Muzzled (12 page)

Similarly, Obama’s secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, abandoned the phrase “war on terror.” In the spring of 2009, speaking to reporters who asked her why she did not want to use those words, she dodged the issue: “I haven’t gotten any directive about using it or not using it. It is just not being used,” she said.

Secretary Clinton’s announcement was followed by news
of a Pentagon memo asking military officials to avoid using the phrase “global war on terror” in favor of “overseas contingency operations.” In April 2010 the president’s national-security team decided to edit any mention of “Islamic extremism” out of the National Security Strategy, the basic statement of policy for protecting vital U.S. interests. Under President Bush the document had read: “The struggle against militant Islamic radicalism is the great ideological conflict of the early years of the 21st century.” A few months later John Brennan, the president’s top counterterrorism adviser, elaborating on a point Napolitano had broached, explained that the new president had concluded that terrorism was not the enemy. Terrorism is a tactic or a state of mind, he said, diving into the sea of political correctness. Taking national pride into the sea with him, he issued the proud but meaningless claim that Americans refuse to live in fear—even as we spend billions on security and go to war to combat Muslim terrorists.

Before completely disappearing beneath the waves of political correctness, he announced: “Nor do we describe our enemy as jihadists or Islamists because jihad is a holy struggle … meaning to purify oneself … and there is nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent” people. By that logic the United States is not at war with terrorists, Muslim extremists, or jihadists. Our enemy is to be defined as organizations using violent tactics, such as al Qaeda and its affiliates. There is no longer mention of terrorists or Muslims. And there can be no mention of the gulf that exists between Judeo-Christian religions and Islamists, who would impose perversions of Muslim religious tenets as national laws. Stoning women to death for adultery, cutting off their noses for
refusing to become child brides, denying them the right to an education—these things do not happen under civil law accepted by Jews and Christians. That’s a fact. And it is a fact that they are accepted under various interpretations of Islam’s Sharia law.

The best that can be said about these flights into euphemistic fantasy is that they pleased liberals who were fed up with years of hard-line rhetoric from the Bush administration. The worst that can be said about the administration’s policy statements is that they are a blatant departure to the land of muddled thinking born of politically correct speech, a land with eyes blind to the reality of violent Muslim extremists launching worldwide terrorist attacks on people in an office building in New York, people on a train in Spain, people on vacation in Indonesia.

What is frustrating to me as a journalist is that Americans have displayed incredible maturity since 9/11 in dealing with the Muslim terror threat. President Bush visited a mosque in the days after the 9/11 attacks to make a public display of his belief that it was wrong to blame all Muslims for the violence. On September 20, 2001, he told a joint session of Congress: “The terrorists practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics—a fringe movement that perverts the peaceful teachings of Islam.” The Republican president displayed tact and sensitivity at a moment of national crisis. Meanwhile, American faith leaders held joint worship services around the country for Christian, Jewish, and Muslim clerical leaders to come together and offer an example of unity in the face of the potentially divisive fallout from attacks justified as an Islamic
mission. This evidence of maturity and restraint gave the nation a basis for an honest conversation on the topic. As an author of several books on black American history, I can give voice to how far the United States has come in dealing with racism and bigotry. The civil rights movement in the United States achieved many of its goals with appeals to conscience, calls to action based on Christian principles, historical reference to the nation’s founding ideals of all men being equal, and the power of the nation’s commitment to justice under law. These principles withstood riots in the streets, the murder of Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and bitter, divisive segregationist appeals. Our nation came through the fire, demonstrating the capacity to deal with the racial divide, the deepest cut in our country’s history. Even when it came to war, the country has acknowledged its mistakes of the past. During World War II President Roosevelt ordered one hundred thousand Japanese Americans into detention camps, as if they constituted an enemy within. The remorse and shame over that action prevented any similar treatment of Korean Americans during the Korean War or Vietnamese Americans during the Vietnam War. And in 1988 Congress went so far as to vote for an official apology to survivors of the Japanese internment. America has hard-earned status among the nations of the world when it comes to dealing with racial diversity and minority rights.

