Still haven’t heard him rant about Islamic terrorists.
Via Air Force Times:
Last week, the FBI managed to thwart a massive bombing in Kansas. The horrific plot was extensive, planned over eight months by three members of a militia group who called themselves the “Crusaders.” Their target was carefully picked: 120 Somali immigrants living in a small apartment block, one unit of which was serving as a mosque.
This kind of terroristic behavior is exactly what we’ve been afraid of at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, of which I am founder and president.
It’s exactly what I meant when I said, in a Huffington Post article, “What happens when all of the discourse regarding Muslims both at home and abroad is couched in terms that divide, denigrate, demean, demoralize and degrade? It should be so incredibly obvious — any contact with Muslims then turns into a crusade.”
It’s exactly the kind of thing former CIA director David Patraeus worried about in an op-ed for the Washington Post: “those who flirt with hate speech against Muslims should realize they are playing directly into the hands of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. The terrorists’ explicit hope has been to try to provoke a clash of civilizations — telling Muslims that the United States is at war with them and their religion. … Such statements directly undermine our ability to defeat Islamist extremists by alienating and undermining the allies whose help we most need to win this fight: namely, Muslims.”
It’s exactly what Michael Hayden, another former CIA and NASA director meant when he said, in an interview with Al Jazeera: “We don’t have radicalized communities in the United States. We have some radicalized individuals, but we have it fully within our ability to create radicalized communities, and that kind of rhetoric [risks] radicalizing communities.”
We keep building an environment of divisiveness, hatred and fear. We keep feeding the hate machine. And the most vile, downright disgusting part of it is even worse. Our own military is using “Crusader” visuals and verbiage on military bases and in military imagery.
HT: TAH