Now she tells us. My article in FrontPage this morning focuses on a largely overlooked aspect of Clinton’s testimony yesterday:
After
four years of pretending there is no jihad against the free world,
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton blurted out the truth during her
testimony on the Benghazi jihad massacre Wednesday: “We now face a
spreading jihadist threat,” she said, adding: “We have to recognize this is a global movement.”We do? Yet the Obama administration has for years steadfastly and
repeatedly denied both that there was a jihadist threat at all and that
it was a global movement. So far has the Obama administration been from
acknowledging that there was a jihad threat that less than two months
into Obama’s first term, on March 16, 2009, Homeland Security Secretary
Janet Napolitano noted proudly
that in her first testimony to Congress, “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.”Even “terrorism,” absent a modifier, was a politically correct
euphemism for jihad violence that demonstrated an unwillingness to
examine the beliefs of the jihadists, for to have done so would have led
straight into Islam. Those who described those dedicated to destroying
the United States simply as “terrorists” generally did not want to admit
that Islam had anything to do with that war. George W. Bush had started
this ball rolling when he proclaimed Islam a “religion of peace”
shortly after 9/11; however, Bush officials could and did explore the
Islamic texts and teachings that illuminated jihadist motives and goals.
Under Obama, it became official U.S. policy not to do so.On May 13, 2010, Attorney General Eric Holder testified before the
House Judiciary Committee, where he was questioned repeatedly by Rep.
Lamar Smith (R-TX) about whether the Fort Hood jihad mass murders, the
attempted jihad car bombing in Times Square, and the Christmas underwear
jihad bomber over Detroit could be attributed to “radical Islam.”
Holder repeatedly refused to agree to this, going only so far as to say: “There are a variety of reasons why people do these things. Some of them are potentially religious.”Noted Smith: “I don’t know why the administration has such difficulty
acknowledging the obvious, which is that radical Islam might have
incited these individuals. If you can’t name the enemy, then you”re
going to have a hard time trying to respond to them.”Indeed. Nonetheless, Obama’s nominee for CIA director, John Brennan,
who is the current Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland
Security and Counterterrorism, echoed Holder’s reluctance to say that
Islam had anything to do with jihad terrorism on May 26, 2010, during a
speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He declared:
“Nor do we describe our enemies as jihadists or Islamists because jihad
is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam meaning to purify
oneself or one’s community.” Brennan has repeated this many times, and
has defined the enemy not as a global movement, but as a “small fringe of fanatics” consisting of al-Qaeda and “its terrorist affiliates.”It was no surprise, then, that Brennan readily agreed in October 2011
to demands from Islamic supremacist groups with links to the Muslim
Brotherhood and Hamas, including the Council on American-Islamic
Relations and the Islamic Society of North America, to purge all
training materials for law enforcement and intelligence agents of all
mention of Islam or jihad. Dwight C. Holton, former U.S. Attorney for
the District of Oregon, emphasized
that training materials for the FBI would be purged of everything
politically incorrect: “I want to be perfectly clear about this:
training materials that portray Islam as a religion of violence or with a
tendency towards violence are wrong, they are offensive, and they are
contrary to everything that this president, this attorney general and
Department of Justice stands for. They will not be tolerated.”In December 2011, when Rep. Dan Lungren (R-CA) asked Paul Stockton,
assistant defense secretary for homeland defense, whether “we are at war
with violent Islamist extremism,” Stockton did his best to dodge the
question and finally answered:
“I don’t believe it’s helpful to frame our adversary as Islamic with
any set of qualifiers that we might add, because we are not at war with
Islam.”This created numerous absurd situations, since Islamic jihadists so
often spoke of Islam and jihad in explaining and justifying their
actions, but the Obama administration plowed ahead anyway. Most
notoriously, it characterized
the November 2009 Fort Hood jihad massacre, when Major Nidal Hasan, a
self-described “soldier of Allah” who had given numerous indications of
his jihadist proclivities and was shouting “Allahu akbar” as he murdered
thirteen Americans, not as Islamic jihad or even terrorism, but as
“workplace violence.”