The FBI placed Orlando shooter Omar Mateen, 29, on its terrorist watch list in 2013 after co-workers reported that he had made “inflammatory comments” they felt showed his sympathies for terrorist groups.
{mosads}When agents questioned him, they determined that Mateen “had not broken any laws,” and closed the investigation. In Obama’s America, it’s not illegal to declare your sympathies for radical Islamic terrorist groups – even repeatedly and vehemently, as Mateen’s co-workers claim was the case – because radical Islamic terrorism doesn’t exist. So the FBI took him off the watchlist.
In 2014, the FBI came back for a second try. This time, they found that Mateen had been in contact with an American who had traveled to Syria, joined ISIS and volunteered for jihad, blowing himself up in a homicide bombing.
An FBI official told reporters that they closed that investigation “because they concluded the contacts with the suicide bomber had been minimal.” Once again, they took him off the terror watchlist.
Now, obviously no rational American wants the FBI arresting people because of their opinions, even though the Obama Justice Department and several Attorneys General are trying very hard to criminalize as “hate speech” anyone who cites scientific data showing that man-made global warming isn’t happening.
But when the FBI investigates the same individual for suspected terrorist ties twice in two years, you would think they might conduct an undercover investigation to learn more.
Remember: they hadn’t investigated Mateen twice because he was a Muslim. They investigated him because he exhibited behavior that suggested he might pose a potential threat. Despite this, they were not allowed to push that investigation further, because of political correctness.
This is not the first time that innocent Americans have died because of political correctness.
Just days after the San Bernardino shootings last December, we learned that the Department of Homeland Security had shut down an intelligence-based screening program that had identified the mosque shooter Syed Farook attended as a recruitment center for jihadis.
Had DHS been allowed to continue using that screening program and pursue its investigation of the mosque, they would have stumbled upon Syed Farook and arguably could have prevented a massacre of American innocents.
Instead, they fired the intelligence analyst who devised the program, Phil Haney, and ordered all the data he had uncovered about jihadi recruiting centers destroyed because it offended President Obama’s Muslim Brotherhood advisors, who worked hard to eliminate all such law enforcement programs on the pretence they were “offensive” to Muslims.
Political correctness kills.
President Obama acknowledged the Orlando massacre as a terrorist attack in his initial comments to the nation. But once again, he refused to utter the words “radical Islamic terrorism” or even “radical Islam.” For the Commander-in-Chief to describe the enemy simply by his tactic, in this case terrorism, ignores the reality of warfare.
Fox News reported on Monday that U.S. intelligence officials now realize that Mateen travelled to Saudi Arabia in 2011 to perform the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. He made a second trip to the Saudi kingdom again in 2012. Apparently, the FBI never asked him about those trips, and if he happened to mention them, they could not follow up, because they involved his “faith.”
In her response to the terror attack, Hillary Clinton treated Mateen as a “lone wolf,” as if his pledge of allegiance to ISIS was unimportant. She then warned about stigmatizing Muslims, claiming that “hate crimes” against Muslims had tripled in the aftermath of the San Bernardino attacks.
Just what were those hate crimes? Reportedly, there were 21 threats, 15 assaults of various types, 11 cases of “criminal mischief,” and 2 arsons. Certainly, not good.
Unlike attacks by Muslims against Christians and Jews (and other Muslims), however, there were no honor killings, no murders, no knifings or maimings, and just one alleged firearms offense, which apparently has never been verified.
FBI statistics on hate crimes since 2012 have shown at least five times as many reports of hate crimes against Jews than against Muslims – a detail that Muslim Brotherhood advocates and apologists would have us ignore.
“We need to tell the truth about radical Islam and we need to do it now,” Donald Trump proclaimed just minutes after Mrs. Clinton finished her speech. “I refuse to be politically correct.”
When it comes to defeating the terrorists who seek to kill as many of us as they can, this is a real choice: one candidate who pledges to continue President Obama’s politically correct — and deadly — fantasy world, or one who tells the truth.
Timmerman is a Donald Trump supporter, and was the 2012 Republican nominee in Maryland’s 8th congressional district. He is the author of Deception: The Making of the YouTube Video Hillary & Obama Blamed for Benghazi, forthcoming from Post Hill Press in July.