Within hours of the Boston Marathon bombing, I sent an email to my newsletter distribution list with speculation about the perpetrators being of Muslim descent. One self-proclaimed “moderate” on my list told me that he was “done,” accused me of being an extremist, and ordered me to remove him from my list.

This followed the Fort Hood shooting that to this day the government continues to label “work place violence.” By refusing to acknowledge that Nidal Hassan was a terrorist, our government is cheating the American public of an honest assessment of the threats we face. So it is no surprise that the White House and FBI refuse to call the Oklahoma terrorist attack, by a Muslim jihadist and Islamic zealot, terrorism, continuing to label the incident workplace violence while the investigation continues.

I use the word zealot intentionally.  Last year a former friend called me a zealot when I talked about the pervasive anti-Semitism metastasizing across the globe. She had no idea that Jimmy Carter was an anti-Semite and that Europe was on its way to becoming Judenrein.  I was a zealot for worrying about global anti-Semitism and that Americans were going to face terrorist attacks more regularly under Obama’s policies of denial and appeasement.

George W. Bush had been in office for seven months when the 9/11 terror attacks shook Americans out of a slumber that was all too deep and ill placed. Bill Clinton spent his two terms ignoring the growing threats from al Qaeda despite multiple terror attacks occurring under his watch.

Bush’s response was relatively swift. He did not choose to be thought of as a war president. It was thrust upon him and he shouldered his responsibilities with the dignity and commitment one expects from a commander-in-chief. And while he did provide moral clarity recognizing the evil threatening the Western world, he mistakenly made the claim in the aftermath of the attacks that Islam is a religion of peace. As Professor Richard Landes noted with regard to Bush’s famous post 9/11 speech:

Now were we a “reality-based” community… such a statement would have been met with howls of derision, especially from academics whose knowledge of the history of Islam would make such a characterization as “religion of peace” risible, and who knew alas only too well what shouts of joy 9-11 provoked in Muslim, Arab and even other audiences the world over.

Alas, what did Professor Landes mean by “reality-based”?  Is not Islam a religion of peace? It depends upon what one means by “peace.” In a recent essay, Professor Clive Kessler explained:

If by a “religion of peace” one means a religion and an attendant worldly order of hegemonic quietude and obedience, then Islam is a religion of peace -- a peace under which Muslims heed God (as they understand God, or are required by their religious authorities to understand these things) and non-Muslims obey worldly Muslim authority (as they are told and required to do).

And he recognized:

The militant and fundamentalist versions of Islam are forms or variants that can be “sourced” and derived directly -- dare one even say “authentically”? -- from Koranic writ, from early formative Islam as recorded in the traditions and practices (hadith and sunnah) of the Prophet in his own lifetime and worldly career, and within historical Islam as it developed on that foundation. The militant version is a reading or construction of direct intellectual lineage and identifiable descent within historical Islam.

Unsurprisingly, Bush never repeated the claim that Islam is peace.  Not so with his successor who continues to proclaim that the violence has nothing to do with Islam despite witnessing decades of terrorism committed by Muslims in the name of their faith across the globe, from the streets of London, Madrid, Toulouse, and Brussels to New York and Boston and most recently Iraq and Syria. 

Saudi flag

Several years ago, historian Daniel Pipes was interviewed about whether or not Islam was a religion of peace. His response:  “If Islam prevails, then there’ll be peace but for Islam to prevail, it has required, and will require a lot of war.”  Pipes elaborated by describing the three forms of Islam that exist today.  Traditional Islam is “a compromise between the dictates of the religion and the practicalities of daily life.” Radical Islam is a “20^th century phenomenon” with early roots but which is now “an ideology comparable to fascism and communism.” And lastly, moderate Islam “which by and large is a hypothesis. It doesn’t really exist yet. It exists in the minds of a few people.”

Pipes’ exposure of the current fallacy of moderate Islam is expounded upon by blogger and journalist Daniel Greenfield: “Moderate Islam is just multiculturalism misspelled.…  The moderate Muslim is an invention of the liberal academic, the secular theologian, the vapid politician and his shrill idiot cousin, the political activist.” Greenfield continues in another column:

Muslims dare not question Islam because they fear Allah. Liberals dare not question Islam because they fear being fools. If they were completely wrong about Islam, then what else were they also wrong about? Pull at one thread and the whole coat of dreams dissolves leaving behind a very naked emperor.

Alas, we find ourselves once again facing radical Islam on the shores of America, led by a political class unwilling to recognize its dangers. The domestic horrors of 9/11, Boston Marathon, Fort Hood, Times Square and Underwear bombers simply were not enough to derail the fraudulent narrative that Islam is a religion of peace. 

