Guy W. Farmer: Understanding radical Islam’s source isn’t our job

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a column about how political correctness has delayed the court-martial of the Fort Hood shooter, deranged Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, for nearly four years. Hasan, who shouted “Allahu Akhbar!” (God is Great) as he gunned down 13 fellow soldiers at Fort Hood in November 2009, will finally go to trial in July.

Meanwhile, Hasan continues to receive his full military pay as we taxpayers foot the bill for his defense team. The Obama administration and the Army call this “justice.”

And now we’ll go through a similar legal rigamarole leading up to the civil trial of accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzokhar Tsarnaev, a 19-year-old ethnic Chechen who was naturalized as a U.S. citizen last November.

Federal, state and local investigators think Tsarnaev and his late brother Tamerlan, 26, who was killed in a shootout with local police, are (or were) Muslim extremists who were on a mission to kill as many innocent bystanders as possible near the finish line of the marathon Monday, April 15. Their bombs killed three people, including an 8-year-old boy, a schoolteacher and a Chinese exchange student, and sent many more to hospitals, where several required amputations.

Officials close to the investigation said evidence suggests the brothers “were ‘self-radicalized’ through Internet sites and U.S. actions in the Muslim world,” according to moderate New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, who asked the right question: “What in God’s name does that have to do with planting bombs at the Boston Marathon and blowing-up innocent people?” “It’s amazing to me how we’ve come to accept this non sequitur,” he continued, “and how easily we’ve allowed radical Muslim groups and their apologists to get away with it.” Amen!

In other words, the Obama administration and so-called mainstream media frequently tiptoe around the fact that Islamic extremism is a clear and present danger to U.S. national security. Instead of attempting to understand the extremists’ alleged “legitimate grievances,” law enforcement officials should be trying to infiltrate radical Muslim mosques and organizations in an effort to obtain intelligence information aimed at deterring future terrorist attacks. Some squishy liberals might call this “profiling,” but I call it common sense.

“Make no mistake, it (Boston) was jihad,” former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey declared in The Wall Street Journal. “For five years we have heard ... of a claimed need to change the Muslim world’s perception of us (but) we haven’t heard a word ... suggesting any need to understand and confront a totalitarian ideology that has existed since the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1920s.” This violent ideology urges its jihadist followers to kill “infidels” — those who reject the teachings of radical Islam.

We should confront these Islamo-fascists head-on rather than to make excuses for them. Like many of you, I was disappointed when the Justice Department intervened to read Dzokhar Tsarnaev his Miranda rights before a special FBI High-Value Interrogation Group had finished questioning him. Perhaps he could have provided vital information about terrorist training and/or plans for future terrorist attacks in the U.S. Remember that solid intelligence is the key to preventing future attacks. In short, radical Islam is our enemy in the ongoing War on Terror.

Guy W. Farmer is the Appeal’s senior political columnist.