The Tevlin Murder: Another Sign of the President’s Denial of the Radical Islamist/Sharia Threat

The murder last month in South Orange, New Jersey of 19-year old Brendan Tevlin by Ali Muhammad Brown was clearly an act of homegrown Islamist terrorism.  Brown admitted to the killing and three others in Washington state and claimed they were acts of “vengeance” for U.S. military action that he claims took innocent lives in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Iran.

Brown murdered Tevlin in cold blood while his car was stopped at an intersection on June 25.  He was shot eight times.

What has the Obama administration and the major news media said about this heinous killing?  Virtually nothing.  Unlike the killing of an unarmed teenager in Ferguson, Missouri in August, the White House issued no statement.  No one from the White House attended his funeral.  The mainstream media has ignored this case.  It is only receiving some coverage now because New Jersey radio host Todd Pettengill began a campaign to publicize this attack.  Click HERE to listen to Pettengill discuss the Tevlin murder.

The Obama administration is refusing to classify Tevlin’s killing as an act of domestic terrorism.  That’s not surprising since it still calls the 2009 Fort Hood shooting an act of work place violence instead of domestic terrorism even though the shooter, Major Nidal Hassan, was in contact with al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula leader Anwar al-Awlaki.

The Obama administration also will not call Brown a home grown terrorist because it refuses to use this term.  At best, it may classify Brown as a “homegrown radical extremist,” a nebulous term which allows Obama officials to lump monsters like Brown and Hassan with anti-abortion activists and right-wing extremists.

The reason for this is that President Obama and his senior advisers are still in denial about the threat from radical Islam and Sharia.   Despite a mountain of evidence that al-Qaeda groups adopted new tactics after 9/11 to spread their message and attack the West – including by recruiting home grown terrorists behind Western borders via the Internet – the president repeatedly claimed during his reelection campaign that al-Qaeda was decimated and on the run.

The September 11, 2012 terrorist attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi proved this wasn’t true but the president and his senior officials refused to acknowledge this.  We now know after the Benghazi attacks that the U.S. intelligence community provided detailed intelligence to the president about the growing threat from ISIS in Syria and Iraq.  Based on his January 2014 remark that ISIS was a ‘JV’ terrorist team, its clear Mr Obama ignored this intelligence.  The reason?  He was still in denial about the radical Islamist threat.

The Obama administration’s extreme reluctance to admit we are at war with ISIS demonstrates that despite the beheadings of two Americans and the threat ISIS is posing to the Middle East and the U.S., it still refuses to admit the threat from radical Islam and Sharia.  The president only announced a plan to confront ISIS last week because he was forced to by media coverage of the beheadings.  His plan was half-hearted and will need to be significantly expanded if the United States is to conduct a serious military effort to destroy ISIS.

The Tevlin killing and recent ISIS developments are linked, but not in the way that some experts have said.  Brown was not recently radicalized – he has been a radical Islamist since about 2004.  Brown was charged in a 2004 bank fraud case that reportedly involved sending funds to terrorists abroad.  This latter charge could not be proved.  While Brown was not radicalized by ISIS, I believe recent ISIS propaganda and publicity pushed Brown over the edge to conduct terrorist killings.   This could point to an unanticipated danger from ISIS’ skills in spreading its extremist propaganda through the Internet: it may be both radicalizing new followers and also convincing existing radicalized individuals to act on their extremist ideology by staging terrorist attacks.

ISIS, al-Qaeda, Benghazi, the Tevlin killing, and the Fort Hood killings are part of the same radical Islamist/Sharia terrorist continuum.  The president continues to propose weak and piecemeal policies in response to radical Islamist terrorism because he refused to acknowledge this continuum.  Until he does, U.S. security will continue to be at unnecessary risk.