We recognized the threat of Communism once; why can’t we recognize Islam as our enemy?

In the federal government, President Harry Truman's Executive Order 9835 initiated a program of loyalty reviews for federal employees in 1947. Truman's mandate called for dismissal if there were "reasonable grounds...for belief that the person involved is disloyal to the Government of the United States. Communism was considered an existential threat to the United States and the freedoms guaranteed by our constitution. The possibility of the overthrow of our government was considered real and needed to be guarded against.

When President Dwight Eisenhower took office in 1953, he strengthened and extended Truman's loyalty review program. Similar loyalty reviews were established in many state and local government offices and some private industries across the nation. In 1958 it was estimated that roughly one out of every five employees in the United States was required to pass some sort of loyalty review.

There were many anti-Communist committees, panels, and "loyalty review boards" in federal, state, and local governments, as well as many private agencies that carried out investigations for small and large companies concerned about possible Communists in their work force.

Fast forward to 2009. A group obsessed with creating a Caliphate based on Muslim religious law -- Sharia Law -- in the United States and other nations held their first US conference in Chicago and there is no reaction by the government and little by the public yet the threat posed by Islam and their Jihadists is greater than any ever posed by Communists in the United States.

The conference is titled, "The Fall of Capitalism and the Rise of Islam," and was held at the Hilton Hotel in a suburb of Chicago. The shocking part of this is that the majority of congress is silent about this gathering of dedicated enemies of the US Constitution and American values, yet they are voicing their outrage over a CIA proposal to "terminate" terrorist leaders overseas. The Obama Administration and most of the news media are also remaining silent.

Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT), the international movement to re-establish an international Islamic state ­ or Caliphate, started their campaign to win American recruits in a Chicago suburb and nearly 300 people packed the Grand Ballroom of the Hilton Hotel for its Khalifah Conference to listen to Islamic ideologues blame capitalism for World War I and World War II, the U.S. sub-prime mortgage meltdown, the current violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, world poverty and malnutrition and inner-city drug use. A speaker (Abu Atallah) even blamed capitalism for the late singer Michael Jackson's decision "to shed his black skin."

In the ballroom where the conference took place, men and women were largely segregated, with men in the front and women in the back. Reacting to criticism of this segregation, one of the speakers said "Men and women must be kept separate to prevent people from behaving like animals."

According to Hizb ut-Tahrir, the world's social and economic problems will not be fixed until the world (obviously including the United States) is governed by Shariah and the government controls all major industries. "Secular capitalism has made me devalue my skin" and "has kept my family in ghettos," said one speaker, an African-American who went on to blame it for the fact that he smoked marijuana and his grandmother played the lottery. Capitalism, he added, is a form of economic "terrorism" and "causes us to be sent to mental hospitals." In an interview with WBBM-TV in Chicago, a deputy spokesman Mohammad Malkawi refused to specifically condemn Al Qaida and the Taliban.

Despite all this Hizb ut-Tahrir has not been designated a terrorist group by the U.S. government and it insists it is only interested in instituting radical change by nonviolent means. But the organization’s alumni include 9/ll mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the late Iraqi terrorist leader Abu Musab Zarqawi and would-be Hamas suicide bombers, and the group's pro-jihadist rhetoric has led critics to label it a "conveyor belt for terrorists."

Even a Muslim American group condemned Hirb ut-Tahir but not the US government. They issued a statement in advance of the conference condemning Hizb ut-Tahrir's radical ideology and challenging others to follow suit.

"Hizb ut-Tahrir preaches an ideology that calls for the destruction of the principles that America is founded on," said Zuhdi Jasser, president of the American-Islamic Forum for Democracy. "While their words are protected by our First Amendment, their actions and movement must not be allowed to take hold. The silence of American Islamist organizations like [the Council on American-Islamic Relations] CAIR and [the Islamic Society of North America] ISNA in condemning the ideologies of Hizb ut-Tahrir and their agenda of insurgency in America speaks volumes to their own, albeit, more camouflaged Islamist agenda."

How “non violent” can this organization be? One panelist suggested that modern industrial powers could fall to Muslims the way Mecca fell to Mohammed nearly 1,400 years ago. A speaker identified by conference organizers as Imam Jaleel Abdul Razek said that "if they offer us the sun, or the moon, or a nice raise, or a passport, or a house in the suburbs or even a place to pray at the job, on the condition that we stop calling for Islam as a complete way of life - we should never do that, ever do that - unless and until Islam becomes victorious or we die in the attempt."

Does this sound like a peaceful organization to you?

There was a dialogue between the imam and a member of the audience over whether Shariah or the Constitution should be the supreme law of the land in the United States

Audience member: "Would you get rid of the Constitution for Shariah, yes or no?"

Imam: "Over the Muslim world? Yes, it would be gone."

Audience Member: And so if the United States was in a Muslim world, the Constitution would be gone?"

Imam: "If the United States was in the Muslim world, the Muslims who are here would be calling and happy to see the Shariah applied, yes we would."

Audience Member: "And the Constitution gone. That's all."

Imam: "Yes, as Muslims they would be long gone."

Clearly Hizb ut-Tahrir's is not only is determined to destroy capitalism -- it would shred the United States Constitution as well in favor of Shariah law.

Could domestic Communists in the 1950’s have done worse? What has happened to America when we once recognized the threat of Communism but fail to recognize the far worse threat – Islam?