CHAPTER ONE
 

Once I used to hope that experience of life could be handed on from nation to nation, and from one person to another, but now I am beginning to have doubts of this.
—ALEXSANDR SOLZHENITSYN1
Having lamented “the death of the grown-up” in a previous book, it may seem odd to begin here with a paean to “the child”—a perfectly guileless but curious and also innately logical child. This is the very young person in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” who entered posterity by speaking out, free and heedless of consensus, careerism, peer pressure, personal safety, legal repercussions, and even, freest and most heedless of all, “giving offense.”
If you recall, the procession of the naked emperor, arrayed in what was put over, flimflam style, as rich and sumptuous attire, was a great success so long as the crowd played along and participated in the charade. “Nobody would let on that he couldn’t see anything,” Andersen writes, “because then he would have been unfit for his job or very stupid.” It was at this point that the little child—boy or girl, we never know which—said its famous line:
“But he hasn’t got anything on!” … And it was whispered from man to man what the child had said …
“Why, but he hasn’t got anything on!” they all shouted at last.
And the emperor winced, for he felt they were right. But he thought to himself: “I must go through with the procession now.” And he drew himself up more proudly than ever, while the chamberlains walked behind him, bearing the train that wasn’t there.2
So ends one of the great cliff-hangers. Will the emperor and his chamberlains brazen it out, cowing the people into acquiescence and thus maintaining their power? Or will the people have the courage to trust their own eyes and, relying on the evidence before them, call the emperor and his men to account? In considering these possibilities, never underestimate the influence of those invisible-train-bearing chamberlains, each one of whom has everything to lose if the empire of lies goes down.
There is hope, at least, in the open question. There is inspiration, too, in the example of the child who tells the truth. However, the forces of illusion and self-delusion are formidable foes against such outbursts of reality. The odds are against any public reckoning. More likely than not, the free-speaking child will be hushed up or badly shunned until it, too, either learns “better” or loses heart in the reeducation process. After all, it’s not easy to continue shouting out what is in plain sight when surrounding society is determined to ignore, overlook, or even hide it. When “everyone” agrees there is nothing there, what is there becomes invisible by consensus, and the Big Lie lives. At some point, even this child may buy into it.
Not a chance.
This child, too, is a force in history, as the following chronicle of Big Lies will tell us, its voice calling out the nation’s betrayal in a desperate struggle to pass on dangerous knowledge that is too often suppressed. We must listen for these voices. You will hear them time and again in the following pages. Sometimes the child has bad teeth and mumbles. Sometimes he pierces the echo chamber of lies with a funny accent. Sometimes he sports a yachting cap and hails from the Social Register. Sometimes she—for, yes, there were such women, too—is careworn, eyes seared by unimaginable hell on earth. Sometimes she is quirky. But the child is always true, always real. It is the rest, the emperors and chamberlains all around, who are as false and hollow as the historical narrative they create, assuming we will follow along. As, in fact, we do. That is our problem today. Heirs to a false and hollow history, we become unwitting participants, perpetuating and entrenching many, many lies as we take our places in a secretly subverted pageant—and never know it.
That’s partly because this subversion of our history, this assault on our nation’s character, has no visible markers or specific constituencies. From the inner rings of the Pentagon to the principal’s office in a local grammar school, we see nothing amiss. Our people still look, speak, and comport themselves just as they should, snapping salutes and schooling the young. What’s changed here is on the inside. Forced to reckonings that require gathering facts and drawing conclusions about ourselves or others, we do not fall back on a vital store of survival instinct and moral code; we fall back on a perversion of both. It is in this moment of free fall when we must look more closely to understand what has happened to us.
