When Omar Mateen called 911 during his shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, the man pledged allegiance to the Islamic State (ISIS) and repeated the common Islamic phrase "Allah the merciful," but those phrases did not appear in the transcript of the call published by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Monday morning.
On Sunday, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, the head of the Justice Department, explicitly said the FBI, which is under her jurisdiction, would doctor the text of the transcripts to remove the Islamic State. But more telling is what she did not say -- not only were the mentions of ISIS taken out, but the word "Allah" was altered to read "God" instead.
DOJ to Release Orlando Shooters's 911 Call But Redact ISIS Pledge, Religious References
Here is a sample of the transcription:
Orlando Police Dispatcher (OD)
Shooter (OM)
OD: Emergency 911, this is being recorded.
OM: In the name of God the Merciful, the beneficial [in Arabic]
OD: What?
OM: Praise be to God, and prayers as well as peace be upon the prophet of God [in Arabic]. I let you know, I'm in Orlando and I did the shootings.
OD: What's your name?
OM: My name is I pledge allegiance to [omitted].
OD: OK, What's your name?
OM: I pledge allegiance to [omitted] may God protect him [in Arabic], on behalf of [omitted].
This is quite a revealing alteration. When Chuck Todd asked Lynch what was going to be left out, she responded, "What we're not going to do is further proclaim this man's pledges of allegiance to terrorist groups and further his propaganda." She later said this doctoring was done to "avoid revictimizing those who went through this horror."
How does she explain the alteration of the name "Allah"? Would it be "revictimizing" survivors to mention the Islamic name of God? Would it be cow-towing to Mateen's "propaganda"? Or maybe it would suggest the bare obvious fact that Omar Mateen did the evils that he did in the name of Islam and the Muslim deity, whose name is Allah.
You could argue that the FBI was merely translating the Arabic word for "God" into the English word for "God," but that would be like translating the Christian "God" into "Krishna" or the Hebrew "G-d" into "Jupiter." It is not a pure translation, because the different names have different meanings, even in the same language.
Why Speaking the Truth About Islamic Terrorism Matters
No, they translated "Allah" into "God" in order to silence the unavoidable truth -- that the horrid murders in Orlando were part of radical Islamic terror, not just some lone wolf totally unconnected to that specific religion.
Ironically, this strategy is like to reinforce the impact of ISIS, not downplay the organization. President Obama's now-explicitly-stated policy is refusing to use the words "radical Islamic terror" as if it were the ideology-that-must-not-be-named.
Next Page: Why the Voldemort strategy is doomed to failure.