a movement, just like fascism and communism; it spans a
spectrum from Hamas to Al Shabab to the Muslim Brotherhood. And to ignore
the common denominator in the motivation behind 75% of the world's annual
terrorist attacks carried out by Islamic terrorists is a sure guarantee
that Wednesday's attacks will be repeated over and over again.
Will we ever learn?
Steven Emerson is executive director of the Investigative
Project on Terrorism and the executive producer of a new documentary
about the Muslim Brotherhood in America "Jihad
in America: the Grand Deception."
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