President Obama claims bad intelligence caused him to miss the threat from ISIS, but critics say he closed his ears to warnings.
Could the same thing be happening when it comes to the threat from homegrown jihadis in America?
On Tuesday, Alton Nolen was charged with first-degree murder in the gruesome beheading of a female worker at an Oklahoma food-processing plant.
Prosecutors tie the killing to his recent suspension from the plant and discount any link to Islamic terrorism. For the FBI, too, it’s just a case of “workplace violence.”
Yet, according to police, Nolen had become a fervent Islamic proselytizer. His Facebook page was inundated with passages from the Koran, signed “From a Muslim,” near pictures of Osama bin Laden.
Could this be another case of see-no-evil?
Recall that the feds treated Maj. Nidal Hasan similarly, even though he admitted communicating with jihadis abroad before launching his Fort Hood massacre.
This summer, Hasan asked ISIS to make him a “citizen” of the Islamic State. Yet the Obama folks still chalk up his killings to just more violence in the workplace.
Closer to home, Ali Muhammad Brown murdered Brendan Tevlin while the 19-year-old student was sitting in his car at an intersection in West Orange, NJ.
Brown, who’s tied to three murders in the Seattle area, admitted killing Tevlin and called it a “just kill” — “vengeance” for US military action in the Middle East. Yet the feds won’t label this terror-related, either.
Will the Obama folks ever learn? To head off a threat, you’ve got to be willing to acknowledge it first.