Let me illustrate with a true story about a real-life U.S. Navy admiral that first crystallized the syndrome for me several years ago. You know the type: steel-gray hair, clipped; military ribbons, bristling; dutiful, loyal, the works. One day in this long-drawn-out post-9/11 era, this admiral received a lengthy, extensively documented briefing on the Islamic doctrine of jihad (Islamic war) from Maj. Stephen C. Coughlin, U.S. Army Reserves. Coughlin is an expert on the legal-religious doctrine that Islamic terrorists claim as the justification for campaigns of violence against infidels and rival Muslims.3 His briefings, which I’ve attended multiple times, are legendary in security circles in Washington and elsewhere for their comprehensive, if not overwhelming, compilation of factual, Islamic-sourced evidence, which demonstrates, for example, that Islamic terrorists are not “hijacking” Islamic law (sharia) when they engage in jihad. On the contrary, they are executing it. Nor are they “twisting” the foundational principles of Islam as codified in each and every authoritative Islamic source. They are exemplifying them.
For reasons that should become clearer over the following pages, this briefing on these basic facts of jihad doctrine is typically our top military leaders’ first exposure to what is known in Pentagon parlance as the “enemy threat doctrine.” I am not exaggerating. Years of battle—even worse, years of battle planning—have passed without our leadership having studied, or even having become acquainted with, the principles and historic facts of Islamic war doctrine. Four years into the so-called war on terror, then–Joint Chiefs Chairman Peter Pace even pointed this out in a speech at the National Defense University on December 1, 2005.4
Notwithstanding Pace’s concern, the study and analysis of Islam and jihad remained de facto forbidden in policy-making circles inside the Bush White House, which even codified a lexicon in 2008 to help government officials discuss Islamic jihad without mentioning “Islam” or “jihad.”5 The Obama administration would carry this same see-no-Islam policy to its zealous limit, finally mounting a two-front assault on the few trainers and fact-based training materials that were sometimes (sparingly) used by law enforcement agencies and the military to educate personnel about Islam and jihad. What history should remember as the Great Jihad Purges of 2012 began at the Justice Department, affecting domestic law enforcement agencies, and spread to the Pentagon, affecting the entire U.S. military.
First, the FBI eliminated hundreds of pages of “anti-Islam” educational material from its own training programs and those of other law enforcement agencies. Several Muslim advocacy groups applauded these purge results at the briefing at the bureau on February 15, 2012, “unexpectedly” attended by FBI Director Robert Mueller himself.6 Next, on April 24, 2012, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin E. Dempsey ordered a similar scrub, calling on the entire U.S. military to “review” its educational and training classes, files, and rosters of instructors to ensure that no members of the armed services were studying material “disrespectful of the Islamic religion.”7
What exactly does the U.S. government and its Muslim advisers consider “anti-Islam” or “disrespectful,” or, as a Pentagon spokesman put it on Al Jazeera TV, “warped views”?8 One trophy of this so-called Islamophobia that made it into Wired.com (whose reportage seems to have energized if not triggered these government purges) was a PowerPoint slide created by Stephen C. Coughlin about the “permanent command in Islam for Muslims to hate and despise Jews and Christians and not take them as friends.”9
Pretty disrespectful and warped for sure—but only if Coughlin’s premise and supporting documentation were untrue. The statement and the documentation, however, are incontrovertible. There is a permanent command in Islam for Muslims to hate and despise Jews and Christians and not take them as friends. The slide in question includes citations of the most authoritative Islamic texts, the Koran and the hadiths (the sayings and deeds of Mohammed, which Muslims hold sacred) to document its veracity.10
Veracity is not the issue here, though. Evidence is not the issue here. Reality is not the issue here, either. The issue is a commandment from on high in government—“Islam is a religion of peace.” It is the Big Lie that is the basis of the prevailing ideology, and, above all, the Big Lie must live. No one in the leadership contradicts it “because then,” as Hans Christian Andersen tells us, he would be “unfit for his job or very stupid.”
Admiral X certainly didn’t want anyone to think that. So what did he make of his Coughlin briefing, an introduction to the central Islamic doctrine of jihad and its role in driving global jihad? How did he react to the spectacular if not shattering array of information contained in th...