President Obama and his cast of aides will lash out at Republicans, the Tea Party, banks, oil companies and Arizona. But when it comes to radical Islam, Obama-ites treat it with kid gloves or ignore it altogether.
Recent speeches show that—rather than identifying the enemy for what it is, bands of Islamic extremists who use their religion to justify murder—the administration searches for the root cause of terrorism, a "why do they hate us?" obsession which serves only to paralyze a global war to defeat terrorist killers.
Islamic extremists use mosques to raise funds, recruit and plan attacks. In Pakistan tribal areas, Taliban and al Qaeda use mosques as safe havens and as munitions stockpiles. Imams, Muslim religious leaders, use their positions to preach hate and encourage violence, citing verses from the Koran.
When Faisal Shahzad pleaded guilty this week to trying to blow up an SUV in Times' Square, he declared himself a "Muslim soldier."
The bottom line: Islam and terrorism are intertwined. America will never understand its enemy, an enemy dedicated to its destruction, unless it comes to grips with that fact.
Yet, the Obama Administration is rewriting the official terrorism glossary to erase any Islam-terror connection.
"Our enemy is not terror because terror is a state of mind and, as Americans, we refuse to live in fear," John Brennan, the President's closest adviser on counter-terrorism, told an audience at the prestigious Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Nor do we describe our enemy as jihadists or Islamists because jihad is holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam meaning to purify oneself of one's community."
And Brennan added this: "The President's strategy is absolutely clear about the threat we face. Our enemy is not terrorism because terrorism is but a tactic. Moreover, describing our enemy in religious terms would lend credence to the lie propagated by al Qaeda and its affiliates to justify terrorism, that the United States is somehow at war against Islam. The reality, of course, is that we have never been and will never be at war with Islam. After all, Islam, like so many faiths, is part of America."
Then he listed an Obama national security priority: "This includes addressing the political, economic and social forces that can make some people fall victim to the cancer of violent extremism .... And I think there's more work we need to do to understand the psychology behind terrorism. But a lot of times, the psychology is affected by the environment that has those political, social, economic factors that contribute to that."
This statement is intended to begin a debate that always comes back full-circle to the United States—Americans did something somewhere along the historical line to convert normal people into terrorists.
We know the 9-11 attackers in Germany were recruited and radicalized in a mosque in Hamburg. But since mentioning the Islamic connection is now out-of-bounds, Brennan wants us to focus on "economic and social forces" on these financially well-off and educated mass murderers.
Brennan cleanses Muslim cleric Anwar Awlaki, the American in Yemen who encourages murder, of any tie to Islam.
"Individuals like Anwar Awlaki, who recently released a video, demonstrated that his rhetoric is anything but peaceful," Brennan said. "It's anything but Islamic. It is dedicated to murder and lashing out."
Brennan is exonerating Islam of links to terrorism, thus enabling it to remain in denial and resist the sort of reform movement that could rid it of radical clerics.
Brennan was a long-time CIA analyst. He worked in the division at Langley that fought against President Bush's war on terrorism and where anonymous bureaucrats leaked all sorts of unsubstantiated charges against the Pentagon and White House.
Before Obama's election, Brennan told me the U.S. needed to reach out to the kinder side of Lebanese Hezbollah. Yes, that Hezbollah. The one dedicated to the destruction of Israel, the one designated a terror organization by the U.S. and the one supported by Syria and nuclear-wannabe Iran.
True to his word, Brennan told the Nixon Center last month the administration wants to build up "moderate elements" within Hezbollah, which he called a "very interesting organization."
Here is what terrorism expert Steven Emerson told HUMAN EVENTS:
"John Brennan’s comments about the existence of moderates in Hezbollah and his definition of jihad meaning exclusively spiritual struggle reveals a dangerous mindset that wittingly endorses the deception perpetrated by Islamic terrorist organizations. His rationale for Hezbollah having moderate elements is based on the fact they have lawyers and doctors in the parliament. Might I remind Mr. Brennan that Ayman al Zawahiri, the number two in al Qaeda, is also a doctor? Hezbollah is not divisible between the 'good Hezbollah' and the 'bad Hezbollah.' There is only Hezbollah, a group responsible for the second largest number of Americans killed after al Qaeda. As for the meaning of jihad, I wonder if Mr. Brennan will now rename the terrorist group Islamic Jihad to be 'The Union of Good'?”
And James Jay Carafano of the Heritage Foundation is likewise critical.
"I think the administration is planning on doing outreach to Hezbollah and Hamas," he said. "I think Brennan is a B-minus. He has ill-served the portfolio trying to give Obama what he wants, which is to have polices which appear 'anything but Bush' even if they compromise our nation’s best interests."
There is someone who liked every thing Brennan said at CSIS: George Soros, the billionaire Socialist who helped fund Obama's political rise and compared George Bush to Hitler.
A representative from Soros' Open Society Institute said, "Mr. Brennan, I'm really heartened by the government's change, in terms of the language usage of 'jihadist' and 'Islamist' and was similarly heartened by your talk at NYU in February. I wonder if there's been any thought about rethinking, frankly, the usage of the words 'terrorism' and 'terrorist,' which, at present, seem to be defined by the government and the media as acts of violence exclusively perpetuated by Muslims."
The word "terrorism" may be the next to be dropped from the Obama glossary.
