In fact, Moore pointed out it is often the very groups intelligence officials want to investigate that pressure governments to eliminate certain training materials and criteria that agents use to try and determine who poses a security threat.
In New York, for instance, the NYPD censored an anti-terror handbook last year to appease offended Muslims, even though the handbook had accurately predicted radicalization patterns in recent homegrown terror cases.
Mayor Bill de Blasio agreed to purge the police training manual to help settle a federal lawsuit filed by the ACLU and Muslim groups who argued the anti-terror manual discriminated against Muslims. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) had organized a protest against the study upon which the manual was based as early as 2007, when it was first written.
This type of appeasement hurts counter-terrorism efforts, in Moore’s view.
“We keep asking this question over and over again after these horrible attacks: How can we prevent this?” he said. “And the way that we can prevent it is to allow the religious, as uncomfortable as it is, the Islamic dimension of this, to be part of the criteria that they use.”
CAIR never wants counter-terrorism officials to explore the Islamic dimension. In January, the group filed complaints with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice over “reports of systematic questioning of American-Muslim citizens by CBP about their religious and political views.”
They complained Muslims had been asked questions such as “What current Muslim scholars do you listen to?” and “What school of thought do you follow?”
Moore pointed out those are very useful questions. For example, when Syed Farook, the male San Bernardino shooter, returned to the U.S. from Saudi Arabia, he showed signs that he had gone through a process of radicalization: He had grown a beard, begun wearing Islamic dress and acquired a Saudi wife. Moore thinks it would have been appropriate to question him about the changes in his life.
Michael Savage
“We know that a lot of these killers – the Fort Hood killer, for example – were disciples of Anwar al-Awlaki, who since was killed in a drone strike, but he was here in our country,” Moore told Savage. “He was spreading around his tapes, his sermons, and a lot of these people were listening to him, so it would be relevant to ask somebody in an interrogation process or at the border, for example, ‘Who are the people that you listen to?'”
Philip Haney was one CBP agent who used to ask all the right questions when potential terrorists came through Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, where he was stationed. But his determination to do his job got him in trouble. Moore co-wrote Haney’s memoir “See Something, Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government’s Submission to Jihad.”
“This book is about somebody who really did care about the defense of our country, and he connected the dots, he followed the evidence where it led, and he was actually punished by the Obama administration DHS for collecting information on groups like CAIR,” Moore told Savage.
Haney collected plenty of useful intelligence on individuals groups linked to Islamic terrorism, but Haney’s superiors forced him either to delete or modify the records, because they were deemed “anti-Muslim.”
“But how can you remove references to Islam when every one of the extremists screams out ‘Allahu Akbar’ and such in their language?” Savage asked. “It’s all about religion to them, isn’t it?”
Moore agreed it is about Islam.
“There obviously are different interpretations of Islam, different kinds of Muslims, but what’s clear is that [the terrorists] are motivated by the Quran, they’re motivated by the writings of the life of Muhammad,” he said. “You can’t get around that. … If that’s what you believe, if you believe that you’re here in this country to ensure that Islamic law becomes the law of the land over the Constitution, you’re clearly a threat.”
Savage wondered what it will take to change American culture back to the way it was before the days of political correctness.
“This was not always the culture of America,” he said. “It was not always submissive, it was not always passive, and it was not always defeatist. That was a culture change.”
Moore, sounding an optimistic tone, said he believes the culture can change.
“It takes people with courage and boldness to be willing to be called an Islamophobe, to be called a bigot,” he said. “You have to have tough skin.”
Savage, who has developed tough skin over the years, offered some advice.
“I learned this when I was very young and people would try to insult me: Be particular whose insults you take to heart,” he warned. “That’s the most important thing I ever learned as I was growing up as a man, because you’re going to be insulted one way or the other if you step out and stand up for the right thing.”