12/1/2017 Donald Trump and National Security

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Donald Trump and National Security

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By: Brian T. Kennedy
November 5, 2016

hite House press secretary Josh Earnest recently described the con ict between
the United States and ISIS as a “war of narratives.” War is ordinarily understood
as a means of defending vital national interests by defeating enemies. That we
are governed by people who, instead, nd it congenial to frame our challenges by using
Literature Department terminology explains why Donald Trump is on the verge of the
presidency.

The 2016 Republican presidential nominee has rejected and mocked the narratives that
have degraded our national security: Islam is a religion of peace; the costs of illegal
immigration are negligible and the bene ts are immense; we must, in particular, bring in
more Muslim refugees, even if they can’t be vetted, because to deny them entry is “not who
we are.” When Trump wins the presidency, it will be a vindication of the common sense of
the American people in rejecting these canards.

The citizens who make the country work are not fools. Throughout the campaign, Trump
has openly rejected the authority of the media, academic, and government elites—witness
his complete fearlessness when it comes to challenging the Generals’ expertise on dealing
with terrorists. For Trump, the facts about illegal immigrants killing American citizens, the
failures to ght in Iraq and Afghanistan with any clear, sustained objective, and the threat
posed by Islamic terrorists on American soil, suf ce to demonstrate what has not worked.
His complete aversion to political correctness now seems like an indispensable
quali cation for a commander-in-chief.

When the United States government fosters false ideas and fraudulent sentiments about
an enemy, and then sacri ces the people’s blood and treasure on that basis, there must be
a reckoning. Consider the most powerful national security narrative at work. While bodies
of American citizens were still burning in the rubble of the World Trade Center, President
George W. Bush declared that Islam was a religion of peace. A simple reading of the Koran
can nd the authoritative chapters and the verses that guide the devout Muslim. As we
approach a national referendum on the future of our country, it’s important to grasp that
faith’s explicit commands.

Sura 9 holds: “Fight and slay the unbelievers wherever ye nd them, and lie in wait for
them in every stratagem of war.” And Sura 5: “Oh ye who believe! Take not the Jews and the
Christians for your friends and protectors; they are but friends and protectors to each

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other. And he amongst you that turns to them for friendship is of them. Verily Allah guideth
not the unjust.”

It is often said that anyone who cites these Suras is cherry-picking the Koran’s most
violent parts. But they are crucial to the most radical Muslims’ worldview. They believe that
the in del, the non-believer, must be made into a Muslim, killed, or subjugated by

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conceding sovereign authority over his nation.

It is not our job to interpret Islam in ways that comfort us or gratify Muslims. Our job is to
defend these United States from all enemies foreign and domestic, which requires
understanding them as they understand themselves. And it matters not whether the
number of Muslims who actually believe this is a thousand, a million, or a billion. This is
what Donald Trump was getting at when, after a series of terrorist attacks here and
abroad, he called for a pause in Muslim immigration.

We have now almost two decades of failed policies—from our inadequate response to
September 11, to squandered wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to Obama and Hillary Clinton’s
encouraging the overthrow of stable regimes in the Middle East in favor of radical groups
like the Muslim Brotherhood. Al Qaeda and its various offshoots have metastasized into a
global Islamic ideological movement that recruits Muslims, young and old.

The leaders of al Qaeda mean to inspire a new generation of terrorists to attack America
and the West. If the “Great Satan” is willing to lie to its own people and put political
correctness ahead of strategic imperatives, they reason, then victory is not merely possible
but inevitable. Their goal is to continue to demoralize us and our allies through attacks
that condition the West to accept endlessly growing Muslim populations and Islamic
terrorism.

This clearly is the strategy of ISIS, whose narrative is that America is a force for evil in the
modern world. ISIS presents itself as the liberator of Islamic peoples from western
corruption, which it will effect by showing the “cross worshipers and democratic pagans of
the West” the true nature of their aggressions. Their goal has been to pursue military
actions that displace millions of Muslims in Syria and elsewhere, driving them into Europe
and the U.S. In so doing, they will have put in place both terrorists and sympathetic
migrants who’ll confuse and paralyze the West.

