Tucker Carlson has been in the news lately – a dangerous thing in itself, perhaps, for a journalist should report the news, not appear in the news himself – for minimizing the threat of radical islam and global jihad.
The most recent pull quote is “And I don’t know anyone in the United States in the last 24 years who’s been killed by radical Islam.”
He’s not denying the threat exists, but he’s saying that we should pay more attention to other threats, such as widespread suicide, and unemployment, and drug overdoses, and porn.
And to do so, he’s employing a rhetorical technique made most famous by Pauline Kael half a century ago, when she insulted President Nixon and his voters by saying “I don’t know anyone who voted for him.”
If I don’t personally know a victim, it must not be an immediate problem for me.
Our society has somehow fallen into a trap of believing that if you don’t have a personal connection who was directly affected by an issue, it’s not as important to society as other issues.
Everyone knew someone who served in WWI and WWII, not everyone knew someone who served in Korea or Vietnam. Everyone knew someone who was stricken by polio or the Spanish flu, not everyone knew someone who was killed by radiation poisoning at a test site or a wristwatch factory.
Using this approach, it’s easy to dismiss a host of issues of critical importance, by simply redirecting one’s audience away. And whether the malicious intent is obvious or not, the malice is there, nevertheless.
There could be honest motivations for this approach. Tucker Carlson and his fellows in this current battle may genuinely believe that we aren’t paying enough attention to the dangers posed by suicidal depression, drug abuse and unemployment, and we need to focus more laserlike attention on these, though I can’t imagine better evidence to the contrary than the nation’s near landslide election of President Trump, who takes these issues so seriously that his administration is redesigning global trade to bring back manufacturing jobs, redesigning military activity to blow drug boats out of the water and to arrest and deport the cartels’ pushers, and redesigning federal funding and approval processes to cut out such mental health time bombs as transgender surgery and critical race theory.
One could argue that nobody in government has ever taken these issues as seriously as the Trump administration, so if Mr. Carlson thinks they’re being neglected, he’s just not paying attention.
It is possible that there may be some wordsmithing going on in his mind, and in the attitude of others who share his view.
People who claim that the fear of radical islam is overblown – people who deny the dangers of jihadist terror – are flying in the face of daily reports in the world news, the constant reports of attacks, bombings, stabbings, beheadings, all kinds of mass murder, in country after country, in every continent except Antarctica.
A cursory review of global news sites, and a quick glance at focused aggregators such as The Religion of Peace website, reveals so many abuses, so much property destruction, so much murder, all in the name of islam, that it is impossible to deny how rampant this problem is, all over the world.
So how can one claim that it’s not a big deal? By denying that it is indeed part and parcel of islam itself.
There are, after all, robbers, rapists, abusers, killers, all over the world, raised in every religion and philosophy from atheism to pantheism, from Christianity to Hinduism. In these religions, these crimes are forbidden, but people stray from their religious training and choose immorality all the time.
The difference here is that islam is the one major religion – if “religion” is even the right word – that teaches such immorality as official behavior, that even goes so far as to raise such immorality as exemplary.
The wording we use with islamic attacks needs to be selected much more carefully. If we allow the Tucker Carlsons of the world to choose the wording, they can say that Al Qaeda is a terrorist organization, and Al Qaeda ordered the attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001 and that’s what a terrorist attack is, and that was awful, but they haven’t done anything here since.
And if you agree with that precise wording, then it may be true, and islamic terrorism sounds like an overblown threat, something that hardly ever occurs.
But that’s really a matter of semantics.
Because islamic terrorism doesn’t work like other terrorism.
With normal terrorism – the IRA and SLA, the Black Panthers and other such political groups we all know – these events were always ordered, top-down, by a terrorist organization.
Islamic attacks today rarely happen like that.
Rather, the clerics and mullahs preach – in person and in writing, in mosques and on the internet – that jihad is necessary, that the global overthrow of non-muslim dominance must be the goal of every muslim on earth, every day, and that all muslims have some role to play in it.
