Phil Haney on Orlando jihad mass murderer Omar Mateen and his mosque: “Imagine what it must have been like to be an active-duty subject matter expert in counter-terrorism. I had my own superiors making these kind of statements incessantly. When I was sitting there with evidence, for example, about the Ft. Pierce mosque – not only was there another person that blew himself up in Syria, but there’s an individual who is teaching a radicalization course who is on early release for weapons charges and tax fraud. And then his own father is vice-president of the mosque. As though nobody knew anything – that’s completely preposterous. If you know anything about the Islamic worldview, family and community is ultimately central to everything they do. The concept of operating alone is anathema to the Islamic worldview. They just don’t do it.”

This is true, accurate, and important — and anathema to the counter-terror establishment.

“DHS Whistleblower Philip Haney: Islamist ‘Self-Radicalization’ Is a ‘Surreal’ Myth,” by John Hayward, Breitbart, June 15, 2016:

Former Department of Homeland Security official Philip Haney wishes he was more surprised by the Orlando terrorist attack, but as he pointed out on Breitbart News Daily this week, the attack came from exactly the sort of Islamic radical network he got in trouble for studying too carefully.

Indeed, one of the major points he stressed during a follow-up interview is that many of the purported barriers between these networks are bureaucratic illusions — they are larger, better-funded, and more interconnected than the Obama administration wants to admit.

I asked Haney about the false, but very loudly repeated, administration narrative that Orlando jihadi Omar Mateen was “self-radicalized” — an assertion that grows more ridiculous with each new revelation about his background.

Haney described the self-radicalization narrative as “surreal.”

“Imagine what it must have been like to be an active-duty subject matter expert in counter-terrorism,” he said:

I had my own superiors making these kind of statements incessantly. When I was sitting there with evidence, for example, about the Ft. Pierce mosque – not only was there another person that blew himself up in Syria, but there’s an individual who is teaching a radicalization course who is on early release for weapons charges and tax fraud. And then his own father is vice-president of the mosque.

“As though nobody knew anything – that’s completely preposterous,” he said. “If you know anything about the Islamic worldview, family and community is ultimately central to everything they do. The concept of operating alone is anathema to the Islamic worldview. They just don’t do it.”

“So, self-radicalization – what does that even mean any more?” he asked. “Nobody is self-anything in this world we live in.”

I suggested that one of the driving forces behind the self-radicalization narrative is that it protects the Obama administration from charges that it dropped the ball on counterterrorism, portraying terrorists like Mateen as thunderbolts nobody could have seen coming.

Haney laughed derisively at the idea of pushing that excuse when we know Mateen was interviewed on multiple occasions by the FBI. He compared it to the way President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton blamed the Benghazi terror attack on a “spontaneous video protest,” a false narrative meant to get them off the hook for being so completely unprepared to deal with the crisis. In both Benghazi and Orlando, red flags were ignored, and now they are retroactively denied.

“They say radicalization is ‘sudden.’ Well, a rocket launch looks very sudden, if you don’t know about all the months of hard work it took to get that rocket onto the launch pad,” Haney observed.

He denounced these political games as dangerously cynical.

“That’s when the false narrative morphs into an ominous malevolent entity, because the President is contradicting his own law enforcement agencies,” he observed.

Another false narrative he criticized was the fiction that radical Islamic organizations won’t cooperate, especially if they fall on opposite sides of the Sunni-Shiite divide. Haney stressed that obedience to sharia law — which he said radicals across the sectarian spectrum are “eighty percent in agreement on” — and the desire to impose it upon secular governments was a powerful common interest.

“It’s like the solar system, and sharia is the Sun,” he said of the Muslim continuum. To extend the analogy, radical groups might be seen as the outer planets, and the asteroid belt isn’t as wide as politically-correct U.S. government ideology portrays it.

Haney noted that Omar Mateen’s father is a supporter of the Taliban in Afghanistan, whose name is derived from the word for “student,” and “sharia law is what they study.” The centrality of the Islamic legal code to radicals cannot be overstated; he observed that all of them list imposing sharia as one of their primary goals and believe strict adherence to sharia is a defining attribute of true Islamic faith….

Philip Haney’s book, See Something, Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government’s Submission to Jihad, is available from Amazon.com.