What Obama can learn from Trump about radical Islam

The first step in any plan to resolve a problem is to acknowledge what that problem is. And yet President Obama continues to ignore this basic fact.

Perhaps it is a deep-seated stubbornness that obstructs his ability to genuinely acknowledge reality. Or perhaps he truly does know the root cause of the country’s largest mass shooting in modern history, and his actions afterward (and over the past few years in general) are mere charades. No matter the reason, his toxic ineptitude has accentuated the growing rift between his blasé attitude toward Islamic terrorism and how it manifests itself in reality. (It took six years, for instance, for his administration to admit that the Fort Hood massacre was a terrorist attack).

He seems more content to play political games than to confront the problem, to deflect responsibility to a secondary issue than to identify and fight the underlying cause, and to maintain a politically correct aura about himself than to take decisive action.

In a speech last Tuesday, Obama appeared more agitated by having to defend his unwillingness to use the words “radical Islamic terrorism” than he was after a radical Muslim and ISIS zealot murdered nearly 50 people. “What exactly would using this label accomplish?” he asked, as if to stump political opponents.

The answer, in fact, is simple: it identifies the enemy. How can we win a battle if we do not know who we are fighting against? His fondness for straw-man arguments is clear as day: “Calling a threat by a different name does not make it go away,” he said. That different name happens to be the correct one, and that is where we have to start if we indeed want to fight this threat. The president, who reportedly frequently reminds his staff that bathtubs pose bigger dangers than terrorists, has not shown that he does.

So while Obama continues to give his condescending, wishy-washy and ineffectual lectures, Donald Trump has seen the problem for what it is and has provided bold measures to help stop it. Now is not the time to tip toe around the issue; we cannot ignore the many ways in which the tenets of Islam are incompatible with American values and national security. Although a temporary ban on Muslim immigration by itself is not the perfect plan, those on the left have faltered in creating one of their own. Any solution that does not address the immigration crisis in which applicants are not vetted nearly as well as they should be is no solution at all.

Each year, the US admits around 100,000 Muslim immigrants—tens of thousands of Middle East refugees. This influx has strained an already crippled immigration system that has been dubbed the world’s “visa clearinghouse” by the president of the National Citizenship and Immigration Services Council. Background checks are lax; speed is paramount to security. Tashfeen Malik, one of the San Bernardino attackers, obtained a K-1 fiancé visa which never should have been approved. CIA Director John Brennan recently said in a statement to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that ISIS is “exploring a variety of means for infiltrating operatives into the West, including refugee flows, smuggling routes, and legitimate methods of travel.” Currently the system is a screen door when it should be bullet-proof glass.

In a highly-anticipated speech last Monday in New Hampshire, Trump went into further detail on how to make our society safer, as the rise of radical Islam is not only a national security concern but a general welfare matter. Muslim communities must cooperate with law enforcement and government if they know of any suspicious activities, he explained. This is common sense. The wife of the Orlando killer, for instance, knew about his plans, accompanied him when he bought ammunition and drove him past the nightclub so he could scope out the area. Muslim immigrants also have a tendency to form enclaves that lead to radicalization, like in Minnesota’s twin cities area where (as of December 2015) ten Somali-Americans have been arrested for aiding ISIS.

Unfortunately, in this day and age it is often the case that citizens choose not to report suspicious activities because of the fear of racial profiling. Let me ask this: would you rather end up in a life or death situation that you could have prevented or report something suspicious and afterwards feel like you were not being “nice”? If the answer is the former, then that shows a severe misalignment of any sane person’s priorities in everyday life. As Trump said: “This politically correct climate cripples our ability to talk, think and act clearly.”