As for fear that forthright discussion about Muslim terrorism might result in a spike of religious intolerance directed against Muslims, it is a statement of historical fact that if any country in the world has a history of frank, peaceful discussions on religion, it is the United States. The United States is
home to remarkable tolerance of varying religious practices, to the point of protecting the rights of nonbelievers; repeated court rulings have come down against the Christian majority labeling the United States a Christian nation. Polling done for a 2010 book on religion in the United States found that an overwhelming majority of Americans said people practicing other faiths can go to heaven. Professors David Campbell and Robert Putnam, the authors of the book
American Grace
, also reported that wide majorities of Christians in the United States, including the most devout evangelicals, stated their belief that Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, and atheists can all go to heaven. Islam ranks among the least popular religions in the United States today, but the authors note that not long ago Judaism and Catholicism, now among the most respected faiths, were among the least respected. Their rise in the esteem of people of other faiths is offered as evidence of the nation’s capacity for tolerance and ability to engage in reasoned debate on Islamic terror.

So why would President Obama, NPR, or anyone else on the Left or Right want to stop Americans, and particularly O’Reilly and me, from talking to one another about this threat, as if we are not to be trusted? There is a hunger for better information, a deep desire to engage in these difficult conversations when it comes to Muslims and terrorism. Yet so many supposedly well-meaning people in politics and media don’t trust other Americans to take part in these debates. How can Americans avoid these conversations when the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies are tracking Muslim terror suspects and monitoring their conversations in the United States and abroad? When the courts are trying to establish
the basis for surveillance and there are legal and ethical questions about profiling Muslims? When government agencies are determining what is within legal limits as they infiltrate places where radical Muslim ideology is being championed, including places of worship, mosques? How can we be told to shut up, be careful what we say, or even be fired for joining a conversation that is under way?

Already the effort to repress conversation on Muslim terrorism is resulting in a deadly form of debate breaking out. In whispered, conspiratorial tones Americans are joining the rest of the world in asking why, if Islam is a peaceful religion, is there a pattern of attacks on Christians in countries with Muslim majorities? Why do Muslims tear down historic Buddhist monuments? Why can you regularly read of Muslims burning schools for girls? Why do imams indoctrinate so many terrorists? Why was Daniel Pearl, an American Jewish journalist, beheaded in the name of Islam? Why is an American political cartoonist, Molly Norris, in hiding because of death threats by Muslims upset at her suggestion of a “Draw Mohammed Day”? Why was the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York compelled to take down all artwork depicting the Prophet Muhammad from its Islamic exhibition? Why was Theo van Gogh, a Dutch filmmaker, killed by Muslims for making a film about Muslim abuse of women?

Pretending that this pattern of Muslim violence does not exist makes no sense. Moreover, it is dangerous, because it suppresses the necessary public vent of honest conversation, open dialogue, and debate. It exacerbates tension as pent-up fear, worries, and anger emerge. And it is likely to become ugly when acted on by frustrated people tired of being called
bigots for seeing what is plain as day but not being able to speak about it. In September 2010, the month before I was fired for talking about my fear of Muslim terrorism, the AP reported that the Justice Department reported that it was investigating several anti-Muslim incidents in four states. In one case a brick was thrown at a window of the Madera Islamic Center in California. Signs left behind read: “
NO TEMPLE FOR THE GOD OF TERRORISM
” and “
WAKE UP AMERICA—THE ENEMY IS HERE!
” Justice was also responding to an attack against a Muslim New York City cab driver who had his throat slashed by a man raging against Muslims. The FBI is dealing with growing vandalism at mosques. And famously, there is an uproar with a strong anti-Muslim flavor over a perfectly legal plan to build a mosque several blocks away from Ground Zero, the site of the 9/11 attacks that brought the World Trade Center crashing down. In Oklahoma, a state with a tiny Muslim population, the state legislature passed an anti-Sharia law at the prompting of politicians looking for an issue to drive up their poll numbers. And the pastor of a very small Christian church in Gainesville, Florida, became the center of international attention for announcing plans to burn the Koran on the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

These are examples of the growing tensions erupting among Americans as they are told to muffle and muzzle their fears of Muslim terrorism. Political, media, and religious leadership rightly protect the First Amendment rights of Muslims to practice their religion. But they fail to acknowledge and denounce radical Islamist elements preaching world domination through violence that are associated with terrorist groups in the Middle East, such as Hamas and Hezbollah. Such (well-intentioned)
censors seem to me to be also opening the door to
more
Muslim terrorism in U.S. schools, in the military, and in jails by deriding those asking questions about radical Islamists as anti-Muslim bigots. If you admit you are suspicious of elements of Islam, you are called a bigot. So lots of people keep their suspicions to themselves. When law enforcement agencies capture Muslims engaged in planning terror plots, as they have in New York, New Jersey, Miami, Dallas, and Washington, DC, in the last year, the politically correct crowd reflexively ratchets up the message that not all Muslims are terrorists and calls for restraint in discussing the blatant links between extreme Muslims, Islamists, and terrorism. I call it censorship. This is a corrupt, self-defeating cycle. It limits the reasoned, rational assessments of genuine terror threats—an essential element of effective response.

