THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume XIII, Issue # 213, August 29, 2011
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
MAKING BELIEVE -- U.S. COUNTERTERRORISM NON-POLICY:
Obama's Pretend Counterterrorism Policy
By Dr. Daniel Pipes
A U.S. WHITE HOUSE POLICY PAPER ON METHODS TO PREVENT TERRORISM: PRESIDENT OBAMA'S
COUNTER-PRODUCTIVE & DANGEROUS APPROACH TO COUNTERTERRORISM -- A FIRM STAND ON THE WRONG SIDE OF
THREE DISTINCT COUNTERTERRORISM DEBATES -- THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM -- HOW TO IDENTIFY THE ENEMY -- THE
APPROPRIATE RESPONSE TO THE PROBLEM -- THE ENSHRINING OF A FRINGE STUDY AS U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY POLICY --
WHAT MUST BE DONE BY AMERICANS WHO FAVOR A GENUINELY EFFECTIVE COUNTERTERRORISM POLICY: UNITE
IN A CONCERTED ENDEAVOR TO REMOVE LEFTISTS & MULTICULTURISTS FROM THE OFFICES OF THE U.S. GOVERNMENT
FULL STORY:
With trumpets and drum rolls, the U.S. White House, in early August, released a policy paper on methods to prevent
terrorism, said to have been two years in the making. Signed personally by President Barack Hussein Obama and with
rhetoric vaunting "the strength of communities" and the need to "enhance our understanding of the threat posed by
violent extremism," the document looks anodyne.
But, beneath the calm, lies a counterproductive – and dangerous – approach to counterterrorism. The import of this
paper consists in its firm stand on the wrong side of three distinct counterterrorism debates, with the responsible Right
(and a few sensible Liberals) on one side, and Islamists, Leftists, and multiculturalists on the other.
The first debate concerns the nature of the problem. The responsible Right points to one immense threat,
Islamism, a global ideological movement that has motivated some 23,000 terror attacks worldwide since 9/11. Islamists
deny that their ideology spawns violence, and they categorize those 23,000 attacks as the work of criminals, crazies, or
misguided Muslims. Western Leftists and multiculturalists concur, bringing their formidable cadres, creativity, funds,
and institutions to support the Islamists' denial of responsibility.
Hearings held this year by the U.S. House of Representatives illustrate this difference. Peter King (Republican of New
York), Chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, insisted on dealing exclusively with radicalization of
Muslims. The ranking Democrat, Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, took exception, noting that "there are a variety of
domestic extremist groups more prevalent in the United States than Islamic extremists, including neo-Nazis,
environmental extremists, anti-tax groups, and others." He requested that the hearings be "a broad-based examination
of domestic extremist groups, regardless of their respective ideological underpinnings."
King rejected this request, countering that "While there have been extremist groups and random acts of political
violence throughout our history, the Al-Qa'ida attacks of 9/11 and the ongoing threat to our nation from Islamic jihad
were uniquely diabolical and threatening to America's security."
The second debate concerns how to identify the enemy. The Right and responsible parties generally talk
about Islamism, jihad, and terrorism; thus, a New York Police Department report from 2007, Radicalization in the
West: The Homegrown Threat, refers in its first line to the "threat from Islamic-based terrorism." Islamists and their
allies talk about everything else – violent extremism, Al-Qa'ida and Associated Networks (dubbed AQAN), overseas
contingency operation, man-caused disasters, and (my favorite) a "global struggle for security and progress." The
forces of multiculturalism have made deep inroads: A U.S. Department of Defense inquiry looked into the 2009 Fort
Hood rampage by Major Nidal Hasan, killing 14, and its report, Protecting the Force, never mentioned the
terrorist's name or acknowledged his obvious Islamist motivation.
The third debate concerns the appropriate response. The Islamist-Left-multicultural crowd finds the solution in
partnership with Muslims, together with an emphasis on civil rights, due process, lack of discrimination, goodwill, and
avoiding a backlash. The responsible Right agrees with these goals but views them as ancillary to the full quiver of
military and law enforcement methods, such as intelligence gathering, arrests, long detentions, renditions, deportation,
prosecution, and incarceration.
Into these three debates waddles a 4,600-word, poorly-written, ill-organized White House report vehemently advocating
the Islamist/Leftist/multiculturalist position.
Nature of the problem? "neo-Nazis and other anti-Semitic hate groups, racial supremacists, and international
and domestic terrorist groups."
Name the enemy? The paper itself never mentions Islamism. Its title, Empowering Local Partners to Prevent
Violent Extremism in the United States, avoids even mentioning terrorism.
Appropriate response? "Just as we respond to community safety issues [such as gang violence, school
shootings, drugs, and hate crimes] through partnerships and networks of government officials, Mayor's offices, law
enforcement, community organizations and private sector actors, so must we address radicalization to violence and
terrorist recruitment through similar relationships and by leveraging some of the same tools and solutions."
Raising community safety issues reveals a severe conceptual deficiency which the Los Angeles Times dismissed
as "implausible." The report praises the Justice Department's "Comprehensive Gang Model," deeming it a flexible
framework that "has reduced serious gang-related crimes." Great news in the battle against gangs! But gangs are criminal
enterprises and Islamist violence is ideological warfare. Gang members are hoodlums, Islamists are zealots. To compare
them distorts the problem at hand. Yes, they both deploy violence, but applying techniques from one to the other is akin
to asking pastry cooks to advise firefighters.
