See no evilBy MICHAEL GOODWIN
Last Updated: 4:05 AM, April 28, 2013
Posted: 12:33 AM, April 28, 20130
Michael GoodwinAccording to a relative of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Chechen immigrant believed there is “oppression of the Muslim population around the world.” The relative described Tsarnaev to The New York Times this way: “He was angry that the world pictures Islam as a violent religion.”
Bombing the Boston Marathon was the Tsarnaev brothers’ way of defending Islam. To say their argument boomeranged, however, isn’t fully true. Not as long as the Obama administration puts religious blinders on the defenders of our homeland.
At its core, the Boston case reveals two fundamental truths. One, not all Muslims are terrorists. Two, in recent times, almost all terrorists are Muslims.
Willie Sutton robbed banks because that’s where the money is. Police didn’t catch him by staking out lemonade stands.
By the same logic, preventing terrorism requires close scrutiny of Muslim men leaning toward violent jihad. Had they followed that logic, the FBI could have prevented the bombing.
But with each passing day, it becomes maddeningly clear that political correctness was complicit in the failure. President Obama’s stubborn refusal to connect the dots to Islam isn’t just a personal tic. It reflects the policy he has spread throughout the bureaucracy, including law enforcement and the military.
At the least, orders to “see no Islam evil” created extra hurdles for those trying to keep America safe. At the worst, they opened the door to the bombers.
The moral of the story is that political correctness kills.
We already knew that from the shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, where 13 service members allegedly were murdered by Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan. Witnesses say he shouted, “God is great,” in Arabic as he started a massacre that also left 30 other people injured.
Although Army brass and anti-terror officials knew Hasan, a psychiatrist, was a radicalized Islamist, they took no action for fear of violating his rights. His colleagues called him belligerent, paranoid and schizoid, but he was promoted. When Hasan communicated about suicide bombings with Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born terror leader living in Yemen, his superiors remained silent.
All this happened when George W. Bush was in the White House.
After Hasan allegedly turned Fort Hood into a bloodbath in November 2009, the Obama administration termed the shooting “workplace violence” instead of a terrorism, an outrageous designation that remains in place. In a remark that still takes the breath away, the Army chief of staff, Gen. George Casey Jr., declared that, “as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.”
The US later droned Awlaki, making for a curious double standard. If he was worthy of death, wasn’t Hasan at least worthy of scrutiny?
Which brings us back to Boston. In March 2011, Russian officials warned the FBI that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was “a follower of radical Islam” who had “changed drastically since 2010.” They also knew he was planning a trip to a hotbed of terror in Russia.
That’s an incredible amount of detail. The FBI has said many things in its defense, some conflicting, but closed the case because agents found no evidence of terrorism or a crime.
That’s a non sequitur. The Russians didn’t accuse Tsarnaev of committing a crime; they said he was a radical Islamist. Why did the FBI limit its concern to actual crimes?
The emerging reason is that bureau guidelines eliminate Islam and other religions as a red flag. In this case, making an actual crime the threshold meant Tsarnaev’s links to radical Islam were ignored or downplayed.
Blinders in place, the screw-up continued. The frustrated Russians gave the same warning to the CIA six months later and added Tsarnaev’s mother was also a threat. Again nothing was done, except both were put on a list with 700,000 other people. He went to Russia in 2012 and stayed for six months.
If the Russians were so clueless, how did they know his travel plans a year in advance? And The Washington Post reports that a source warned the Joint Terrorism Task Force that, after Tsarnaev returned to the United States, he had become radicalized — but still nothing happened.
After all that, the FBI continues to defend its conduct, with an official telling The Washington Post that “since there was no derogatory information, there was no reason to suggest that additional action was warranted.”
This is worse than scary — it is nuts. By definition, the information about Tsarnaev was “derogatory.” It was also true.
The Russians knew he was dangerous two years ago. The FBI figured it out only after the bombs went off.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/see_no_evil_nTVTUfrMkPRRBJnKsW5D3L