They don’t have to be active in a terror cell; they don’t have to be the ones who build the bombs and pull the triggers.
They can be the members of a mosque or “islamic cultural center” that funds such projects and hosts such terrorists, without getting their own hands dirty, themselves.
They can be the immigrants who infiltrate Western society by raising their children amongst ours, trying to break down our natural resistance, until their children can grow up and marry our children so that our grandchildren are muslim and the population shifts, gradually, or even quickly.
They can be the voters who elect more and more “islam-tolerant” politicians until they have sufficient numbers to elect actual muslim politicians. AntiSemitism and sharia law didn’t come to Dearborn and New York overnight, after all; they followed a systematic path. One we can see from the growing numbers of muslim aldermen and judges, state and federal legislators, and bureaucrats all over Europe and North America, in numbers that would have been unbelievable a short generation ago.
And all along, day in and day out – for years, decades, generations – they instill in the minds of their members the knowledge that if they should get the inclination, the means, and the opportunity, they can and should “kill the infidel” – in whatever numbers they can manage – and it would be their greatest achievement.
We call these “lone wolf” attacks, in the press. We tell ourselves that this was a person who’d been radicalized, a person who went overboard, a person who went nuts.
We tell ourselves that we shouldn’t blame islam itself; this was just someone suffering depression, or a copycat who wanted the notoriety of Al Qaeda and ISIS, or a psychopath who isn’t really a believer in the Religion of Peace, but rather someone who went too far, who took theory too literally, who doesn’t really reflect on the reality of this nice peaceful movement at all. So we shouldn’t worry. That’s what we’re told.
But to look at the world through such rose-colored glasses is to miss the point entirely.
In fact, islam itself is weaponized against the rest of the world, and always has been, for fourteen hundred years now. Its rules, dictates and traditions are designed to serve one goal – the goal of world conquest. Win land for the caliphate, either by voting it in, by taking advantage of our freedoms, or by the sword. They don’t really care; the goal is conquest, the means don’t matter.
Some of them enjoy stabbing and beheading; that’s welcome. Some of them enjoy commercial success, taking over businesses and expanding their reach in real estate and commerce; that’s welcome too. Some of them enjoy bureaucracy and corruption, redirecting our tax dollars to their goals through crooked charities, grants and tax dodges; that’s welcome too. And some of them win public office and work to take over our governments from the inside, in England and France and Germany and even, especially, the United States.
Every time you see a muslim attack, these attacks that Tucker Carlson reports as not being “islamic terror” because they don’t look as organized as from an officially designated terror cell with a chain of command leading up to the top boss, remember this: the lone wolf attack IS part of the plan.
The lone wolf is an official soldier in the islamic war of conquest against the rest of the world. Because that’s their system. That’s how they work it.
And every time anyone in the media minimizes such attacks, painting them as unorganized, as unimportant, as unworthy of fear, because no clear chain of authority marks it as an official Al Qaeda threat – the media is doing the bidding of global jihad, whether they realize it or not.
Just because jihad doesn’t look like a traditional war between uniformed armies, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a real war for the heart and soul of this planet.
And minimizing this threat only serves the cause of our enemies.
Define the islamic threat as being “only mass murders by Al Qaeda trained terror cells, publicly and proudly claimed by the organization,” and you’re foolishly playing into the hands of an enemy that wants – needs – to be underestimated until they achieve their goals.
But define the islamic threat realistically – recognizing the fact that lone wolves and terror cells alike, islamic prison ministries and islamic cultural centers alike, muslim political activists and muslim politicians alike, are all part of the very same army, committed to the same cause of overthrowing western civilization to build a global islamic caliphate. Only when the true nature of the threat is understood and appreciated can it be effectively opposed.
Copyright 2025 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance trainer and consultant. President of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s and Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
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