A man investigating a jihad terror attack wants “strong efforts” against those who tell the truth about Islam and jihad. “Benghazi Investigator Slams America and “˜Islamophobes,– by Matthew Vadum at FrontPage, November 2:
America
is a seething hotbed of “Islamophobia,” filled with ignorant racist
rubes who irrationally fear the benign Muslim religion, according to the
Obama administration’s lead investigator into the Benghazi atrocities.So said former Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering in more polished,
diplomatic language during an Oct. 23 panel discussion at the National
Cathedral in Washington, D.C. The talk was on “what role the faith
community can play in fighting Islamophobia,” a make-believe mental
illness that Islamists would love to have listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Radical Islam’s stateside defenders frequently accuse anti-terrorism
hawks of “McCarthyism,” hurling the epithet “Islamophobe” the same way
American leftists use the word “racist” to shut down debate.Pickering’s pontifications came two and a half weeks after Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton named him to head a State Department
“Accountability Review Board” tasked with examining the circumstances
surrounding the deaths on Sept. 11, 2012, the 11th
anniversary of 9/11, of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, information
management officer Sean Smith, and security personnel Glen Doherty, and
Tyrone Woods at the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya.At last week’s panel discussion, Pickering piously but incorrectly
invoked the Holocaust to argue that American Muslims were somehow in
danger.“I”m not great at quotations,” he said, foreshadowing a misattribution to come.
“Perhaps it was [German theologian and dissident] Dietrich Bonhoeffer
who said of the Nazis, when they came for the Jews, I didn’t speak up. I
was not a Jew. When they came for the Catholics, I didn’t speak up, I
was not a Catholic. When they came for us, no one spoke up. There was no
one left to do so,” Pickering said, paraphrasing famous, poignant
verses actually spoken by Third Reich-era German pastor Martin
Niemoller.Pickering said that Americans” lack of familiarity with Islam –and
not Islamic terrorist attacks on Americans”” fuels hostility toward
Muslims.“Data shows that those Americans who do not know Muslims, who do not
know much about Islam, are the ones who harbor the greatest feelings of
prejudice,” he said.There is a “strong, continuing, and perhaps, in an unfortunate way in
some areas, growing, prejudice against Muslims and Islam,” he said.However, he added that veterans returning from the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan have so far avoided embracing this anti-Islamic bigotry.
“Many of the soldiers are still serving and I think that also is helpful
because they understand that as loyal Americans that kind of prejudice
is not to be expressed.”Pickering urged what might amount to a zero-tolerance policy against
so-called Islamophobes in American society. “There are strong efforts as
well that we must make to deal with opinion leaders who harbor these
prejudices, who espouse them and spread them,” he said.Although the former envoy did not elaborate on what those “strong
efforts” might consist of, his statement is worrisome. The Obama
administration is openly hostile to the First Amendment.
Indeed it is. Read it all.