Diversity and national security: Where do we draw the line?

In response to the terrorist act committed by Sayfullo Saipov on Halloween, President Donald Trump was right to say political correctness has no place in the war on terror. Unfortunately, it appears political correctness has played a big role in this war in a way that undermines our efforts to stay safe. Back in 2014, for instance, the New York Police Department dropped a program that monitored potential suspects of Islamic extremism.  

Created in 2005, the program, known as the "Demographics Unit", was a simple monitoring initiative that sent plain clothes detectives to mosques and other gathering places for Muslims to see if anyone was pushing extremist rhetoric on the community. While it might seem a bit intrusive, let's not forget that in a city of 8.5 million people with as many as 800,000 Muslim residents in the greater metro area, thousands of people died in an Islamic terror attack in New York City.

The monitoring program was going well until 2014 when Sharia Law advocate and female liberal activist, Linda Sarsour, spoke out against the program. (If her name sounds familiar, it’s because she is the one who organized the Women’s March in DC earlier this year after calling for a “Jihad against President Trump” and publicly expressing her hatred for Israel).

According to Sarsour, as quoted in the New York Times in 2014, "The Demographics Unit created psychological warfare in our community.” She didn't offer any evidence to support that claim, but apparently it was effective enough to get the NYPD’s intelligence chief, John Miller, to agree that the program had to go.

But after Saipov ran his rented truck into pedestrians this past Tuesday, killing eight and injuring about a dozen, it was revealed that he frequented a mosque in Paterson, NJ, that used to be monitored as part of the Demographics Unit program as a possible destination for, “budding terrorist conspiracies."  

Unfortunately, because Linda Sarsour convinced the NYPD that it was politically incorrect for its detectives to monitor “innocent” people, they were unable to monitor at all. But without proper profiling initiatives, how can we expect law enforcement to detect possible nefarious players who want to do us harm?

The people who call such profiling “racially insensitive” first need to be informed that Islam isn’t a race. They then need to be informed that there is nothing “xenophobic” about a real problem that deserves no-nonsense attention and action.  As Americans have proven from the beginning of time, we don’t fear foreigners. We embrace them. In fact, the ones murdered by Saipov this week were foreigners. But we can’t be foolish about the issue. Just ask the Europeans who have been told it’s wrong to put any limits on immigration. 

Too bad Senator Chuck Schumer doesn’t agree. Despite yet another terrorist attack in New York City, he is still pushing the “Diversity Lottery” visa program that brought Saipov to our shores, while pointing a finger at those of us who dare to demand reasonable monitoring of who enters our country, either before they get here or after they arrive. 

But to Chuck, “every immigrant is special,” as he announced this week. Tell me, just how special is an immigrant who murders innocent people? Are we supposed to celebrate him in the name of diversity while continuing to allow an open-border approach to letting anyone in? I don’t know. Maybe we should ask the surviving victims of Saipov for their thoughts on the matter.

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