The Terrorist Next Door (10 page)

In early 2011, a Senate committee released a blistering report deeming the Fort Hood massacre to have been preventable. Not only did Department of Defense officials fail to recognize Hasan's obvious Islamist tendencies, the committee found, but in the name of multiculturalism they actively covered them up. “Rather than discipline or discharge him,
Hasan's superiors sanitized his personnel evaluations so that evidence of his radicalization was praised as research on terrorism and Islam,” the committee's leaders, senators Joseph Lieberman and Susan Collins, wrote in the
Washington Post
.
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As the
Wall Street Journal
's Dorothy Rabinowitz noted, “In November 2010, each branch of the military issued a final report on the Fort Hood shooting. Not one mentioned the perpetrator's ties to radical Islam. Even today, [the Senate committee report] reminds us that DoD still hasn't specifically named the threat represented by the Fort Hood attack—a signal to the entire Defense bureaucracy that the subject is taboo.”
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Because Hasan is a Muslim, firing or demoting him could have provoked the dreaded accusations of “Islamophobia” and “racism” against the military, shouted from the rooftops by CAIR and other Islamist pressure groups. No, it would all have been much too messy and inconvenient. Better to look the other way as the seeds for jihad—in the form of the quintessential Chip Away attack—were planted on U.S. soil. If the American people ask why Hasan did what he did, keep them in the dark. Tell them he was just a lone wacko who snapped, and not part of any larger jihadist movement or new terrorist strategy. Move along, folks, nothing to see here. That is the unspoken but undeniable bedrock of the Obama administration's counter-terrorism policy.

Shahzad, an MBA and married father of two who lived with his family in the Connecticut suburbs, was the face of this plot.
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But its genesis is found in the tribal regions of Pakistan, where Shahzad had trained in bomb-making with the Pakistani Taliban.
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Pakistani authorities detained at least eleven men in connection with the attempted Times Square bombing, including a former Pakistani Army major who had been in phone contact with Shahzad on the day of the incident.
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Although Shahzad had been on a U.S. government travel-lookout list from 1999 until 2008 and had been on the Joint Terrorism Task Force's radar since at least 2004,
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he was apparently not being monitored by U.S. authorities at the time of the attempted bombing. This would likely explain how he gained U.S. citizenship in 2009, how he moved freely between Pakistan and the United States during his jihadist training, and how he boarded a flight at New York's JFK Airport two days after planting the bomb, nearly escaping to Dubai.
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Based on the timeline of events, it appears the Obama administration ceased surveillance of Faisal Shahzad that had begun way back in the latter days of the Clinton administration. Memo to the Obamis: any U.S. citizen—particularly a Muslim male under the age of thirty-five—who takes trips to Pakistan, Somalia, or Yemen for months at a time should be monitored and questioned vigorously when he returns to America. Let's be realistic. In the current threat climate, there is no compelling reason to travel to these al-Qaeda strongholds unless you are a) from there and visiting family, or b) doing some kind of government consulting or contracting work. All three countries are impoverished, jihad-plagued war zones that are unwelcoming to Westerners. The lure for a young American Muslim like Shahzad to visit a place like Pakistan's tribal regions is obvious: it is the epicenter of the global jihad, the location of countless terror training camps, and the seat of power for al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

If there were any doubts as to why Shahzad, who cited the ubiquitous Anwar al-Awlaki as one of his inspirations,
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would have traveled to Pakistan, his behavior at his sentencing put them to rest. As
ABC News
reported, “Shahzad, wearing a white prayer cap, said ‘Allahu Akbar' after hearing the sentence, and said he would sacrifice a thousand lives for Allah. ‘War with Muslims has just begun,' said Shahzad, who then predicted that ‘the defeat of the U.S. is imminent, God willing.'”
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As in the case of Nidal Hasan, the facts show that Faisal Shahzad was an Islamic terrorist, one who nearly pulled off a lethal Chip Away attack at a highly visible American cultural landmark.

So how did the Obama administration respond to the Shahzad plot? At a press briefing two days after the incident, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs mumbled, stumbled, and refused to use the appropriate word until asked point-blank if Shahzad was a terrorist: “I think anybody that has the type of material they had in the car in Times Square, I would say that that was intended to terrorize, absolutely. I would say whoever, whoever did that would be categorized as a terrorist, yes.”
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How else would you describe an Islamic fanatic who tried to kill hundreds, potentially thousands, of people at Times Square with a car bomb? Gibbs' natural reaction should have been a firm, “Yes, this was clearly an Islamic terrorist act.” Instead, we got ten seconds of hemming and hawing in which the word “Islamic” was never mentioned.