The uncensored reality is that there are 1.5 billion Muslims in the world and Islam is the world’s fastest-growing religion. The most pressing threat to our nation comes from this religion’s determined extremist faction, the Islamists who see jihad as a holy mission to establish a one-world government, a caliphate, under Muslim law. Of course, the overwhelming majority of Muslims are peaceful people who are respectful of others, mean no harm, and are just trying to hold a job, pay the rent, and raise their children. However, if only one-tenth of 1 percent of Muslims are radicalized and intent on harming the United States and its allies in the name of Islam, that makes 1.5 million seeking to bring down democratic governments, ban religious diversity, and overturn Western civilization. That is an astoundingly large number, and by all indications the growth of Islam in the United States and
the worldwide reach of the Internet are leading to increasing conflict between those bent on committing acts of terror and the rest of the world. To point this threat out is not bigotry. It is an act of self-preservation.

But the insidious hand of political correctness extends its corrupt fingers to shush people who are trying to introduce some straight talk into discussion of the Muslim terror threat. For example, when President Obama told Bob Woodward, my former
Washington Post
colleague, that the United States could absorb another terrorist attack, conservatives who normally rail against left-wing political correctness played their own game of avoiding hard truths. They hammered President Obama as a weak commander in chief who was effectively inviting another terrorist attack. But the president had done no such thing. He had simply told the truth: that he was doing everything he could to prevent another 9/11 but that even after 9/11 “the biggest attack ever … we absorbed it and we are stronger.” The president spoke the truth. He was not giving in on the fight against terrorists. He was expressing almost hubristic, pro-American sentiment in noting the strength and resilience of our people and our country. Hard-line conservatives, sensing political vulnerability, turned it into a statement of surrender by a weak-kneed liberal Democrat. To them, the Democrats have long been suspect on national security. But they turned the president’s words against him in an unfair way. We do a service when we shed light on a statement that exposes a hidden truth. But deliberately misconstruing comments and turning them into something else is a lie—it’s a form of censorship, whether it’s done by the Left or the Right.

This is the other side of the political pressures limiting rational
assessment of terrorists’ power. They undercut honest dialogue about the Muslim terror threat. The not-so-hidden factor at play here is that Republicans are setting the stage to blame President Obama should any terrorist act take place. It has the effect of forcing the president into a defensive posture, hindering decisions about the practical limits of what we can do to prevent terrorism. This is a tit-for-tat game because Republicans are still trying to justify every over-the-top, costly step taken by the Bush administration, including getting into questionable wars. The politically correct thinking suggests that the Bush team was right to keep its deliberations secret to ensure quick response to any terror event. It also reveals how scared the Bush White House was of another terrorist attack. Their thinking was to control the response to any threat and keep Congress and the public out, assuming that they, not Congress, would be blamed if anything happened. As a result, they wanted to make all the decisions. Even after the overwhelming passage of the Patriot Act, which gave the government unprecedented powers to conduct surveillance of any suspected terrorist, President Bush, without consulting Congress, secretly authorized domestic wiretaps, monitoring the e-mail of Americans. Three years later, when the
New York Times
learned what had happened, it wrote that allowing such violations of the privacy rights of Americans “crossed constitutional limits on legal searches.” It also created a lack of accountability. It opened American intelligence agencies to charges of fixing their reports to please the White House. It called into question American credibility with other governments. The Department of Defense was similarly tarnished after Congress granted approval in 2002 for a program
called the Information Awareness Office. The plan allowed for collecting and analyzing phone calls, e-mails, and personal information. But under the Bush administration the program was discovered to have become a digital “drift net” to grab any and all communications, or what an expert Internet technician later called “vacuum-cleaner surveillance of all the data crossing the Internet.” That criticism grew so intense that Congress pulled funds for the program in 2003.