"When I go into the field,” Captain Yousef Yee once said, “I have a copy of the Qur’an and next to it a copy of the U.S. Constitution.” Well, at least two of the documents he was carrying weren’t classified. But when FBI agents arrested this American Muslim Army chaplain recently, much of what he was carrying was. Al-Qaeda prisoners at Guantanamo may have seen this material. Yee has been charged with espionage, sedition, aiding the enemy, spying, and failure to obey a general order. Officials are contemplating a treason charge.
No one would have guessed it would come to this in the weeks after 9/11. Back then Yee was quoted in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, the Los Angeles Times, and other media outlets, talking about peaceful Islam. He told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that the 9/11 attacks were “un-Islamic and categorically denied by a great majority of Muslim scholars around the world.” According to the Voice of America, he explained that “Islam is a religion of peace, and that the concept of ‘jihad,’ which is sometimes translated ‘holy war,’ simply means, ‘to struggle.’”
Even the State Department quoted Yee — in a press release about a fatwa allowing American Muslims to join the U.S. military to fight against terror. “An act of terrorism,” Yee declared, “the taking of innocent civilian lives is prohibited by Islam, and whoever has done this needs to be brought to justice, whether he is Muslim or not.” Yee told reporters that he counseled American Muslim military personnel to remain in the military despite the Qur’anic declaration that “if a man kills a believer intentionally, his recompense is Hell” (Sura 4:93).
The military, like other sectors of society, has done everything it could to avoid appearing anti-Muslim. In October 2001, retired Navy chaplain Greg DeMarco remarked presciently: “I have no doubt [Yee] will make captain.” Why? DeMarco opined that “there is a political agenda going on . . . and that is to show the world how pluralistic the military really is. My hope is that . . . they would be very careful how they detail these individuals.”
Clearly they haven’t been careful enough. That’s partly because, as I detail in my book Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West, political correctness has strangled the national debate about Islam. Those who dared suggest that greater vigilance might be needed to root out terrorism from the American Muslim community have been vilified by the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and its numerous media allies as racists and hatemongers. Major media outlets and even the FBI avoid referring to “Islamic terrorists.” FBI agents have been required to undergo sensitivity training in which they were told by imams that terrorists have twisted the peaceful message of the Qur’an, and that jihad means a spiritual struggle.
That message was Yousef Yee’s after 9/11. Therein lies the problem. No amount of media silence and wishful thinking can change the fact that there is today a global network of terrorist organizations operating out of self-proclaimed loyalty to Islamic principles. Was it something Yee learned about Islam that led him to the decision to side with America’s enemies? If so, where and when did he learn it? How many other American Muslim chaplains and military personnel have been exposed to the same ideas?
The ever-growing media blackout, plus the continuing strong-arming from American Muslim advocacy groups, keeps these questions from being asked. Yet sensitivity training and politically correct niceties won’t answer them. The silencing and vilification of those who are honestly investigating the roots of Islamic terror must end. The House and Senate intelligence committees report on intelligence failures leading up to 9/11 criticized the FBI for failing to investigate allegations that an imam, Anwar Awlaki, had connections to Al-Qaeda. Did they assume that a clergyman of the Religion of Peace couldn’t have been mixed up in that kind of dirty business?
CAIR’s website contains numerous “Action Alerts,” giving Muslims a chance to respond to perceived slights, as well as a mechanism for reporting an “anti-Muslim experience or a hate crime.” It contains no directions for Muslims who may want to report terrorist activities in their community. Meanwhile, even many conservative media figures are reluctant to look at what really causes Islamic radicalism and what can realistically be done to protect American freedoms. Until that changes, we will see many more Yees. God help us.
Robert Spencer is the author of Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West (new from Regnery Publishing) and Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith (Encounter Books, 2002). He is an Adjunct Fellow with the Free Congress Foundation.