Robert Spencer reports:

Speaking at the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, Evans declared:

We’re all Muslims deep down. We all yearn for peace.

…For Evans, Islam is not just a religion of peace, but the religion of peace: to be a Jew, a Christian, a Hindu, a Buddhist, or an atheist would not make one yearn for peace.

It’s a remarkable place to make the assertion.  This particular mosque, the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, has produced at least a dozen jihadists.  Secure Freedom made it the feature of a short documentary.

You might suspect that the Police Commissioner simply made a mistake in his pandering.  As Spencer points out, this isn’t a simple error by a police officer who didn’t know any better. Evans has been to this mosque before:

He went there last December — right after two Muslims murdered fourteen people at a Christmas party in San Bernardino. He made that visit in order to make sure that the local Muslims weren’t jittery after that attack:

I don’t think we can tolerate bigotry toward the Muslim population. They’re an important part of our city. I just want to reassure them that we’re here for them.

The real problem is that the police in America, following the lead of a Federal government that has long looked upon the Muslim Brotherhood as potential partners, have accepted training in how to talk about Islam that leads them to aggressive self-censorship. Rather than speaking the truth about the relationship between Islam and violence — or even about this one particular mosque and violence — the police follow the advice of their trainers and make anodyne statements that treat Islam as essentially peaceful.  If Islam is essentially peaceful, then any violence in the name of Islam must be an accident or a perversion of the faith.

In fact, it is the most literal and obvious readings of Islam’s core documents that lead people to believe that war, violence, and slavery are called for in service of the faith.  It is the variations of Islam that attempt to downplay those literal, obvious readings that have some explaining to do.  Even among those branches of Islam that have adopted esoteric readings of the Koran and Hadiths that do allow them to live in peace, there is in every generation a danger that their children will absorb and believe in the obvious, direct message from the texts.

There are other reasons to object to the claim that “we are all Muslims, deep down.”  The assertion is theologically and philosophically absurd.  Politically, however, what is most wrong with it is that it marks a dangerous self-deception on the part of American security professionals.  The Commissioner should correct his vision, or else his line of work.