Neither can federal and state agencies afford to be shackled by fears of accused bias, a crucial point that Trump touched on in New Hampshire. The Orlando killer directly benefitted from the Obama administration’s tentative and outright dangerous policy-making decisions. Patrick Poole, co-founder of Unconstrained Analytics, said:

“The fact is that the FBI did recognize Omar Mateen, twice in fact, but as a matter of official policy under the Obama administration’s politically correct ‘countering violent extremism’ policies, the institutional rules of our national security agencies as a matter of intentional design ensure that investigative clues are obscured.”

How were clues obscured? Poole cites a 2011 decision to remove from training materials certain terms found objectionable by Muslim “experts” called in by the Department of Justice. Orders were also given to not use any language that could be deemed disrespectful to Muslims; employees of the US Customs and Border Protection agency, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the US Secret Service and several other agencies had no choice but to comply. In short, PC-based policies hamstring the authorities responsible for ensuring domestic security, creating an operations crisis that is slowly but surely coming to light.

In an eye-opening piece earlier this year in The Hill, former Department of Homeland Security employee Phillip Haney revealed how the Obama administration ordered the Department to scrub records of Muslims with ties to terrorism. This severely prohibited the Department’s ability to “connect the dots.” Haney wrote how the administration “had been engaged in a bureaucratic effort to destroy the raw material – the actual intelligence we had collected for years – and erase those dots.” The pertinent information that was eliminated, he notes, “could have prevented subsequent domestic Islamist attacks like the ones committed by Faisal Shahzad (May 2010), Detroit “honor killing” perpetrator Rahim A. Alfetlawi (2011); Anime El Khalifi, who plotted to blow up the US Capitol (2012); Dzhokhar or Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who conducted the Boston Marathon bombing (2013); Oklahoma beheading suspect Alton Nolen (2014); or Muhammed Yusuf Abdulazeez, who opened fire on two military installations in Chattanooga, Tennessee (2015).” It is infuriating how Americans’ security is being compromised in favor of the arbitrariness of semantics and the rigidity of political correctness.

Despite this administrative degeneration, many on the left would prefer to harp on the thought-crime of Islamophobia. If Hillary Clinton still believes, after all the death and destruction that Islam has caused in this country, that “Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism,” then she is nothing short of delusional.

Obama’s stale reminders to not jump to any conclusions have fallen flat when time and again there are painstakingly obvious trends that link the incidents that he continually downplays. Americans deserve a president who cares more about our safety than about not rubbing people the wrong way.

What happened in Orlando is neither the result of only an Islamic terrorism problem, nor is it only a gun problem. But it is certainly more so the former than the latter. Stricter firearm regulations and background checks may indeed help, but that by no means addresses why these incidents keep happening. On 9/11, the attackers used box cutters and planes; bombs were employed at the Boston Marathon; in France on Tuesday, a Muslim terrorist stabbed to death a French police officer and his wife in front of their three-year-old son. These people will not stop if the only remedy we pursue focuses on the availability of a particular type of weaponry. That would be a bandage on a broken leg. If by simply making something illegal we could end all social ills, then we would have eliminated the drug problem and the drinking and driving problem, for instance. The heart of the matter is not guns — it is why these lunatics use guns or bombs or knives or fists or bows and arrows or broken bottles.

So how many more massacres committed in the name of Islam will the president shove under the rug? On June 20th, the FBI released transcripts of the Orlando killer’s call to 911 with references to Islam wiped clean by the Department of Justice (eg “I pledge allegiance to [omitted]”). This tactic reeks of state-sponsored propaganda in which the truth is “corrected” to fit a desired narrative — an Orwellian practice, no doubt. Obama can try to direct our attention to the shadows on the wall, but that is a futile effort. When he says ISIS is a JV team, for instance, he is channeling his inner Chip Diller from Animal House who exclaims amid chaos, “All is well!” — but then gets stomped into the sidewalk. All is far from well in the United States in 2016, and likewise when Bluto and crew are tearing up the streets outside Faber College in 1962. The more Obama fumbles around in this matter like a JV president, the more he too is bound to get trampled — but by the forces of reason, responsibility and loyalty.