Whether you call them Islamists, Islamic extremists, Jihadists, or something else, the fact is that there is a segment of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims who are motivated by Islam to attack and kill Americans. Yet this threat is one that, from the beginning of his presidency and his much-heralded “speech to the Muslim world in Cairo,” President Obama has steadfastly refused to acknowledge.

Instead, the President has made political correctness a policy priority above the safety of Americans.  In 2011 the Justice Department ordered that its training materials remove all references to Islam in connection with any investigations into terror activity. Similarly, the U.S. military was ordered to remove any “anti-Islamic content” from its training materials. Now this recent story (see below) reveals more of the same at the Department of Homeland Security. According to the report, a 2011 memo from the Department instructed national and local law enforcement officials to ensure that the free speech rights of pro-Shariah Muslim supremacists were protected.

We’ve seen the deadly consequences of appeasement. Prior to killing 13 fellow soldiers and wounding dozens of others in the 2009 Fort Hood massacre, Major Nidal Malik Hasan was investigated by the Army and FBI, yet nothing was done despite revelations of his terrorist connections and jihadi sympathies.  Shouts of “Allahu Akbar” while carrying out his murderous rampage still didn’t convince the Obama administration of Hasan’s terrorist inclinations, and the entire event was labeled as “workplace violence.”   

More recent examples of the administration’s policy of appeasement and continued reticence to name the enemy are the Benghazi debacle and the Boston Marathon bombings. Both were Islamist terror attacks perpetrated by Islamists, regardless of where the perpetrators were radicalized, e.g., abroad, at home or via the Internet.

So the question is: How do we overcome a threat that we refuse to name or acknowledge exists?

Scott D. Woller is an attorney practicing in New York, and a member of The National Security Roundtable.