In FrontPage this morning, j’accuse:
Barack Obama promised Tuesday that he would be taking lessons from the Boston Marathon jihad bombing: “When an event like this happens, we want to review every step that was taken, we want to leave no stone unturned, we want to see if there is in fact additional protocols and procedures that could be put in place that would further improve and enhance our ability to detect a potential attack.–
Sounds great –Â but ultimately all Obama offered were words. Words that are unlikely to be backed up by real action. The one thing that needs to be done — an official acknowledgement of the reality and magnitude of the global jihad, and the commitment of U.S. intelligence to understanding and combating it — is the one thing that will not be done.
After all, the Administration official Obama has charged with ferreting out the lessons of Boston is none other than his director of national intelligence, James “Clueless” Clapper, who thinks the Muslim Brotherhood is “largely secular.” Obama explained: “Part of what Director Clapper is doing is to see if we can determine lessons learned from what happened– in Boston.
Yet one of the foremost of those lessons is that people like James Clapper should not be entrusted with the nation’s intelligence-gathering apparatus. The Russians had Boston jihad bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev under surveillance, were deeply concerned about his contacts with jihad terrorists, and shared those concerns with the FBI. Yet Obama said that criticism of how the FBI handled that intelligence was “not right, although I am sure it generated some headlines. It’s not as if the FBI did nothing. They not only investigated the older brother, they interviewed the older brother, they concluded that there were no signs he was engaging in extremist activity.”
Obama concluded from this that “the question then is, is there something that happened that triggered radicalization and an actual decision by the older brother to engage in the tragic attack we actually saw in Boston, and are there additional things that could have been done in the interim that might have prevented it?–
That’s not the only conclusion that can be drawn from the fact that the FBI found no signs that Tsarnaev was “engaging in extremist activity.” The other is that the FBI had no idea how to tell whether or not Tamerlan Tsarnaev was “engaging in extremist activity,” because the “extremist activity” he was engaging in was Islamic jihad, and Obama’s FBI is forbidden to study Islamic jihad. This is because the Obama Administration in 2011 mandated the scrubbing of counter-terror training materials of the truth about Islam and jihad. It is the terror threat that dare not speak its name.
The Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) deserves some credit for this “” they mounted a huge campaign in 2010 to have me dropped as a trainer of FBI agents. Nor was that campaign personal: they mounted similar campaigns against any trainers and training materials that told the truth about Islam and jihad. But CAIR”s was not a lonely struggle. Others responsible for the politically correct scrubbing of counterterror training materials of any mention of Islam or jihad include hard-Left pseudo-journalist Spencer Ackerman, who published a series of “exposes” of “Islamophobic” counterterror training; Farhana Khera of Muslim Advocates, who wrote a letter to Obama’s then-chief counterterrorism adviser and current CIA director, John Brennan, demanding that this material be removed. Brennan, who readily acquiesced to this demand, also bears responsibility, as does Salam al-Marayati of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, who piled on in the mainstream media. They got what they wanted: now FBI agents are woefully ill-equipped to deal with the Islamic jihad threat, which they largely must pretend does not even exist.
Now in Boston, we have begun reaping the fruit of this.