It’s no surprise that people whose life work is to enforce the principles of “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) would have only a glancing acquaintance with the truth. And so it has now come to pass in our green and pleasant land that DEI officials are warning the “intelligence community” that it must not speak accurately about the jihad threat, or even refer to “jihadists” at all. To do so would — you guessed it! — offend Muslims, and with Muslims in the U.S. already enraged at the Biden regime for its ostensible and vanishing support for Israel, we can’t have that.
The Daily Wire reported Thursday that “an internal newsletter sent by diversity, equity, and inclusion officials in the Biden administration’s top intelligence agency warns personnel not to use ‘problematic phrases’ when discussing Islamic terrorism.” In this Orwellian age, “problematic phrases” are those that are true and accurate, but are offensive to pressure groups that the regime wishes to court.
It seems that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence puts out an internal newsletter, appropriately entitled “The Dive,” and that a recent issue “argues in its cover story that the intelligence community needs to focus on ‘changing terminology related to counterterrorism,’ because ‘words matter.’” Yeah, they do. That’s why so much of the Biden regime’s manual for governance, George Orwell’s 1984, is about the manipulation of the language so that the wretched inhabitants of the book’s totalitarian regime aren’t even capable of thinking thoughts that the regime doesn’t want them to think. Old Joe and his henchmen tried to establish an agency for this with their abortive Disinformation Governance Board, and they’re still at it.
The author of the article in The Dive says that “one of our goals” is “disentangling Islam from words and phrases used to discuss terrorism and extremist violence.” Never mind that it is Islamic jihadis themselves who have explicitly and proudly entangled Islam with “terrorism and extremist violence.” We are forbidden to notice: the article explains that woke DEI operatives are trying to remove “certain phrases to identify international terrorism threats that are hurtful to Muslim-Americans.”
Some of the allegedly hurtful phrases are “‘Salafi-Jihadist,’ ‘Jihadist,’ ‘Islamic-Extremist,’ ‘Sunni/Shia-Extremism,’ and ‘Radical Islamists.’” Islamic jihadis themselves frequently speak about Islam and jihad as the motivation and justification for their actions, but never mind. This newsletter was “created by ODNI’s Intelligence Community Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Office and sent out to personnel throughout the Intelligence Community, which includes the country’s most powerful executive agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Department of Justice (DOJ), as well as intelligence components within each branch of the military.”
The strangest aspect of it, however, is that U.S. counterterror material was purged of all mention of Islam twelve years ago. I know this for a fact, as I was mixed up in the controversy.
On October 19, 2011, Farhana Khera of Muslim Advocates, who had complained for years about supposed Muslim profiling and entrapment, sent a letter to John Brennan, who was then the Assistant to the President on National Security for Homeland Security and Counter Terrorism.
The letter was signed not just by Khera, but by the leaders of virtually all the significant Islamic groups in the United States: 57 Muslim, Arab, and South Asian organizations, many with ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, including CAIR, the Islamic Society of North America, the Muslim American Society, the Islamic Circle of North America, Islamic Relief USA; and the Muslim Public Affairs Council.
The letter denounced what it characterized as U.S. government agencies’ “use of biased, false and highly offensive training materials about Muslims and Islam.” It criticized “the FBI’s use of biased experts and training materials.” One of those was me. Khera also complained that my books could be found in “the FBI’s library at the FBI training academy in Quantico, Virginia”; that a reading list accompanying a powerpoint presentation by the FBI’s Law Enforcement Communications Unit recommended my book The Truth About Muhammad; and that in July 2010 I “presented a two-hour seminar on ‘the belief system of Islamic jihadists’ to the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) in Tidewater, Virginia,” and “presented a similar lecture to the U.S. Attorney’s Anti-Terrorism Advisory Council, which is co-hosted by the FBI’s Norfolk Field Office.” She demanded that I be fired as a trainer for the FBI and military groups.
These were supposed to be terrible things because I was bigoted and hateful. But many of the examples Khera adduced of “bigoted and distorted materials” involved statements that were not actually bigoted and distorted at all, but simply accurate, albeit out of step with leftist sensibilities.
Related: FBI’s Wray Pauses From Hunting for ‘Insurrectionists’ to Warn of an Actual Terrorist Threat
Brennan immediately complied. In a November 3, 2011, letter to Khera, that — significantly — was written on White House stationery, Brennan promised that the government would “ensure that federal officials and state, local and tribal partners receive accurate, evidence-based information in these crucial areas.”
Numerous books and presentations that gave a perfectly accurate view of Islam and jihad were purged. The situation has only worsened since then. The Obama administration replaced accurate examination of Islamic jihad with its “Countering Violent Extremism” program, which was deliberately vague about who the “violent extremists” were. We know now the reason for the vagueness: the “violent extremists” are us. The Biden regime — with its targeting of its political opponents, angry parents at school board meetings, and Catholics — has turned the government’s counterterror apparatus against Americans who oppose its far-left agenda. The DEI operatives’ memo is just a rear-guard action to mop up the few remaining clear thinkers inside the “intelligence community.”