It was the same story with Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano. The day after the attempted attack, she said on ABC—twice—that it was just a “one-off” event.
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The fact that Shahzad had international jihadi links and was trained by the Taliban in Pakistan for his mission in New York City was apparently no big deal to Big Sis.

Likewise, PC-addled attorney general Eric Holder could not bring himself to utter the words “radical Islam” during his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee following the Times Square incident. The now infamous YouTube clip shows Holder putting himself through contortions to avoid directly answering Texas congressman Lamar Smith's persistent questioning as to whether radical Islam played a part in the Shahzad case and others like it.
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Here's part of the exchange:

Doggedly refusing to concede the obvious, Holder capped his cringe-worthy display by playing armchair imam, telling Smith that Anwar al-Awlaki “has a version of Islam that is not consistent with the teachings of it.”

And what exactly are those teachings, Mr. Attorney General? Since you speak so confidently about what Islam is all about, please inform us what research you've done on this topic. And no, Googling a random, peaceful-sounding Koranic verse for use in one of your pandering speeches to Muslim Brotherhood front groups does not count.

Sadly, Americans who were rightly curious about the motivations behind Faisal Shahzad's attack on Times Square wouldn't find answers from the Obama administration. New York City mayor (and notorious panderer to Islam) Michael Bloomberg had a unique take though, pinning the plot on “maybe a mentally deranged person or somebody with a political agenda that doesn't like the [Obama] health care bill or something.”
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Mind you, Bloomberg said this with a straight face.

Shortly after his conversion to Islam, Muhammad—who was raised Christian in his hometown of Memphis—traveled to Yemen, supposedly to teach English and learn Arabic. His busy itinerary also included joining al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, marrying a Yemeni woman, and spending time in jail for overstaying his visa and possessing a fraudulent passport.
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U.S. authorities, understandably concerned, asked the Yemeni government to deport Muhammad back to America. The Yemenis complied, and upon his return to the United States four months before slaughtering Private Long, Muhammad became the subject of a preliminary investigation by the FBI's Joint Counter-Terrorism Task Force.
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Nevertheless, he was able to stockpile a small arsenal and eventually open a barrage of gunfire on a U.S. military recruiting center, apparently
right under the FBI's noses. Muhammad's track record raised so many red flags you'd think the feds were monitoring his every move. Yet, like in the cases of Nidal Hasan and Faisal Shahzad, you'd have thought wrong.

In a letter to the judge hearing his case, Muhammad wrote that his attack represented “a Jihadi Attack on infidel forces” that was “justified according to Islamic Laws and the Islamic Religion. Jihad—to fight those who wage war on Islam and Muslims.”
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In Muhammad's view, that would mean the U.S. military. It is a recurring theme in every homegrown jihad case I investigate: U.S. troops are viewed as the living, breathing symbol of imperialist, Crusader aggression against Muslims, and need to be punished accordingly.

There was a telling side note to Muhammad's case. Just one day before Muhammad's premeditated, Islamically inspired murder of a brave U.S. serviceman, a notorious late-term abortion provider named George Tiller was gunned down during Sunday services at a Kansas church. It was a heinous crime worthy of strong condemnation. But to witness the spontaneous outpouring of grief from the Obama administration, you'd have thought Tiller, arguably America's most infamous abortionist, was Mother Theresa incarnate.

The president felt compelled to issue a Rose Garden statement just hours after Tiller's death, professing that he was “shocked and outraged.”
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His Department of Justice followed suit, releasing its own same-day statement decrying the “abhorrent act of violence” against Tiller, vowing to guard against similar acts of mayhem, and even promising to send federal marshals to protect abortion clinics nationwide.
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They were no doubt concerned that a wave of suicide bombings by fundamentalist Christians acting in Jesus' name was imminent. Remember, for the Left, the next Eric Rudolph or Timothy McVeigh, two psychopaths whose actions transgressed Biblical Christianity and who were universally denounced by Christians, is always lurking right around the corner—as opposed to Islamic jihadists, who have actually spent centuries rounding the corner in waves.

In contrast to the administration's immediate wailing over Tiller's death, it took President Obama two days to get around to issuing a statement saying he was “deeply saddened” over Abdulhakim Muhammad's jihadist murder of Private Long.
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No “shock” or “outrage” like there was with Tiller—just deep sadness, like when the family pet dies. And of course, no mention of Islam or Islamic terrorism was anywhere to be found. And why would there be? After all, Abdulhakim Muhammad and the scores of others like him are just isolated extremists who have distorted the true teachings of Islam, or so the Obama administration would have us believe.