Article by Robert Spencer in PJMedia
DHS Issues New Bulletin Warning of 'Domestic Violent Extremists'
A new bulletin from the Department of Homeland Security took effect Thursday, and notes that “the Homeland continues to face a diverse and challenging threat environment.” Hey, that’s great news! The terror threat is now officially “diverse” — that’s a good thing, right? Diversity is our strength! The diversity, in this case, includes both “domestic violent extremists and those inspired or motivated by foreign terrorists and other malign foreign influences,” but it’s clear that the feds are most concerned about those domestic violent extremists. As USA Today noted in its report on the new DHS bulletin, “In September, FBI Director Christopher Wray referred to the rising domestic terror threat, telling a Senate committee that domestic terror cases had more than doubled since early 2020.” Sure they have. But is this because there are more domestic terror cases, or because the feds are now aggressively looking for some in order to validate their claims?
The DHS bulletin warned of the possibility of terror attacks in the coming weeks, as “several religious holidays and associated mass gatherings” are now approaching “that in the past have served as potential targets for acts of violence.” At the same time, however, officials conceded that intelligence agencies have not found any “imminent and credible threat to a specific location in the United States.”
The threats they’re really worried about are those that supposedly come from alleged right-wing extremists who are enraged at Biden’s handlers’ gallop toward authoritarianism: “The ongoing global pandemic continues to exacerbate these threats, in part due to perceived government overreach in implementation of public health safety measures.”
Oh yeah, there are jihadis around as well: “Further, foreign terrorist organizations and (domestic violent extremists) continue to attempt to inspire potential followers to conduct attacks in the United States, including by exploiting recent events in Afghanistan.” This is because al Qaeda and ISIS “celebrated perceived victories over the United States and encouraged the use of violence by their followers and supporters to further their objectives. These foreign terrorist organizations will likely continue to maintain a highly visible online presence in an attempt to inspire U.S.-based individuals to engage in violent activity.”
The part about jihadis possibly plotting to strike inside the United States is certainly true, and there is abundant attestation to that from the open and unapologetic words of the jihadis themselves. But the clear implication of the DHS bulletin—that the threat the jihadis pose to the U.S. is secondary to a terror threat from Americans who are angry at the federal government’s outrageous overreach in the months that Joe Biden has pretended to be president of the United States—is as baseless as it is ominous.
Biden’s handlers, and even Old Joe himself, have repeatedly warned about a “white supremacist” terror threat that is supposedly the greatest threat the nation faces today. The only thing this scenario lacks are actual white supremacist terrorists. And so they have to be invented. Old Joe and the establishment media defamed Kyle Rittenhouse as a white supremacist last year, doing everything they could to make him fit their ridiculous myth of violent, racist, right-wing fanatics menacing the good and decent spiritual descendants of the soldiers who stormed the beaches of Normandy, the fine young men and women of Antifa.
And it isn’t just Rittenhouse. Virtually everyone who dissents from the Leftist agenda is a “white supremacist” and/or a “violent extremist” these days – even me. A few months ago, the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), an organization created by Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube to police terrorism on the Internet, bizarrely designated my organization Jihad Watch a “violent extremist” group, despite the fact that pretty much all we do is type, and report on jihad activity in the U.S. and around the world. In response to a letter from my attorney demanding a retraction, the GIFCT refused to back down. Those who designated Jihad Watch as a “violent extremist” group explained that we reported on violent activity – terrorist bombings, murders, etc. – and that this in some way “dehumanized” Muslims.
How we did this was left unexplained; it would have been impossible to explain, as it is absurd on its face. The response to my attorney’s letter was essentially the increasingly common Leftist argument that speech that dissents from its party line is violence, and hence must be shut down.
So that’s that, at least for now. When I hear the DHS warning about a rise in the number of “domestic violent extremists,” now I know why: because ordinary, law-abiding Americans who utter inconvenient truths are being smeared with this label. And remember: if they can do it to me, they can do it to you. Remember also: it won’t stop with labeling.
