We are all aware of the barbaric acts of ISIS, al Qaeda and the others flying the Black Flag. Sadly their violence continues to kill innocents around the world and here at home. They fight in the cause of Jihad to impose their totalitarian religion on all people. But they are not the only ones working toward that goal. There are other Islamist groups who seem much less dangerous on the surface, but actually represent an even more insidious threat to free western society. They seek to use our very freedoms as weapons against us.
There is a persistent suggestion by those who want to increase the number of incoming Syrian refugees that the Federal government will guarantee our security by performing rigorous background checks on them. Of course, to be useful, you’d have to check records in Syria. Those records, if they still exist at all amid the ruins of a civil war, are often going to be in places where no police could drop in to look through them.
The folly of this approach is made abundantly clear by the admission by European Union (EU) authorities that they had actually employed one of the Brussels bombers inside their main Parliamentary headquarters.
“He held a summer holiday job cleaning at the Parliament for one month in 2009 and one month in 2010. Those were the only instances he worked at the Parliament,” the parliament said in a statement…. the suspect did not have any criminal history during the two one-month stints he worked for a contractor hired to clean the building.
“As required by the contract, the cleaning firm submitted proof of the absence of a criminal record to the European Parliament,” the statement said.
A clean background check did nothing to ensure that they had not employed a radical, one so devoted that he would eventually volunteer to serve as a suicide bomber.
The problem is one that is well-known. As European demographics tilt more heavily Muslim in each successive generation, the youth available for employment in such jobs will be more likely to harbor radical views. The danger extends to the police and security services, as we explored here last week. Policemen in particular need the vigor of youth, and if the only youths available are Muslims, you will therefore have to hire increasingly large numbers of Muslim policemen.
The effect can be to nurture radical views within the very security services that are needed to constrain the radicals. Mark Steyn gives the example of a recently fired Belgian national security officer who said that he would kill “each and every Jew,” and that “the word ‘Jew’ itself is dirty.” The officer had, among other assignments, guarded Molenbeek’s mayor Françoise Schepmans.
As mentioned in the previous post, authorities in Europe hardly seem to need to be infiltrated to get them to turn against the freedoms of their native citizens. The influence of Muslim Brotherhood organizations in ‘training’ national governments, police, and security services has turned even native German police against the liberties of their people. How much worse will it be when the police are members of the Brotherhood, instead of simply trained by them?
The President has clear Constitutional authority to pause immigration from countries and regions known to be incubators for jihadi terrorism in defense of U.S. national interests.