Neither were the famously horrific beheadings that began with Daniel Pearl in 2002 and continued in Iraq with Nicholas Berg, Jack Hensley and Eugene Armstrong in 2004. Americans were not the only victims over the past decade, as Turks, Egyptians, Brits, Iraqis, Kurds, and a sundry Arabs were also beheaded by Islamists.  In London over the past year there have been two beheadings that have made the news. And it is only since ISIS took to YouTube to publicize the beheadings of two Americans and a British citizen that people are even remotely aware of this seemingly common phenomenon.

The trend has finally hit our shores.  In Oklahoma last week, a 54 year old woman was beheaded allegedly by an Islamist who was fired for supporting the stoning of women, celebrated terrorists, tried to convert others, and cherished the day that Sharia would govern. And the left pens columns questioning whether this was an act of terrorism.

Is this a one-off? Frighteningly, I fear not. Elsewhere in Oklahoma, another man was arrested for threatening to behead a co-worker and in Ferguson, a Muslim man threated to behead critics like “Bitch Daniel Pearl.”  Professor Timothy R. Furnish wrote an essay in 2005 analyzing the theological and historical precedent in Islamic teachings supporting decapitation.  He concluded:

[I]n contradiction to the assertions of apologists, both Muslim and non-Muslim, these beheadings are not simply a brutal method of drawing attention to the Islamist political agenda and weakening opponents' will to fight. Zarqawi and other Islamists who practice decapitation believe that God has ordained them to obliterate their enemies in this manner. Islam is, for this determined minority of Muslims, anything but a "religion of peace." It is, rather, a religion of the sword with the blade forever at the throat of the unbeliever.

And what of that moderate Muslim community the left trots out every time another jihadist commits an act of terrorism. Take Oklahoma for instance. Did the local Muslim community take to the streets in outrage denouncing the heinous act and proclaiming that their religion is being hijacked by extremists? Have they ever taken to the streets, or more importantly, to the mosques with such a suggestion? What they did was surround the police during a press conference while reading the Koran and shouting “Praise Allah!”

And where were the imams? We know of at least one from the mosque attended by the Oklahoma suspect who apologized to ISIS this week and asked for Allah’s forgiveness (he is currently at a mosque affiliated with that at which the Tsarnaev brothers worshipped, and has spoken alongside al Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki). And I pointed out in a recent column:

The NYPD was forced to terminate a program designed to root out terror in area mosques where it is known to begin and foment….[I]f anyone thinks that the mosques in the U.S. are attended by Muslims of the moderate variety, it was recently reported that the mosque attended by the Boston Bombers has a virtual who’s who list of terrorist attendees including a top ISIS operative.
 

As Obama insists that violence has no place in Islam, his policies are dangerously impacting our national security. He has opened the borders, allowing terrorists to enter illegally, while over a million legal immigrants from Muslim countries have entered the U.S. since 2000.  In his U.N. speech last week, Obama praised a Muslim cleric who endorsed a fatwa condoning the killing of U.S. soldiers. He and his DOJ have banned religious profiling without exemption even in national security investigations. And he refuses to withdraw the passports of Americans who have joined ISIS in its jihadist rampage across the Levant.

It is difficult not to question from where Obama’s blind faith in Islam emanates. In a 2012 blog, Pipes discussed Obama’s personal ties to the religion. Despite being told that Obama “has never been a practicing Muslim” (emphasis added), Pipes notes this is irrelevant for purposes of Muslim identity. Obama spent time during his youth in a mosque, learning how to pray the salat, a form of ritual worship that “in and of itself made Mr. Obama a Muslim.” During an interview in 2007, Obama recited the adhan, “the very utterance of which makes one a Muslim.” In a 2008 interview, Obama inadvertently referred to “my Muslim faith” and when he addresses Muslim audiences, he “uses specific phrases that recall his Muslim identity.”

I am not suggesting that Obama is a closet Muslim today. But it is clear that his “knowledge of the history of Islam,” rather than draw him into a “reality-based community,” has tainted his ability to defend our nation. When our leaders refuse to call jihad by its rightful name and continually strut out the mantras that al Qaeda has been defeated and Islam is a religion of peace, they are part of the sickness, precluding a cure.

What needs to be beheaded is the politically correct mentality that is preventing policy makers from living in a reality-based community. Until our leaders stop claiming that Islam is a religion of peace, terrorism may very well become as commonplace here as it is in Iraq and Syria.