How many more Americans must die before law enforcement and intelligence officials dare to examine and discard the comforting falsehoods and fantasies they have embraced regarding Islam and jihad?

In PJ Media, Robert Spencer writes about the jihad massacre in Pensacola.

Second Lt. Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, an aviation officer in the Saudi Air Force, opened fire at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Fla., on Friday, killing four people and wounding many others. In doing so, he showed yet again that the prevailing politically correct obfuscation and denial regarding the jihad threat is not only wrong, it’s dangerous. If we had a realistic approach to the jihad threat, Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani’s victims would be alive today.

…Alshamrani was in the country to get aviation training. No one flagged him as a potential jihadi. No one would even have dared to question him to try to ascertain his thoughts about the United States and the global jihad. Any effort to have done so would have been denounced as “Islamophobic,” and would have been career suicide for whoever did the questioning.

…Thirteen people died at Fort Hood because of the politically correct assumption that Islam is a religion of peace and that to raise suspicions about any Muslim is “Islamophobic” and evidence of nothing more than bigotry and racism. Four more people have now died at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola because in the ten years since the Fort Hood jihad attack, we have learned nothing. All the same taboos are still firmly in place. To point out that there is no reliable way to distinguish genuine friend from concealed foe among our “allies” from Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan or anywhere else will do nothing but invite scorn and derision, and earn one a place on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “hate” list.

How many more Americans must die before law enforcement and intelligence officials dare to examine and discard the comforting falsehoods and fantasies they have embraced regarding Islam and jihad? How many more Mohammed Saeed Alshamranis must there be before our government and military authorities recognize that Islam is not actually a religion of peace at all, but one that teaches warfare against unbelievers in its core texts, and consequently that any devout and knowledgeable Muslim may believe that it is a good and even holy thing under certain circumstances to kill those unbelievers?

This is an unpleasant but readily demonstrable fact. It does not mean that every devout Muslim is or ever will be a jihadist. It does mean that we must be realistic and careful regarding the sentiments of the personnel we train from countries where the teachings of Islam are well known and revered. If we aren’t, nothing is more certain than the fact that there will be more massacres in America like the one in Pensacola on Friday.

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