[guest post by Dana]
In response to today’s terrorist attack in Brussels, Ted Cruz posted the following on his Facebook page (emphasis mine):
Today radical Islamic terrorists targeted the men and women of Brussels as they went to work on a spring morning. In a series of co-ordinated attacks they murdered and maimed dozens of innocent commuters at subway stations and travelers at the airport.
For the terrorists, the identities of the victims were irrelevant. They –we—are all part of an intolerable culture that they have vowed to destroy.
For years, the west has tried to deny this enemy exists out of a combination of political correctness and fear. We can no longer afford either.
Our European allies are now seeing what comes of a toxic mix of migrants who have been infiltrated by terrorists and isolated, radical Muslim neighborhoods.
We will do what we can to help them fight this scourge, and redouble our efforts to make sure it does not happen here.
We need to immediately halt the flow of refugees from countries with a significant al Qaida or ISIS presence.
We need to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized.
We need to secure the southern border to prevent terrorist infiltration.
And we need to execute a coherent campaign to utterly destroy ISIS.
The days of the United States voluntarily surrendering to the enemy to show how progressive and enlightened we can be are at an end. Our country is at stake.
It is the bolded portion that is causing a stir. This comes just days after Ted Cruz announced his national security team members, and CAIR immediately requested that Cruz drop “designated hate group leader Frank Gaffney Jr., retired Lieutenant General William G. “Jerry” Boykin and other Islamophobes as a foreign policy advisers”.
Today, Andrew McCarthy, who is a member of Cruz’s newly formed team, laid out his argument supporting Cruz’s call for law enforcement to “secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized.” He argues that this administration has moved away from a post-9/11 prevention-first counterterrorism where law enforcement would pro-actively work to prevent attacks by gathering intelligence from inside Muslim communities sympathetic to “Islamic supremacy” to a practice where law enforcement now primarily engages after an attack occurs, or after a threat has been verified. The latter method is part of an effort by the Obama administration to keep Muslims from being lumped in with radical Islamists as well as messaging that the U.S. does not believe that we, as a nation, are “at war with Islam.” This revised method now includes an effort to “empower” approved Muslim groups, in lieu of law enforcement, to regulate and monitor their communities as well as gather intelligence for law enforcement.
Here is the heart of McCarthy’s defense of Cruz’s statement:
[W]e have to recognize the reality of what the threat is and where it comes from, and we have to stick with prevention-oriented, intelligence-based counterterrorism methods that work.
We have had some domestic terrorist attacks in the U.S. as the threat has intensified during Obama’s presidency. Yet, we have not suffered the spate of attacks they have had (and will continue having) in Europe. The main reasons for the difference are that (a) we have not had as much mass immigration of an assimilation-resistant population, and (b) our police and local governments have not ceded de facto jurisdiction over communities to Muslim activists who would turn them into anti-American enclaves.
Obama policies have put us on the trajectory to repeat Europe’s self-destruction. Cruz is saying we have to defend ourselves — and that we are worth defending.
Pro-American Muslims can be a real asset in effective counterterrorism by joining us in helping us ostracize and marginalize radical elements – both the violent jihadists and their ideological sympathizers. But we have to prosecute the war against Islamic supremacists and protect our homeland regardless of how much or how little help we get.
Unsurprisingly, not everyone buys that the implementation of the bolded portion of Cruz’s plan (as briefly outlined by Cruz, without knowing the particulars) would result in a positive outcome. I apologize for the choppiness of the tweets below, but for the sake of brevity, I wanted to focus on the bottom-line:
–Dana
