On Saturday, the Value Voters Summit included a panel of three expert on jihad: Sebastian Gorka, Philip Haney (author of See Something, Say Nothing) and Zuhdi Jasser.
Security expert Gorka is not shy about assessing the danger we face from our Islamic enemies. In fact, he remarked on the Hannity show last week, “The presidency of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton was a godsend to ISIS, literally.”
It hasn’t helped that Washington has allowed considerable Muslim immigration into this nation during a time of jihad, specifically the worldwide war of Islam against infidels. Not every Muslim is engaged in that war, but the koran urges all followers to fight the nonbelievers to establish Islamic rule. Our arrogant political leaders apparently think that immigration to America is a right even for historic enemies.
As a result, more than two million immigrants and refugees from majority Muslim nations have been admitted to the U.S. since the 9/11 attacks. More recently, the Obama administration has rubber-stamped 10,000 Syrian refugees for admittance, whom FBI Director Comey testified could not be screened because the government has no access to needed records.
Is Washington deranged? Sane leaders don’t welcome likely enemies inside the gates. As Gorka mentions, the authorities have arrested or killed 110 ISIS jihadists in America in the last two years. Why does the government continue to believe Islam is not the problem?
SEBASTIAN GORKA: Let me start by saying that we need to remember that this Sunday marks the 15th anniversary of the longest war the Republic has been engaged in since 1776, and the question I’d like you to ask yourselves is very simply the following: Do you feel today — yourself, your families, your friends — do you feel safer today than you did on September the 10th, 2001?
AUDIENCE: No!
GORKA: Good, and why is that? You know in your gut, you sense that we are more in danger, more imperiled today than we have ever been, but let’s look at the facts behind your common sense intuition and let me just give you some of the data points that will allow you to understand what it is that really makes us more endangered today. Number one, ISIS is the most powerful modern jihadi organization the world has ever seen. Let me give you the facts from inside President Obama’s own administration.
Two weeks ago he went to the Pentagon for a special meeting on ISIS. At that meeting, the National Counterterrorism Center, which is part of the Director of National Intelligence’s complex, gave him a briefing on ISIS. That map, which was reported in the mainstream media, said that ISIS now has fully operational affiliates in 18 nations around the world. Two years ago that number was seven: in 24 months they’ve more than doubled their global expanse. Not only that, it controls territory in different regions of the world. We focus on Iraq, we focus on Syria, but ISIS has control of territory in Nigeria, Boko Haram territory. There are Taliban leaders in Afghanistan that have sworn allegiance to ISIS, but that sounds very far away. The Middle East, Central Asia — let’s bring it all back home. My wife and I Catherine Gorka published a report one week before San Bernardino on what ISIS is doing in America. You’ll hear much more from Phil (Haney) and others, but let me just give you again the key data points.
Since ISIS declared the caliphate on June 29, 2014, so just over two years ago, here in America we have killed or arrested 110 terrorists linked to ISIS. Not 10 not 50, but 110. One of the most recent being the arrest two weeks ago in Roanoke, Virginia, of an ISIS terrorist. If you look at those arrests and break them down into what they were doing, it gets even more disturbing.
Half of the people we have intercepted are what if the Federal Bureau of Investigation calls travelers, they are US subjects who want to leave America to become jihadis in Iraq or Syria. Twenty percent of them are middle management: they’re recruiters, talent spotters, people buying the tickets for the jihadis to fly to the Middle East. But that leaves more than a third — 38 percent of everybody we have intercepted has sworn allegiance to the new caliph, the new emperor of Islam, and decided that the best way to serve ISIS is to kill infidels here in America. They don’t need to go anywhere; they can go and buy a rifle, 2000 rounds of ammunition, go to the range, practice and then go to a nightclub in Orlando and slaughter 49 Americans.
So what has our response been? After Orlando almost instantly the American government and the left-wing media said well clearly Omar Mateen is a man with repressed homosexual tendencies who wanted to take revenge on a Latin lover.
No, he’s a jihadi who wants to kill people who he sees as infidels, but that reality was censored by a cabinet member of this administration. The Attorney General removed and changed the wording of the 911 call the transcript that Omar Mateen made, because what did he say in that conversation with that dispatcher? He wasn’t asking for them to send ambulances to the palace nightclub, he was saying I am a jihadi, I am fighting a holy war for Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the caliph of ISIS. That had to be removed, that had to be deleted, and when he said Allah Akbar, allah is the greatest, the Department of Justice decided they’ll change the word allah on the transcript to god.
That’s political interference in the intelligence cycle. That’s a distortion of a reality, and that is what endangers you and every American. We are losing this war against our enemy and we have to understand that our enemy is a new type of totalitarianism. Just like the Communists before them and just like the fascists and the Nazis, groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS are totalitarians — either you join them or they will enslave or kill you. It is that simple. These are not individuals you can negotiate with. And the sad thing is, America is the most powerful nation the world has ever seen; it is also the greatest nation the world has ever seen. And there’s no excuse for losing this war — none.
So what will it take to win this war? In my book Defeating Jihad I lay out a very simple three-stage plan the next president could follow if he wished to, and in my opinion it would bring victory.
Number one: no more politics in the threat assessment, no more politics. There is no room for political correctness inside our intelligence community. If the enemy says I am a jihadi, you don’t get to call them, oh, poor unemployed young men. If the enemy says I’m a jihadi you get to call them that. We didn’t delete the word Nazi when we were fighting the Third Reich. We didn’t say about the Soviet Union that they’re not communists, they’re just misguided Democrats. Truth about the enemy and truth about the fact that they are evil — they’re not misguided, they are evil.
Second part of my plan: we have to understand that — I’m sorry whether you like it or not — this is not a war with Islam. Remember what was the religion of the fighter pilot in the cage who was burnt alive? He wasn’t a Christian he wasn’t a Jew he was a Jordanian fighter pilot, a Sunni Muslim. This is a religious war inside Islam and in fact the greatest number of victims are Muslims. They’ve decimated the Christians in Iraq, they’ve chased the Yazidis out of their territorial homes, but the majority of victims are Muslims who disagree with ISIS. We have to help the Muslims who want to be on our side to defeat ISIS — the Jordanians, the Egyptians, the Emiratis and we can add the Kurds into that mix as well. We don’t want white-skinned or brown-skinned Americans to be the face of this war. It should be the King of Jordan, it should be the President of Egypt, but that is never going to happen unless they trust us and believe we have their backs. And in the last seven and a half years they don’t quite believe that. I wonder why.
Last point: the long-term victory is not measured in body bags or predator strikes: it’s measured in delegitimizing the ideology of jihad just like President Reagan delegitimized communism. We have to help our Muslim allies delegitimize jihadism. Those three things together and we can win.
And remember my last message: it is no accident that in the last hundred years two totalitarianisms threatened Western civilization — communism and fascism — and in both cases, which country was instrumental in their defeat? Us, America. It wasn’t the French, it wasn’t the Belgians, it wasn’t the Brits, it was America. And once again a Western civilization is in an existential threat environment because of the new totalitarians, and once again it’s going to take America to defeat them.
