http://frontpagemag.com/2013/robert-spencer/why-leftists-and-islamic-supremacists-bear-the-blame-for-boston/

May 1, 2013 By Robert Spencer Comments (12)

Barack Obama promised Tuesday that he would be taking lessons from the Boston Marathon jihad bombing: “When an event like this happens, we want to review every step that was taken, we want to leave no stone unturned, we want to see if there is in fact additional protocols and procedures that could be put in place that would further improve and enhance our ability to detect a potential attack.’’
Sounds great – but ultimately all Obama offered were words. Words that are unlikely to be backed up by real action. The one thing that needs to be done – an official acknowledgement of the reality and magnitude of the global jihad, and the commitment of U.S. intelligence to understanding and combating it – is the one thing that will not be done.

After all, the Administration official Obama has charged with ferreting out the lessons of Boston is none other than his director of national intelligence, James “Clueless” Clapper, who thinks the Muslim Brotherhood is “largely secular.” Obama explained: “Part of what Director Clapper is doing is to see if we can determine lessons learned from what happened’’ in Boston.

Yet one of the foremost of those lessons is that people like James Clapper should not be entrusted with the nation’s intelligence-gathering apparatus. The Russians had Boston jihad bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev under surveillance, were deeply concerned about his contacts with jihad terrorists, and shared those concerns with the FBI. Yet Obama said that criticism of how the FBI handled that intelligence was “not right, although I am sure it generated some headlines. It’s not as if the FBI did nothing. They not only investigated the older brother, they interviewed the older brother, they concluded that there were no signs he was engaging in extremist activity.”

Obama concluded from this that “the question then is, is there something that happened that triggered radicalization and an actual decision by the older brother to engage in the tragic attack we actually saw in Boston, and are there additional things that could have been done in the interim that might have prevented it?’’

That’s not the only conclusion that can be drawn from the fact that the FBI found no signs that Tsarnaev was “engaging in extremist activity.” The other is that the FBI had no idea how to tell whether or not Tamerlan Tsarnaev was “engaging in extremist activity,” because the “extremist activity” he was engaging in was Islamic jihad, and Obama’s FBI is forbidden to study Islamic jihad. This is because the Obama Administration in 2011 mandated the scrubbing of counter-terror training materials of the truth about Islam and jihad. It is the terror threat that dare not speak its name.

The Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) deserves some credit for this — they mounted a huge campaign in 2010 to have me dropped as a trainer of FBI agents. Nor was that campaign personal: they mounted similar campaigns against any trainers and training materials that told the truth about Islam and jihad. But CAIR’s was not a lonely struggle. Others responsible for the politically correct scrubbing of counterterror training materials of any mention of Islam or jihad include hard-Left pseudo-journalist Spencer Ackerman, who published a series of “exposes” of “Islamophobic” counterterror training; Fatima Khera of Muslim Advocates, who wrote a letter to Obama’s then-chief counterterrorism adviser and current CIA director, John Brennan, demanding that this material be removed. Brennan, who readily acquiesced to this demand, also bears responsibility, as does Salam al-Marayati of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, who piled on in the mainstream media. They got what they wanted: now FBI agents are woefully ill-equipped to deal with the Islamic jihad threat, which they largely must pretend does not even exist.

Now in Boston, we have begun reaping the fruit of this.

Khera’s letter to Brennan complained that my books could be found in “the FBI’s library at the FBI training academy in Quantico, Virginia”; that a reading list accompanying a powerpoint presentation by the FBI’s Law Enforcement Communications Unit recommended my book The Truth About Muhammad; and that in July 2010 I “presented a two-hour seminar on ‘the belief system of Islamic jihadists’ to the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) in Tidewater, Virginia,” and “presented a similar lecture to the U.S. Attorney’s Anti-Terrorism Advisory Council, which is co-hosted by the FBI’s Norfolk Field Office.” In fact, I gave many such presentations to various government agencies and law enforcement groups.

Again, the complaints about me and my work were not singular or personal; they came amid many other complaints about similar material from other writers, and presentations by other counter-jihadists. So now all that material is gone, and the witless and politically correct FBI of today ignored Tamerlan Tsarnaev despite repeated warnings from Russian authorities. And if they did investigate him, they didn’t know what to look for or how to understand what they were seeing.

The Leftist journalists and Islamic supremacist groups who pressured Obama (as well as Obama and his administration officials themselves) ought to be held accountable for the law enforcement and intelligence failures connected to the Boston jihad bombings.

J’accuse.

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