by ConservativeHQ.com Staff
The appointment of Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly as White House Chief of Staff has opened a new, and dangerous, search for a Secretary of Homeland Security.
Prior to the nomination and confirmation of General John Kelly as DHS Secretary no one campaigned harder for the job than did the Chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, Representative Mike McCaul of Texas.
Our view then, and now, is that McCaul would be a disaster as Secretary of Homeland Security.
Not only is McCaul soft on illegal aliens and amnesty, but he has demonstrated a total lack of understanding of the threat that Muslim terrorism and Islamism present to the American homeland and more importantly to constitutional liberty.
As the President and his team consider names for this vital position it should never be forgotten that Rep. McCaul was a vital member of the team that implemented Obama’s failed “Countering Violent Extremism” counter terrorism doctrine.
At the time McCaul and Obama were promoting the canard that there is a universal element of “violent extremism” that must be countered we asked the question: Who are these “violent extremists” who need to be countered?
Are they actually Islamists, such as Yemeni Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez who killed the four Marines in Chattanooga, Tennessee? Or are they Americans who support the right-to-life movement, Fourth Amendment property rights, the Second Amendment and strict constitutional limits on the size and scope of the federal government?
If you were President Obama and Congressman McCaul you apparently believed either or both were equal threats to constitutional government and needed to be “countered” with new legislation that McCaul rammed through his Homeland Security Committee on a voice vote no less.
McCaul’s bill would have created a “countering violent extremism” office at the Department of Homeland Security, but who or what would be “countered” was not just undefined, Obama administration policy made defining it in terms most Americans would deem appropriate to the threat of Islamism almost impossible.
And that’s the way McCaul and Muslim apologists at DHS wanted it.
These are the same guys at the Department of Homeland Security who classified returning veterans of the Middle East wars potential “rightwing violent extremists.”
A few years ago, in the wake of President Obama’s speech about his belated plan to confront the national security threat posed by the rise of the Islamic State, then-Attorney General Eric Holder announced a new program “to bring together community representatives, public safety officials and religious leaders to counter violent extremism.”
Except nowhere in the announcement could you find the words Islamic, Islamist, Muslim, jihadi or any other term that might give you the slightest idea who these violent extremists might be.
What’s more Holder said that the Department of Justice “will along with our interagency affiliates, we will work closely with community representatives to develop comprehensive local strategies, to raise awareness about important issues, to share information on best practices, and to expand and improve training in every area of the country.”
It is exactly these “community representatives,” such as the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR), that have demanded that the American government scrub any mention or use of the words Islamic, Islamist, Muslim, jihadi or any other association with Islam from Pentagon and law enforcement training programs as “Islamophobic.”
And it is these same groups that recently received a shout out from DHS for their “cooperation” even as they continue to try to divert attention from the connection between Islam, jihad, Muslim culture and terrorism.
Back in 2009 the Department of Homeland Security issued an “intelligence assessment,” really more of a political broadside, arguing that “rightwing extremism,” defined by then-Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano to include groups opposed to abortion and open immigration and infamously even returning veterans as among terrorist risks to the U.S.
The report was so outrageous that even Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, then-chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee and the top House Democrat with oversight of the Department of Homeland Security said in a letter to Ms. Napolitano that he was “dumbfounded” that such a report would be issued. Mr. Thompson stood tall in 2009, but since changed his tune now as, in deference to Far Left calls for resistance to President Trump, he lumps together Islamism and “white supremacy extremism” as equal threats.
Interestingly, the language Mike McCaul used at the hearing on his “countering violent extremism” bill was strikingly similar to that used in Holder’s 2014 announcement and the 2009 report that said the federal government “will be working with its state and local partners over the next several months” to gather information on “rightwing extremist activity in the United States.”
It is worth noting that to the extent that veterans have been linked to recent domestic terrorist attacks or plans they have been of a Leftist or Islamist nature.
The Dallas attack that killed five police officers and the Baton Rouge police shooting were motivated by the Far Left Black Lives Matter Movement, and the recent Islamist terror attack planned by an active duty soldier in Hawaii was not motivated by “rightwing extremism.”
As Chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security Congressman McCaul all too willingly embraced a foolish, perhaps fatal, politically correct description of who the enemy is in this war radical Islamists have declared on us; and it is not returning American veterans of the wars to defend their country against Islamism.
Something is bizarrely wrong in the mind of Rep. Mike McCaul if groups that embrace the plain words of the 10th Amendment to reject federal authority in favor of state or local authority or take the Declaration of Independence at its word that “life” is an unalienable right to oppose abortion can be named as terrorists, but the words Islamic, Islamist, Muslim and jihadi cannot be used in a program to “counter violent extremism.”
It is our view that Rep. Mike McCaul wants to be Secretary of Homeland Security to fulfill his personal ambition to round out his political career as a Cabinet Secretary, not because he has a deep understanding or commitment to win the war Islam has declared on the West.
President Trump’s greatest challenge at the Department of Homeland Security is getting rid of Obama-era people, thinking and policies. Nominating Rep. Mike McCaul as Secretary of Homeland Security would be tantamount to appointing an Obama holdover to run DHS and would be a self-inflicted wound from which it would be very hard for the President to recover.
Reprinted with permission from ConservativeHQ.com
