British intelligence has reportedly identified the terrorist responsible for beheading American James Foley, prompting fears of homegrown Islamic State sympathizers striking in the west and American experts insisting it’s time for politicians and the media to stop sanitizing the threat we face and where it comes from.
Reports suggest that hundreds of people holding American passports may be fighting alongside the Islamic State, or ISIS, in Iraq and Syria. The number of Europeans assisting the terrorist army could be well into the thousands.
American Freedom Defense Initiative President Pamela Geller says, if anything, the real numbers are probably worse.
“I think the numbers are probably low, because they haven’t taken the threat terribly seriously for the past ten years. They’ve been discounting and completely avoiding or omitting the motive,” said Geller, who is not shocked that some Muslims in western nations are attracted to ISIS.
“It’s not surprising at all that Muslims in the west would express support for the Islamic State. The idea of a caliphate transcends national allegiance and goes beyond anything current. It goes back to the beginning of Islamic history,” said Geller.
According to Geller, Muslim immigrants come in with a very different attitude than most who yearn to live in the west.
“Many Muslims come to the west with a ready made model of society, of government that they believe is superior to what is currently in place,” she said, noting most immigrants throughout history come not to change the west but to embrace it.
“Immigrant populations, whether from eastern Europe, whether from Asia, they would come to America for freedom. That was the idea of the shining light on the hill, it’s freedom, it’s individual rights. This is the uniqueness of America. This us what makes American exceptionalism exceptional. It’s individual exceptionalism,” said Geller.
One of the biggest problems for western nations is that they’ve largely allowed Muslims to export their vision for a nation to their adopted homelands, most notably through implementation of Sharia Law.
“The Muslim population, for example, in France is over ten percent. You see outside of Paris…it can be very frightening. The no-go zones, the Sharia zones, where firefighters and police cannot go. They are many times lured by particular criminal activity into these zones, only to be ambushed. We see it in the UK, increasingly, the imposition of Sharia Law. And people think it can’t happen here, but it is happening here,” said Geller.
Geller says American examples of capitulation to the Muslim agenda include mandatory prayer breaks at major companies like Heinz and Hertz and Muslim cashiers at Target and Walmart being excused from handling non-Halal meats. She says Muslim employees of Disney insist on wearing hijabs but objected when Disney tried to incorporate the head covering into costumes.
“It starts off with demands and then accommodation and more demand and so on and so on. We are at stage two, Europe is stage three. You look somewhere like Sudan. That’s stage five of the islamization of a particular country. It’s drip, drip, drip, drip. That’s how it’s happening,” said Geller.
“As you can see, the islamization of the workplace, of the public school, of the public square, of the national dialogue, where literally the media is self-enforcing the Sharia. They will not criticize Islam. They will not offend Islam,” she said.
So how can western nations prevent their people from becoming victims of home-grown radicals? Geller says it starts with educating the public, starting with an honest critique of a press that won’t tell the truth.
“The biggest weapon that the enemy has in their arsenal is the media,” said Geller. “The key is educating the public. First, they must understand who and what they’re up against. They don’t because it’s like they’re Helen Keller and someone moved the furniture.”
“We cannot defeat an enemy that not only do we not understand but we dare not say its name. This is what we have to do first and then we can strategize how you can defeat jihad,” she said.
Geller says President Obama is a prime example of trying to deal with a threat while simultaneously obscuring where the threat comes from and the ideology behind its actions.
“He’s woefully unprepared to face the threat of the Islamic State. He can’t even say it. He said it has nothing to do with religion. Their name is the Islamic State. I don’t know if he’s clueless. I don’t believe he’s clueless. I believe he’s complicit because we’ve seen him align with the jihad force in Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, in Libya with Al Qaeda-linked groups, in Gaza with Hamas. You know, Hamas is ISIS in Gaza,” said Geller.
Obama deserves much of the blame for the rise of ISIS, according to Geller, who says the president has botched virtually every step of addressing this threat.
“He created the threat of the Islamic State by leaving Iraq precipitously and giving an opportunity to this group. He has denied it has anything to do with Islam, despite its name. He has denied that the Foley killing has anything to do with the U.S., despite the fact that the Islamic State has made explicit threats, that Foley was beaten more than any other of the hostages because he was American, that Foley was literally was hung and crucified on a wall because his brother was a member of the U.S. Army,” said Geller.
“This shows that Obama is encased in denial and willful ignorance. This is not a recipe for success or a sign that he’s prepared to deal with the threat,” she said.
