The Pensacola shooting: Radical Islam kills again

Another Saudi terrorist on 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 multiple shooting spree Friday at Naval Air Station Pensacola, murdering three and wounding eight with a Glock-45 9mm pistol that he smuggled on base, predictably had pundits and bureaucrats asking why it happened.

The immediate facts indicated the answer: Gunman Mohammed 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 co-conspirators, or at least fellow officers who knew of his plans in advance.

We know this because, as the press has 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.”

Despite all these facts that news organizations reported, the news 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.

Osama bin Laden’s terrorist crew who hijacked the four passenger planes on September 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 condemn the Pensacola attack as an act of terrorism, including Florida Senator Rick Scott, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX).

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.

He 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.

Governor DeSantis has called for stronger precautious for letting foreign nationals train on U.S. military bases and said Saudi Arabia needs to explain how it is vetting its military personnel for people who may hold radical worldviews.

Just like the Obama administration, 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 anyone who dares to raise it as haters and “Islamophobes.”

This suspension of reality and systematic attacks on truth-tellers has enabled terrorists to continue coming here to kill our people.

The Pensacola shooting is a wake-up call that that the threat from radical Islam and the determination by radical Islamists to commit acts of violence because of their hatred of the West continues.  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. 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 at least 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.