WASHINGTON – “Political correctness” in the United States and Europe is causing the West to ignore dire warnings, including those enunciated in recent days by British intelligence MI5 Director-General Andrew Parker, asserts former U.S. Ambassador Henry Cooper.
“If only 1 percent of the Muslims in the United States are among the true believers, who cheer the jihadis even if they are not actively involved in acts of terrorism – that amounted to 35,000 in 2010,” Cooper said. “How many more are here now, given our lax emigration policies and our leaky borders?”
Cooper was President Reagan’s chief negotiator in the successful Strategic Defense Initiative negotiations, a program also known as the “Star Wars” initiative, with the Soviet Union and the first director of the Strategic Defense Initiative under President George H.W. Bush. He also is at the forefront of the effort to warn of the impact of an electromagnetic pulse event on the nation.
The MI-5 chief Parker said the West faces “more complex and ambitious plots that follow the now sadly well-established approach of al-Qaida and its imitators: attempts to cause large-scale loss of life, often by attacking transport systems or iconic targets.
“We know, for example, that a group of core al-Qaida terrorists in Syria is planning mass casualty attacks against the West,” Parker said.
Even then, Cooper said, Parker echoed “politically correct folks” in his reference to claims made recently by the Islamic State, or ISIS.
“I won’t dignify the group with its self-adopted propaganda label ‘Islamic State,'” Parker said. “Scholars have rightly pointed out that it is neither ‘Islamic’ nor is it a state. Its true nature is visible to all from its visceral brutality, including the murder of hostages, and its indulgence of the very worst imaginable forms of treatment of other human beings.”
Parker said its “hatred is directed against all who do not adhere to its own twisted ideology.”
“The vast majority of its victims are Muslims. It is rightly condemned by Muslim leaders and scholars,” he said.
Parker’s comments come on the heels of the Islamic jihadist attacks by Al-Qaida in the Arab Peninsula and ISIS last week on the French satirist newspaper Charlie Hebdo that murdered 12 people and on a Jewish delicatessen in which four customers were killed.
‘Political correctness swamp’
Cooper referred to a piece he wrote in 2010 that showed how the United States has been descending into a “political correctness swamp.”
Political correctness was prompting a wave of “double-think” to which the public was being increasingly exposed daily, with the effect of controlling individual and collective lives, he wrote.
Cooper referred to the killing of 13 U.S. Army personnel by Army Maj. Nadal Hasan in November 2009 at Ft. Hood, Texas, which the Obama administration referred to as “workplace violence.”
Hasan was a disciple of Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula leader Anwar al-Awlaki and yelled “Allahu akbar” while gunning down his military colleagues.
Since then, Hasan has been sentenced to death pending appeals, but it hasn’t stopped him from recently declaring his own allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
“He is being tried for murder in an act described by the ‘politically correct’ as ‘workplace violence,’ but which any rational person would call an act of Islamic terrorism, or a ‘Jihadi terrorist attack,'” Cooper wrote at the time.
Cooper said that if a majority of Muslims don’t support the jihadists’ terrorist acts, they should speak out.
However, Cooper referred to telling comments made by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi on New Year’s Day in an address to Muslim clerics urging them to take responsibility to change the world’s outlook on Islam today.
“I am referring here to the religious clerics. … It’s “inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire ummah (Islamic community) to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of world. Impossible!
“That thinking – I am not saying ‘religion’ but ‘thinking’ – that corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the centuries, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is antagonizing the entire world. It’s antagonizing the entire world! … All this that I am telling you, you cannot feel it if you remain trapped within this mindset. You need to step outside of yourselves to be able to observe it and reflect on it from a more enlightened perspective.
“I say and repeat again that we are in need of a religious revolution. You, imams, are responsible before Allah. The entire world, I say it again, the entire world is waiting for your next move … because this ummah is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost – and it is being lost by our own hands.”
While such an initiative by Sisi has been long in waiting, Cooper said the establishment news media have almost entirely ignored such comments.
However, like the Islamic jihadists, Sisi who attended the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 2006, wrote in his thesis a reference to imposing Shariah, or Islamic law, on the U.S. constitution.
“(T)o codify the main themes of the Islamic faith, they should be represented in the constitution or similar document,” Sisi wrote. “This does not mean a theocracy will be established, rather it means a democracy will be established built upon Islamic beliefs.”
Cooper pointed out, however, that Shariah, the basis for “Islamic beliefs,” is in direct conflict with the U.S. Constitution.
Cooper’s reference to political correctness echoes recent comments by Clare Lopez to WND. A former CIA analyst, Lopez said the jihadist terrorist attack in France underscored concerns that the Obama administration is in retreat, displaying weakness of U.S. leadership in combating the jihadist threat.
“The United States is essentially hors du combat (French for “out of the fight”) in the jihad wars – the wars to stay free of Shariah,” said Lopez, vice president for research and analysis at the Washington-based Center for Security Policy.
Lopez pointed out that the administration refuses to use terminology that “correctly identifies” the enemy, which she identified as “forces of Islamic jihad and Shariah – Muslim terrorism, Islamic jihad – some combination of these that demonstrates we know that authoritative, mainstream, orthodox Islamic doctrine drives and justifies what Islamic terrorists do.”
She added that the United States “cannot fight what we will not name.”
