With the massacre in Orlando, Fla., Islamic terrorists have now killed 91 and injured more than 370 on U.S. soil since President Obama took office. Yet Obama still refuses to admit that radical Islam is a threat. Could this explain why his administration keeps missing warnings signs that could have prevented these attacks?
It didn’t take long after the attack at a gay bar in Orlando, which claimed 49 lives and injured at least 53 others, for the public to learn that the terrorist, Omar Mateen, had been on a terrorism watch list and was twice interviewed by the FBI.
In fact, FBI director James Comey said on Monday that there were “strong indications of radicalization.” In other words, this attack didn’t come out of the blue. So why wasn’t something done before Sunday?
This has become a deeply troubling pattern during the Obama administration. In fact, in all the past major Islamic terror attacks carried out on U.S. soil, federal officials either ignored or overlooked warning signs that arguably could have prevented the carnage.
San Bernardino, December 2015 (14 killed 22 wounded): Tashfeed Malik passed three background checks by immigration officials before coming to the U.S. from Pakistan on a fiancee visa. That’s despite the fact that she had expressed support for violent jihad on social media.
Her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, meanwhile, had been radicalized for years, and the FBI later said he had ties to a group of jihadists in California who had been arrested in 2012. His actions before the shooting alarmed his neighbors, who said they didn’t report “suspicious activity” at his home out of fear of being called racist.
Chattanooga, Tenn., July 2015 (5 killed 2 wounded): Kuwaiti-born Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez had spent seven months in Jordan before shooting up a recruiting center and a Navy Reserve center. A friend told CNN that “something happened over there,” and before the shooting Abdulazeez blogged about wanting to become a martyr, fighting “jihad for the sake of Allah.”
Garland, Texas, May 2015 (2 killed): One of the killers at a “Draw Mohammad” contest, Elton Simpson, was reportedly on a no-fly list for a terror-related offense in 2011. Another had been investigated in 2012 and was suspected of plotting an attack at a Super Bowl game.
Boston Marathon, April 2013 (3 killed, 264 wounded): The Russian government had warned U.S. authorities that one of the Boston Marathon bombers, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was a violent radical Islamist almost two years before the attack. The CIA reportedly cleared him of ties to violent extremism.
Benghazi, Libya, September 2012: (4 killed): As Sharyl Attkisson reported, there were eight major warning signs before the Benghazi attacks — which claimed the lives of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans — including an online posting in which al-Qaida stated its intent to attack the Red Cross, the British and Americans in Benghazi. “The goals were accomplished in order,” Attkisson notes.
Ft. Hood, Killeen, Texas, November 2009 (13 killed, 32 wounded): A Senate investigation faulted the Army and the FBI for missing warnings signs that could have prevented the Fort Hood attack, in which Maj. Nidal Hasan went on a shooting spree. Then Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, I-Conn., said the probe’s “painful conclusion is that the Fort Hood massacre could have and should have been prevented.”
Little Rock, Ark., June 2009 (1 killed, 1 wounded): After Abdulhakim Muhammad opened fire on a U.S. military recruiting office in Little Rock, Ark., it came to light that the FBI had him in its sights, but didn’t think he posed a threat. After the killing, his father blasted the FBI for ignoring what the father said were obvious signs of his son’s radicalization.
This is to say nothing of two Islamic terror attacks that failed only because the terrorists themselves bungled the job.
When Adul Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight into Detroit, even Obama admitted that there were “warning signs (that) would have triggered red flags, and the suspect would have never been allowed to board that plane for America.” Had he succeeded, it would have cost 289 people their lives.
After Faisal Shahzad’s bomb in Times Square failed to go off, Richard C. Holbrooke, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, admitted that the U.S. hadn’t “paid enough attention to the warning signs” about Shahzad. The FBI said the bomb could have killed thousands had it gone off as intended.
Obviously the government can’t stop every single attack, and there have been some attempts foiled by the FBI and Homeland Security. But Obama clearly deserves blame for the attacks that have succeeded.
As IBD pointed out after the San Bernardino attacks, Obama took several steps to redirect the war on terror to his own, more politically correct, liking.
“He ordered the FBI and Homeland Security to delete ‘jihad’ from counterterrorism manuals and fire all trainers who linked terrorism to Islam,” we noted in this space.
“He also stopped a major investigation of terror-supporting Muslim Brotherhood front groups and mosques after U.S. attorneys successfully prosecuted Brotherhood charities. And he opened the floodgates to Muslim immigrants, importing more than 400,000 of them, many from terrorist hot spots Somalia, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.”
Even now, Obama seems more intent on blaming the NRA for the Orlando attacks than radical Islam.
The massacre, he said, is a “further reminder of how easy it is for someone to get their hands on a weapon that lets them shoot people in a school, or in a house of worship, or a movie theater, or in a nightclub.”
Wrong, Mr. President.
The attack is a further reminder that you have been failing to do your job of protecting U.S. citizens from threats foreign and domestic because he refuses to acknowledge the source of these threats.
(via: Investors)
