Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson is under attack for saying: “I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that.”

Candor about Islam will guarantee you the hot seat at the center of a media firestorm.

The GOP is the only one of the two parties that will even discuss the 800-pound elephant in the room: jihad and Muslim terrorism. Islamic supremacists and their leftist lapdogs in the media are waging their own jihad to silence this debate, and it is critical that we push back and support candidates who dare to speak against the gravest threat to our national security.

The enemedia is in an uproar and the Hamas-tied Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is howling for his head. CAIR is calling for his withdrawal — the terror-tied advance team is laying down the law, sharia law, making it perfectly clear that jihad terrorism and criticism of Islam is off-limits, in accordance with sharia. Interestingly enough, they cite religious freedom, something that is forbidden in Muslim countries under Islamic law.

But we (and Mr. Carson) are not talking about the religious component of Islam. Islam is not just a religion. It is a comprehensive system which deals with all aspects of human life and behavior; legal, religious, dietary, political, et al. It is political Islam that poses a threat to our national security.

Why doesn’t CAIR issue action alerts against jihad? Why hasn’t CAIR instituted programs to stop jihad recruitment? And while CAIR has made rote statements concerning the Islamic State, where are they teaching against the ideology that gave rise to it?

Right now, nothing is being done to stop jihad recruiting in US mosques, even as several hundred young Muslims from the US have gone to wage jihad for the Islamic State. What has CAIR done to stop that?

CAIR is part of the problem, not the solution.

If the moderates really reject extremism, let them show it by instituting genuine programs to teach against this view of Islam, so as to stop American Muslims from joining the Islamic State.

“ISIS is here”: ISIS sympathizers or jihadis have held up signs in Ferguson, Missouri, outside the White House, and in Chicago. There have been several Islamic State-inspired jihad plots in the US already.

The lines are drawn: which GOP will stand up against terror groups in the U.S.?

Ben Carson is right. Electing a Muslim president would be dangerous. We have seen the Islamic pattern of previously moderate Muslims becoming devout and then aiding and abetting jihad. How could we be sure a Muslim president would not do the same?

And look at Barack Obama. Why do people believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim? He claims he is a Christian, but his father and his stepfather were Muslims and he was raised in a Muslim country. He went to an Islamic school and took Qur’an classes while growing up in Jakarta.

Because of his upbringing, he is islamophiliac, and his foreign and domestic policies reflect this. Obama’s advancement of Islam has been disastrous for freedom and freedom-loving peoples across the world. He has sided with jihadists in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Gaza and their counterparts in America, i.e. terror-tied CAIR.

Obama’s pro-jihad policies and his sharia adherence (“the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam”) tell us more about him than words or agitprop ever could. He rules like a Muslim leader. And the media wonders why so many people think Obama is a Muslim? Obama has banned the word “jihad” and any discussion of Islam from State, Defense, and Justice Department vernacular and counter-terrorism materials. 

He is denying that jihad is the enemy, while his Justice Department acts as the de facto legal arm for Muslim Brotherhood groups in America. And the Obama administration has held hundreds of meetings with U.S. Hamas front groups.

It’s not a question of “Islamophobia” or “racism,” or ignorance, for that matter. You can’t know what’s in a man’s heart, but “by their fruits ye shall know him, and so we know him.”

The Obama experience is the best proof of all that Ben Carson is right. The risk is too great.

Pamela Geller is the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of PamelaGeller.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. Like her on Facebook here.