The Obama White House talks glibly about helping millions of “Americans in waiting.” Most Americans are more concerned with the untold number of martyrs-in-waiting.
The FBI arrested three young Muslims in New York this week and charged them with planning to join ISIS. One wants to kill police and FBI agents, and one wants and kill President Obama. Another was arrested at the airport before he could board a fight to Istanbul.
Why did we stop the guy from leaving? We should let him go– and all other young Muslims eager to join ISIS. Let them go to Syria or Damascus and join ISIS. It’s so much easier to kill them on the battlefield over there than prosecute them and put them in prison for 20 years at great taxpayers’ expense.
Think about it. Why should we be arresting and prosecuting people who want to join ISIS and kill infidels? Instead, we should expedite their departure.
In fact, the more you think about it, it is obvious that we should not only allow them to leave, we should subsidize it, but on one condition: they are labeled enemy combatants, they can never return, and if they try to return, they will be shot on sight.
If they are citizens, they must surrender their passport and renounce their US citizenship. If they are immigrants they must surrender their visa and are forever barred from returning. Think of it not as a “no fly” list but a “fly home” list. They are going home to their “new Islamic caliphate.”
One expert estimated to FOX News that while there are two or three thousand Europeans — mainly French and British — fighting with ISIS in Syria and Iraq, there are only 150 to 250 Americans in that arena. Now, forgive me for being narrow-minded on this matter, but if they are fighting alongside ISIS jihadists in Syria or Iraq, that is a problem for Syria or Iraq, but they are not a threat to America if they are 5,000 miles away.
Unfortunately, we can’t say that about the unknown number of Americans — and immigrants and children of immigrants — who want to join the Islamic jihad but have not yet purchased a ticket to Istanbul. We must remember that the three young Muslims who killed a dozen people in December in Paris were native-born French citizens, the children of immigrants from North Africa, not immigrants themselves.
We need to encourage these angry Islamists to make that journey to join ISIS, and the sooner the better — before they start killing infidels in Richmond, Minneapolis, Seattle and Sacramento. Unless they leave and join the battle in the Middle East, we will have jihadist slaughter at “soft targets” across America– shopping malls in Los Angeles, baseball games in Boston, and college basketball games in Kansas.
That is not speculation, it is a certainty. An al-Qaeda affiliate has released a video message to Islamists living in the West: Come join the jihad in Syria and Iraq, “but if you can’t, kill infidels where you live.”
What will the Obama team do about our domestic jihadists? We know the answer. They will wait for the terrorist attacks and then prosecute any of the surviving Islamists as misguided misfits, alienated youth who needed better job opportunities, not as enemy soldiers who are waging war against the United States.
Obama cannot admit we are in a war with Islamist fundamentalism. If we are to take seriously the speech he gave to the “White House Conference on Violent Extremism,” our domestic jihadists-in-waiting simply need better educational opportunities. Then they will reject “extremism” and pursue the American dream instead of martyrdom. According to Obama, we have been mistranslating “Allah Akbar!” It really means, “I need a job!”
Obama’s plan to treat Islamist terrorism as a social problem created by poverty betrays either an unfathomable ignorance of the true motivations of Islamist jihadists or a cynical evasion of political responsibility. In either case it is a monumental failure of leadership at a time of extreme danger for our nation.
Tom Tancredo is the founder of the Rocky Mountain Foundation and founder and co-chairman of Team America PAC. He represented Colorado’s sixth congressional district in the United States House of Representatives from 1999 to 2009, and he is a former presidential candidate.
He is the author of In Mortal Danger: The Battle for America’s Border and Security, and he can be heard every Monday on Grassroots Radio Colorado with Kris Cook (KLZ 560 AM).
