Hundreds of Saudi military pilots grounded after NAS Pensacola shooting
National security correspondent Jennifer Griffin reports.
Another Saudi terrorist receiving flight training in Florida has left a path of death and blood. Again, journalists and federal officials scratch their heads about motive, pretending not to know.
A Saudi military officer’s shooting spree Friday at Naval Air Station Pensacola – murdering three and wounding eight with a Glock-45 9mm pistol that he smuggled onto the base – predictably had pundits and bureaucrats asking why it happened.
The immediate facts indicated the answer: gunman Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani – a 21-year-old second lieutenant in the Royal Saudi Air Force, training with the U.S. military – committed an act of radical Islamist terrorism. He may have had co-conspirators, or at least fellow officers who knew of his plans in advance.
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We know this because, as the media have reported, Alshamrani showed videos of mass shootings at a dinner party the night before the attack. He also, in an online post, called the United States “a nation of evil” for committing “crimes not only against Muslims but also humanity.”
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Despite all these facts that news organizations reported, much of the media and U.S. government sources had the usual denial-of-reality response to the attack such as “authorities are still investigating the motive” and “the gunman did not appear to have any ties to international terrorist groups.”
We know the motive. It is radical Islam, a movement that wants to destroy the West and modern society.
And as I’ve said many times before, radical Islamist terrorists do not need formal links to terrorist groups like ISIS or Al Qaeda to kill on their behalf – they frequently are radicalized online or by extremist Muslim clerics.
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Usama bin Laden’s terrorist crew that hijacked four passenger planes on Sept. 11, 2001, were not known to be part of an organized group at the time they took their civilian flight lessons in Florida. That was almost a generation ago. A lot of people haven’t learned the lesson.
Fortunately, many have. Republican officials have spoken out to condemn the Pensacola attack as an act of terrorism, including Sen. Rick Scott and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, and Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas.
President Trump has done a lot to prevent attacks like this with his restricted immigration policies to “stop importing jihadists.”
The president knows the irreversible damage done to the security and stability of Western Europe by importing large numbers of unvetted refugees from Middle Eastern countries where ISIS and Al Qaeda or their affiliates are active.
President Trump had a plan to stop foreign Islamist terrorists from entering our country. He called it “extreme vetting.” The Pensacola attack shows that extreme vetting has not taken place.
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Gov. DeSantis has called for stronger precautious before letting foreign nationals train on U.S. military bases. He said Saudi Arabia needs to explain how it is vetting its military personnel to identify people who may hold radical worldviews.
Just as President Barack Obama’s administration did in the past, today the mainstream media, the left and their American Islamist allies are in deep denial about the deadly threat from radical Islam. They pretend this threat doesn’t exist, dismiss the carefully documented facts as a “conspiracy theory,” and portray those who dare to raise it as haters and “Islamophobes.”
This suspension of reality and the systematic attacks on truth-tellers have enabled terrorists to continue entering the U.S. to kill Americans.
The Pensacola shooting is a wakeup call to the continuing threat from radical Islam and the determination by radical Islamists to commit acts of violence because of their hatred of the West.
The Trump administration must do more to ensure that federal officials stand up to pressure from the left and Islamist groups to ease up on carefully vetting immigrants and visitors to the United States who could hold radical, anti-American views.
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The administration must finally fix its crippled personnel policies and purge all Obama holdovers, careerists with a pattern of softness toward Islamists, and so-called Republicans who are too cowardly or clueless to take necessary action to put the right people in the right jobs.
Radical Islamist terrorist attacks like the Pensacola shooting will become more frequent in the United States if President Trump’s tough immigration policies are not implemented – or worse, are reversed. This is an important reason why the outcome of next year’s presidential election is vital to our national security.
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