In the Detroit News today I discuss the price of the prevailing denial and willful ignorance:
In the wake of the Orlando jihad terror massacre, a counter-terror analyst revealed that denial and willful ignorance about the jihad threat have permeated law enforcement at all levels.
“I spent eight hours with a Midwest police force — 250 officers teaching them about jihad — and helping them understand about al-Qaida and the Islamic faith,” he said. “After eight hours of talking to them a young woman walks up from the Obama administration from the Department of Homeland Security and says, ‘That’s all very interesting, but I disagree with all of it because the primary threat to Americans is white supremacists.’ ”
This patently false claim first surfaced in June 2015, based on a study of the number of those killed by jihadis and by right-wing extremists since Sept. 11. It skews the results by leaving out 9/11, and stated that right-wing extremists had killed 48 people from September 12, 2001, to June 2015, while Islamic jihadists had killed only 26 people in the U.S. in that span.
The results would, of course, look much different if one more day to the period surveyed, September 11, 2001 — or if one adds the 49 people killed by Omar Mateen. The study also ignored the many, many foiled jihad plots, and the fact that jihadis are part of an international movement that has killed many thousands of people, while right-wingers and white supremacists are not.
But the DHS official was just reflecting government policy. The East Orlando Post reported Sunday that James Copenhaver, whom it described as a “veteran investigator and former Orlando law enforcement officer,” said: “I have been in this business for 30 years, and … never in all my years of training, and being involved in several investigative units, to include the FBI Task Force, would we have ever guessed a LGBT club be a target of an terrorist attack.”
Why would they never have guessed? Because the FBI and other law enforcement agencies don’t study the motivating ideology behind jihad terror attacks. They do not know or care that the prophet of Islam, Muhammad says: “If you find anyone doing as Lot’s people did, kill the one who does it, and the one to whom it is done.” (Abu Dawud 38:4447)
Combine that with Islamic State spokesman Abu Mohammad al-Adnani’s call to Muslims to make this Ramadan a “month of calamity everywhere for nonbelievers … especially for the fighters and supporters of the caliphate in Europe and America,” and there was every reason for the FBI to suspect that an LGBT club could be the target of a jihad terror attack.
This goes back to October 2011, when a coalition of Muslim and South Asian groups demanded that the Obama administration “purge all federal government training materials of (allegedly) biased material.” The administration complied, purging all counter-terror training materials of all mention of Islam and jihad.
While the desire to protect innocent Muslims from vigilante attacks is laudable, to enforce willful ignorance about the motivating ideology behind attacks such as the one in Orlando is not only foolish, but dangerous. It only ensures that there will many, many more jihad massacres.