Refugees and the Jihadist Fifth Column

Refugees and the Jihadist Fifth Column 

 

By Andrew C. McCarthy — November 19, 2015 

 

It is patently obvious that the Syrian refugees (and, in fact, people from lots of other Middle East hot spots) cannot be vetted by our government. When FBI Director Jim Comey acknowledged this, he was simply saying aloud what we already know perfectly well.

Remember: specifically with respect to the Syrians, the Obama administration told us that our government is so adept at distinguishing the good guys from the bad guys that, if the it spent enough of our money, it could arm, train and churn out a “moderate rebel” army of about 5,000 per year. A year and a half-billion dollars later, Obama had to shut down the program in utter humiliation: We managed to train only 54 “rebels” (about one percent of what was promised for the first year). Many of those vetted trainees immediately gave the equipment we’d supplied them with to al-Nusra, the Syrian al Qaeda affiliate.
So that’s what happened with the Syrians our government said it had vetted, knew well, and had months of close contact with. How effective do you figure the vetting would be for thousands of Syrians our government doesn’t have a clue about – including about whether they’re actually Syrians.
But there is a more critical point here. Even if you are competent and have sufficient background information to do effective vetting, you have to know what you are vetting for.
That is the subject of my column on the home page: “France’s ‘No Go’ Zones: Assimilation-Resistant Muslims Are the Real Refugee Problem.” Listening to our Beltway solons – very much including Republicans – talk about this subject, you would think the only people we have to worry about are terrorists. Therefore, if you vet someone and determine he’s not a terrorist, it’s “mission accomplished” and you can give him asylum.
That’s not even half of the challenge. As we are seeing in France, and have seen elsewhere in Europe and the Middle East, jihadism thrives when it has a support system of sharia-adherent Muslims. In Europe this means – as it would mean here – enclaves of assimilation-resistant Muslims.
On that score, who does Washington say are our allies against the jihad?
There is Turkey, ruled by the authoritarian Islamist, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. President Erdogan, a vigorous supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah (which is to say, of jihadists), is a huge part of the problem. It is he who encourages Muslim migration to Europe but then proclaims – while speaking in Germany – that pressuring Muslims in the West to assimilate is “a crime against humanity.”
Erdogan is a longtime confederate of the Muslim Brotherhood, which operates quite freely in Turkey. Among his partners is Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the influential sharia jurist who vows that Islam will “conquer Europe” and “conquer America” by dawa – the proselytism of Islamic law. Qaradawi is also a notorious proponent of jihad – by Hamas against Israel, and by any willing Muslim against Americans in Iraq.
Qaradawi is thus a master of the Islamist inside-outside strategy: “moderate” Islamists residing in non-Muslim countries exploit the atmosphere of violence created by jihadist terrorists in order to pressure governments to accommodate sharia. The purportedly moderate Islamists and the violent jihadists have the same objective: the creation of Islamic states governed by sharia. They work cooperatively to achieve this goal – even though, for the consumption of gullible Westerners, the “moderates” will occasionally condemn jihadist savagery and the jihadists will reciprocate by condemning “moderate Islamist” passivity.
Qaradawi is especially influential over the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. The principal goal of this 57-government bloc is the promotion of sharia. Yet, our government somehow considers the OIC to be its ally, – particularly important member states like Turkey and Saudi Arabia, the world’s leading propagator of Islamic supremacist ideology. As I explain in the column, a top agenda item of the OIC is to exhort Muslims in the West not to assimilate in the countries where they now reside. They are instructed that it is a religious duty to remain steadfastly sharia adherent. “Muslims,” the OIC proclaims, “should not be marginalized or attempted to be assimilated, but should be accommodated.”
Under these circumstantes, how are we possibly going to do refugee vetting that serves the national security interests of the United States?
It is patently obvious that our security challenge is not just jihadists; it is the combination of jihadists and their support network of assimilation-resistant Muslims. Indeed, even if we could vet for all the currently active jihadists, it is from the assimilation-resistance Islamic communities that future “homegrown” jihadists will emerge – and that is apart from the material and moral support jihadists get from like-minded Islamists in these communities.
We not only remain willfully blind to what our actual security threat is. We actually look for allies among the countries and Muslim Brotherhood operatives who campaign against Muslim assimilation while rationalizing jihadist terror as legitimate resistance.
If the United States government looks at Erdogan and sees a close ally, do we really think we can trust government officials to grasp the threat we face, much less vet it?