It would have been absolutely unthinkable ten years, five years, perhaps even one year ago. Muslims demonstrating on the National Mall on September 11th.
We have come a long way in the 12 years since that fateful day, haven’t we? Yes, we have now seemed to accept being told not just by Islamic activists, but by the Obama administration through its actions if not its explicit statements, that our real enemy is Islamophobia. That we have nothing to fear but fear of Islam itself.
As the American face of fundamentalist Islam rallied on the Mall with their “Million American March Against Fear” (originally titled the “Million Muslim March”), they seemed to embrace the nonsensical idea that the way to combat fear is to shout down those who are afraid of them.
The event included several groups that could best be termed 9/11 truthers or deniers, who actually dispute the obvious – that airplanes hijacked and commandeered by Islamic extremists wound up killing 3000 people in the political and financial capitals of America, as well as its heartland.
While they cleverly sought political cover by including many non-Muslim speakers and emphasizing broad civil liberty issues such as the NSA and Justice Department’s targeting and warrantless surveillance of various media and conservative political organizations, the organizers are well-known apologists for the worldwide Islamic movement, which openly states that their goals are the destruction of Israel and the infidel west and imposition of soul-crushing Shariah law throughout the world.
But who can fault their audacity when the Obama administration has essentially placed any mention of Islamic terrorism off limits?
When an obvious terrorist attack killed four American diplomats in Benghazi, there was nary a mention of terrorism until the administration was backed into a corner months after the event. And even then, it was described as simply terrorism rather than Islamic terrorism.
When Major Nidal Hasan murdered 13 people and injured 29 others while shouting Allahu Akbar, the Muslim expression for God is the Greatest, the administration characterized the incident as “workplace violence.”
When The Tsarnaev brothers executed the Boston Marathon bombing, the administration refused to even mention their ties to Islamic extremists.
The administration has even removed all mentions of the word Islam or Muslim or Islamic radicalism or fundamentalism from the US counter-terrorism training manual.
This, despite the fact that virtually all of the estimated 70 to 80 terrorist plots foiled by the FBI since 9/11, including plans for the immolation of Times Square and the New York City subway system, were conceived by Islamic radicals. 186 of the 226, or 82% of home-grown terrorists arrested on American soil since 2009 are Muslim.
And yet the president and his administration have even refused to use the words Islamic and radical together when discussing Hezbollah and Hamas, the notorious and murderous organizations that have spread death and misery throughout the middle east for the entirety of their existence. The Muslim Brotherhood, which assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and has organized terrorist plots for lo these many years, were lauded as part of the so-called Arab spring when we sold out our ally Hasni Mubarak in Egypt. And even Al Qaeda is characterized only as an extremist group, as if they could be Buddhist or Christian or Jewish.
There are likely well over one billion Muslims on the planet today, and the world Muslim population is projected to grow to over two billion in the next 15 years or so. Apologists for Islamic radicalism are quick to point out that radicals represent no more than 10% of the world’s Muslims. But even if such fundamentalists represented just 5% (a conservative number) of the worldwide Muslim population, that would still add up to at least 75,000,000 adherents to Islamic fundamentalism.
Obama is not the only president who has attempted to tamp down fear and suspicion of Muslims. George W. Bush started the trend with his description of Islam as “a religion of peace” just weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. But an understandable and defensible attempt to prevent the random targeting of innocent American Muslims has now been elevated to the point where we are not permitted to even acknowledge the existence of the world’s greatest threat to America.
And it is that perverse political correctness that convinced radical Islamists and their apologists that they could demonstrate, raise their voices with impunity and deny the truth of an historic tragedy perpetrated by them on the most visible site in our national capital on the very anniversary of their crimes against humanity.
