Last week in Seattle, the FBI was running a terrorism awareness campaign featuring bus ads depicting photos of sixteen of the world’s Most Wanted Terrorists. This was a publicity campaign sponsored by the Joint Terrorism Task Force for the U.S. Department of State’s Rewards for Justice (RFJ) program. The RFJ program offers up to $25 million for information that helps stop terrorism.
However, Muslim groups and the politicians in their pockets actually succeeded in having the ad campaign removed; as such, we are going to have to do the FBI’s job for them. At my organization, the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), we’re taking it upon ourselves to alert the public to the nature and magnitude of the terror threat. We’re putting the ads back up.
The RFJ program has been quite successful: through it, the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security has paid over $125 million to more than 80 people who offered genuine information that led to jihadis being jailed and prevented acts of jihadist terror. This program was instrumental in leading to the arrest of jihadist Ramzi Yousef, who is now in prison for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center jihad bombing. This program saves lives.
It’s hard to believe that this program bothered anyone, but it did. Jeff Siddiqui, the founder of American Muslims of Puget Sound claimed that Seattle-area Muslims called him, saying the Most Wanted Terrorists ad campaign made them “concerned for their safety.” He said the ad would be just as bad if the government had posted an ad on buses with the faces of people from a single ethnic group and the caption “the face of murders in the United States.”
Muslim groups wailed and dhimmi Congressman Jim McDermott (D-WA) did their bidding. He wrote to the FBI demanding that they pull the campaign, which he claimed was “offensive to Muslims and ethnic minorities” and encouraged “racial and religious profiling.”
McDermott claimed that the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list included people of other races and “associations with other religions and causes,” but “their faces are missing from this campaign.” He said that the ad would “likely only serve to exacerbate the disturbing trend against Middle Eastern, South Asian and Muslim Americans.”
What trend? In reality, FBI statistics show that Jews are significantly more likely to be targets of hate crimes than Muslims. And the ad was not unfair: of the FBI’s 32 Most Wanted Terrorists, only two are not Muslims.
So if he wanted the FBI to leave the Muslims off the Most Wanted Terrorists ad, he’d first have to convince Muslims to stop committing terror attacks in the name of Islam. But instead, McDermott and Siddiqui succeeded in getting the FBI to remove the ads.
That’s right: the FBI caved to this Sharia demand (do not offend Muslims). The FBI is putting Americans at risk by submitting to the outrageous demands of Islamic supremacists. It is not the fault of the FBI that the world’s most dangerous terrorists are jihadists. That is the reality. You cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality. Capturing these mass murderers is significantly more important than propping up the fictional narrative of victimhood and the nonsensical hurt feelings. People are being slaughtered every day in jihad attacks.
Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media points out: “McDermott has a long history of pandering to radical Muslim groups and received the public-official-of-the-year award from the Seattle chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in 2004. CAIR is an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood, and is part of a lawsuit against the NSA’s surveillance of foreign terrorist organizations and their American agents.”
“The dropping of the ads can only reduce the possibility of some of these global terrorists being brought to justice,” he added.
We’re going to run the same ad on Seattle buses. We are going to make it happen. We have submitted the ads to Seattle transit that the FBI ran.
Please help us stand against this politically correct madness. Go here to learn more.
Pamela Geller is the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of AtlasShrugs.com and author of The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. Follow her on Twitter here.
Photo credit: KOMO News
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