The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) has expressed alarm at reports indicating that the Obama Administration is deliberately destroying databases on jihadist, Islamic terrorist groups. Recently retired Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official of 15 years’ standing, Philip Haney, has written that:

“… We [at DHS] knew [President Barack Obama’s] administration had been engaged in a bureaucratic effort to destroy the raw material—the actual intelligence we had collected for years, and erase those dots. The dots constitute the intelligence needed to keep Americans safe, and the Obama administration was ordering they be wiped away. After leaving my 15 year career at DHS, I can no longer be silent about the dangerous state of America’s counter-terror strategy, our leaders’ willingness to compromise the security of citizens for the ideological rigidity of political correctness—and, consequently, our vulnerability to devastating, mass-casualty attack … Just before that Christmas Day attack, in early November 2009, I was ordered by my superiors at the Department of Homeland Security to delete or modify several hundred records of individuals tied to designated Islamist terror groups like Hamas from the important federal database, the Treasury Enforcement Communications System (TECS). These types of records are the basis for any ability to “connect dots.”  Every day, DHS Customs and Border Protection officers watch entering and exiting many individuals associated with known terrorist affiliations, then look for patterns. Enforcing a political scrubbing of records of Muslims greatly affected our ability to do that. Even worse, going forward, my colleagues and I were prohibited from entering pertinent information into the database … As the number of successful and attempted Islamic terrorist attacks on America increased, the type of information that the Obama administration ordered removed from travel and national security databases was the kind of information that, if properly assessed, could have prevented subsequent domestic Islamist attacks like the ones committed by Faisal Shahzad (May 2010), Detroit “honor killing” perpetrator Rahim A. Alfetlawi (2011); Amine El Khalifi, who plotted to blow up the U.S. Capitol (2012); Dzhokhar or Tamerlan Tsarnaev who conducted the Boston Marathon bombing (2013); Oklahoma beheading suspect Alton Nolen (2014); or Muhammed Yusuf Abdulazeez, who opened fire on two military installations in Chattanooga, Tennessee (2015).  It is very plausible that one or more of the subsequent terror attacks on the homeland could have been prevented if more subject matter experts in the Department of Homeland Security had been allowed to do our jobs back in late 2009. It is demoralizing—and infuriating—that today, those elusive dots are even harder to find, and harder to connect, than they were during the winter of 2009” (Philip Haney, ‘DHS ordered me to scrub records of Muslims with terror ties,’ The Hill, February 5, 2016).

ZOA National President Morton A. Klein said, “The details provided in Philip Haney’s account of working within the DHS are nothing short of startling. If true –– and no-one has suggested that Mr. Haney is lying –– it seems clear that President Obama made a decision some years ago to deliberately obliterate the vital national security records relating to radical Muslim terrorism and to hamper the ability of our secure and law enforcement agencies from doing their sacred duty of protecting the U.S. and all American citizens and residents.

“Why is President Obama doing this? No explanation other than the one we have been compelled, painfully and reluctantly, to offer –– that President Obama has sympathy for radical Islam and seeks to protect and empower such groups –– would appear to explain this action and some 33 other instances of favoring, protecting and empowering jihadists and radical Islam which we provided in May 2015.

“Among the instances are: 

• President Obama refusing to condemn radical Islam and jihadist terrorism by name, insisting instead that such things have nothing to do with Islam or are instances of ‘workplace violence’;

• Releasing numerous jihadist terrorists from Guantanamo prison, despite their designation by experts as ‘high risk’ to commit repeated terrorist attacks; 

• Promoting the radical Islamic Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, having helped force out of office a U.S. ally (Hosni Mubarak) and insisting on immediate elections involving ‘non-secular actors’ which, as every poll foreshadowed, resulted in the election of a radical Islamic regime;

• Declaring that jihadist terrorist organizations State Department-listed terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hizballah have ‘legitimate claims’;

• Appointing, or attempting to appoint, advisers, like Chas Freeman and Robert Malley, who have promoted legitimizing and engaging with jihadist terror groups like Hezbollah and Hamas; 

• Empowering the radical Shia regime in Iran by concluding a nuclear deal which the President, himself, says might result Iran going nuclear in a little over a decade and meanwhile provide Tehran a stupendous windfall of hundreds of billions of dollars in sanctions relief pursuant to that agreement; 

• Dispatching Salam Al-Marayati, director of the radical Islamic Muslim Public Affairs Committee overseas to speak on behalf of the United States, when Marayati had condemned the 1990’s American air strikes of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Sudan; called for Israel’s destruction; suggested Israel may be responsible for 9-11; and defended the rights of Holocaust deniers; and 

• Inviting radical Muslims to White House meetings and events while not inviting genuine Muslim moderate individuals and organizations, like M. Zuhdi Jasser or the Society for Islamic Pluralism.

“In view of the deadly seriousness of the issues involved, the ZOA urges the Congress to immediately investigate Mr. Haney’s claims and to see, if true, what can be done to contain the damage and reverse as far as possible the damage inflicted on our national security. NO higher duty rests on the shoulders of our elected representatives.”