Jihad Denial Syndrome

By Guy Rodgers, Executive Director, ACT! for America

See no jihad. Hear no jihad. Speak no jihad.

That pretty much sums up the Obama administration’s national security assessment regarding our ongoing conflict with radical Islam and global jihad.

Early evidence of this was the Pentagon report on the Ft. Hood jihadist attack. The mountains of evidence, including Nidal Hasan screaming “Allahu Akbar” as he fired away, seem indisputable that Hasan was motivated by the ideology of jihad.

Yet the Pentagon report achieves the remarkable feat of avoiding the mention of “radical Islam,” “jihad,” or any similar references, anywhere in the body of the report.

This was not due to oversight or omission. This was a calculated effort to define why this atrocity happened in any way but the actual way.

The recent National Security Strategy document affirmed that what happened in the Pentagon Ft. Hood report was no accident. Stripped from the document were all references, even the most vanilla, to radical Islam as a threat or a factor in the increasing number of terrorist attacks attempted against the United States.

Then came Attorney General Eric Holder’s tongue-tied response to U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith’s simple question about the recent spate of terrorist incidents, “Do you believe these individuals might have been incited to take the actions they did because of radical Islam?”

Acting as if affirming the obvious might instantly turn him into a leper, Holder just couldn’t bring himself to acknowledge that radical Islam might have been even part of the motivation behind these attacks.

When pressed, he referred to Anwar al-Awlaki’s views as a “version of Islam that is not consistent with it…”

On June 4th, Todd Rosenblum, Deputy Undersecretary for the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, made a similar argument, but went even further.

According to a report in CQ, he “…defended the Obama administration’s decision to avoid using terms such as `jihadist’ or `Islamist’ to describe the enemy in the war on terrorism, saying such descriptions legitimize the rhetoric of criminals and extremists while denigrating true Islam.”

This echoed what Obama counterterrorism advisor John O. Brennan said in a speech given previously, “Nor do we describe our enemy as jihadists or Islamists.”

There can be no doubt. The Obama administration has gone to great lengths to censor, suppress, and silence any reference to “jihad”, “radical Islam,” and any related term, by officials in its defense, intelligence and counterterrorism branches.

This goes beyond political correctness. This is an obsessive denial of reality that will actually encourage more terrorism and is putting America at greater risk.

It is also the height of hubris.

Because what the Obama administration is asserting is that it understands the doctrines of historic political Islam better than the leading Islamic clerics in the world today…better than the Islamic scholars who developed the sharia law within the five Islamic schools of jurisprudence… and better than the prophet Mohammed, whose years of engaging in jihad to purge or conquer non-Muslims is a historical fact, and whose life Muslims regard as the “perfect” life worthy of emulation.

If this approach actually worked, we would be seeing a decline in Islamic terror attacks and plots against the United States. Yet the very opposite is true. Over the past 16 months there have been four times as many homegrown jihadists arrested than in any similar period since 9/11.

Without question there has been a ramping up of militant Islamist and terrorist activity since Barack Obama became president. This is not a blip but a quantifiable trend. There is no evidence that the existence of “Jihad Denial Syndrome” within the Obama administration has marginalized those they call the “extremists,” minimized their numbers, or won us any increased approval in the Muslim world.

Indeed, every poll I have seen shows that America’s approval rating among Middle Eastern Muslims has not increased by a statistically significant amount.

There is also no evidence that the Obama administration’s “Jihad Denial Syndrome” has made America any safer or more secure. Think back to the years when President Bush was president. Love him or hate him, we didn’t see this constant drumbeat of both successful and near-successful jihadist attacks on our soil.

President Obama and his national security leadership have bought into a false narrative espoused by organizations and leaders connected to the Muslim Brotherhood, such as CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) and ISNA (Islamic Society of North America). Dozens of such individuals have been placed in his administration, including Dalia Mogahed, a top Mideast advisor to Obama who made the astounding assertion last October that most women in the world associate sharia law with “gender justice.”

The false narrative being peddled to the Obama administration attempts to redefine “jihad” as merely a “personal struggle against sin” and denies the historical and doctrinal centrality of violent jihad to political Islam and as a means to advance Islamic sharia law.

This narrative is integral to the disinformation campaign emanating from Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated organizations. The motto of the Muslim Brotherhood is this: "Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur'an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

During the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing trial, at which organizations including CAIR and ISNA were named unindicted co-conspirators, the Muslim Brotherhood “Project” for the West was entered into evidence.

It states in part: “The Ikhwan must understand that all their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging their miserable house…”

What better way to sabotage a nation from within than to dupe its leadership regarding the true nature of and motivation for the threat that is arrayed against it?

There is a reason why there have been more than 15,000 documented cases of Islamic terror worldwide since 9/11. That reason is the ideology of jihad to advance Islamist supremacism and sharia law. That ideology was lived out by Mohammed, is trumpeted by leading Muslim clerics throughout the world, is enunciated throughout the Qur’an and Hadith (sayings and traditions of Mohammed), and is sanctioned by all five schools of Islamic jurisprudence.

But for whatever reason President Obama and his administration argue that they know better what jihad is – and isn’t -- than all these Islamic authorities.

This is arrogant, dangerous and foolish.

The results speak for themselves.