The lone sentence in Empowering that recognizes the danger of Islamism fixates on one small group, stating that
"Al-Qa'ida and its affiliates and adherents represent the preeminent terrorist threat to our country." This ignores the 99
percent of the Islamist movement unconnected to Al-Qa'ida, such as the Wahhabi movement, the Muslim Brotherhood,
Hizb ut-Tahrir, the Iranian government, Hamas, Hizbullah and Jamaat ul-Fuqra, not to speak of socalled lone wolves. U.S.
Representative Sue Myrick (Republican of North Carolina) rightly notes that the policy paper "raises more questions …
than it answers."
The intellectual roots of Empowered go back to a George Soros-funded 2004 initiative, the Promising Practices
Guide: Developing Partnerships Between Law Enforcement and American Muslim, Arab, and Sikh Communities by
Deborah A. Ramirez, Sasha Cohen O'Connell, and Rabia Zafar. These authors made their outlook clear: "The most
dangerous threats in this war [on terrorism] are rooted in the successful propagation of anger and fear directed at
unfamiliar cultures and people." The most dangerous threat, they announced, is not Islamist terror, with its thousands of
fatalities, but a supposed widespread bias by Americans against minorities. As I observed in 2004, "The guide might
present itself as an aide to counterterrorism, but its real purpose is to deflect attention from national security to the
privileging of select communities."
While the document unobjectionably emphasizes American constitutional values and the need to partner with Muslims, it
says not a word about the need to distinguish between Islamist and anti-Islamist Muslims. Empowering finesses
the dismal fact that Islamists dominate the organized American Muslim leadership and their objectives share more with
terrorists than counterterrorists. Representative King correctly worries that the White House document condemns
"legitimate criticism of certain radical organizations or elements of the Muslim-American community," something urgently
needed to distinguish foe from friend.
Indeed, the Obama administration's willingness to partner with Muslims who reject the American constitutional order
accounts for Islamist organizations' delighted responses to this paper. The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a
terrorist-supporting front organization, praised it as "objective and holistic," while the likeminded Muslim Public Affairs
Council deemed it "very useful."
In contrast, Melvin Bledsoe, father of a convert to Islam, Carlos Bledsoe, who, in 2009, shot and killed a soldier at a
military-recruiting center in Little Rock, Arkansas, said of the report: "It's never going to fix the problem when they're
trying to dance around the issues." Ed Husain of the Council on Foreign Relations dismissed it for saying "worryingly
little" and being primarily designed "not to offend Muslims."
In brief, an organization connected to terrorists swoons over the Obama administration's pretend counterterrorism policy,
while the grieving father of a terrorist scornfully dismisses it. That tells us everything.
What now, with the enshrining of a fringe study as national policy? There are no shortcuts: Those who want a genuine
counterterrorism policy must work to remove the political Left and the multiculturalists from American government.
© Daniel Pipes 2011
Originally Published in National Review, August 29, 2011
Republished with the Permission of Daniel Pipes
Reprinted from the Daniel Pipes Mailing List, August 29, 2011
URL: http://www.danielpipes.org/10094/obama-counterterrorism-policy
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
The Islamist Fifth Column -- America's Internal Enemies:
Disloyalty, Subversion, Sedition, & Treason
Islamism & Jihadism -- The Threat of Radical Islam
Page Three
Page Two
Page One
Counterterrorism & U.S. National Security
Middle East -- Arabs, Arab States,
& Their Middle Eastern Neighbors
American Foreign Policy -- The Middle East
International Politics & World Disorder:
War, Peace, & Geopolitics in the Real World:
Foreign Affairs & U.S. National Security
Page Two
Page One
Islamist Terrorist Attacks on the U.S.A.
Osama bin Laden & the Islamist Declaration of War
Against the U.S.A. & Western Civilization
Islamist International Terrorism &
U.S. Intelligence Agencies
U.S. National Security Strategy
Dr. Daniel Pipes, a Ph.D. in Islamic History (Harvard University, 1978), is Founder and President of the Middle East Forum,
Publisher of Middle East Quarterly,
Founder of Campus Watch, Taube Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, a
signatory of the Project for the New American Century, a former board member of the U.S. Institute of Peace, a former
adjunct scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a Golden Circle supporter of the U.S. Committee for a Free
Lebanon, a former member of the U.S. Department of Defense Special Task Force on Terrorism and Technology, and a
former lecturer at the U.S. Naval War College, Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and the University of
Pennsylvania. Dr. Pipes was the Director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute from 1986 to 1993.
Author or co-author of eighteen books, Dr. Pipes is a regular columnist for National Review Online, Front Page
Magazine, the New York Sun, and the Jerusalem Post. His analyses of world trends and of forces and
developments in the Middle East have appeared in numerous North American newspapers, including the Washington
Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. He frequently appears on American network
television, as well as at universities and think tanks, to discuss the Middle East, Islam, and the Islamist threat to the
U.S.A. and the West. He also has appeared on BBC and Al Jazeera, and has lectured in approximately
twenty-five countries.
Dr. Pipes is a Polish-American Jew whose parents fled Poland in 1939, immigrated to the U.S.A., and assimilated well into
American society and culture. His father is Richard Pipes, an American historian specializing in Russian and Soviet history
and serving as Professor of History at Harvard University from 1950 until his retirement in 1996. During the Cold War, the
worldview of Richard Pipes was strongly anti-Soviet and anti-Communist.
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