Trump rightly blames the rise of ISIS on Obama and Clinton. ISIS was organized,
supported, and armed by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey. President Obama and Secretary
of State Clinton regard all three as American allies, much more so than Israel. The rise of
ISIS is either gross incompetence on the part of Obama and Clinton or high government
policy. The WikiLeaks transcripts reveal some of each.

In any case, Hillary Clinton is willing to ful ll part of the ISIS strategy by calling for America
to accept 65,000 Syrian refugees. This does not include her immigration policies in
general, which will lead to hundreds of thousands of additional immigrants, many of them
Muslim. On pure policy grounds none of this makes sense.

There are, it is believed, 30 million foreign nationals in the United States today, plus 11
million more people here illegally. No one is quite sure of either number. We try to
assimilate them at a time when our government-run education system does not adequately

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teach the country’s history and principles, math and science, or any other basic skill,
leaving these new immigrants unequipped to hold anything other than the lowest paying
jobs. And, we try to assimilate them while heavy and increasing regulatory burdens inhibit
investment and economic growth. Instead, government welfare policies discourage
immigrants’ ambition and resourcefulness. One need look only to Europe’s stagnant
economies and fractured polities to see the inevitable consequences.

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Islamic immigration is dangerous because Islam operates like a political ideology, one
antithetical to American principles. The Suras mentioned above may not mean much to
most Muslims, but are taken quite seriously by large numbers.

We have the example as well of the Muslim Brotherhood and their operations in the United
States. We know, from a 2007 federal trial in Texas that investigated terrorist funding, the
contents of the Muslim Brotherhood’s “Strategic Memorandum on North American Affairs,”
written in 1991:

The general strategic goal of the Group in America is: Enablement of Islam in North America, meaning:
establishing an effective and a stable Islamic Movement led by the Muslim Brotherhood which adopts
Muslims' causes domestically and globally, and which works to expand the observant Muslim base, aims at
unifying and directing Muslims' efforts, presents Islam as a civilization alternative, and supports the global
Islamic State wherever it is.

The process of settlement is a “Civilization-Jihadist Process” with all the word means. The Ikhwan (the
Muslim Brotherhood) must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating
and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands
and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other
religions.

Andrew McCarthy, Frank Gaffney, Stephen Coughlin, and others have written excellent
treatments of the Muslim Brotherhood threat, but the federal government has yet to
designate it a terrorist organization. This passivity demonstrates the political power of the
Brotherhood’s af liates: the Council on American Islamic Relations, the Islamic Society of
North America, and Muslim Student Associations around the country. All aggressively
exploit America’s politically correct deference to Islam.

Donald Trump’s success, however, means millions of Americans refuse to look the other
way when it comes to the nature of Islam. Americans are very tolerant, but the attacks
after September 11—from Fort Hood, to the beheading in Oklahoma, the San Bernardino
massacre, and the Orlando nightclub shooting—demonstrated what was at stake. It is one
thing to have hundreds of individuals for law enforcement and the U.S. intelligence
community to monitor. It’s another if thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of
thousands of people living here disdain the United States in favor of an operational form of
Islam that seeks America’s destruction. If this permanent threat to the peace and
tranquility of the American people cannot be understood as a national security threat, then
nothing can be.

President Trump will have to address many threats. We do not yet possess a ballistic
missile defense to protect us from Russian, Chinese, Iranian, or North Korean nuclear
attacks. We have allowed our military and strategic forces to deteriorate to dangerous

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levels, and treated our veterans scandalously. Transforming these failures into successes
will require an urgency not seen since the Cold War. Thankfully, all are well within our
means.

We lack, above all, the moral clarity to grasp that our civilization is worth defending.
Whether it is stopping illegal immigration, thwarting Islamic terrorism, or protecting

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against foreign enemies, this election is about what is good for the American people. The
required choices and actions will save lives, but the point is not that we are afraid of dying.
Death comes to us all. We are more concerned about living as free men and women. That’s
an imperative, not a narrative.

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