Recently released transcripts from Orlando nightclub terrorist Omar Mateen further testify to the fact that he was indeed motivated by the Islamic State. The transcripts are of Mateen’s cellphone conversation with the police negotiator during the attack while he was holding hostages. Mateen revealed his primary motive for the attack when he said that he had to respond to the U.S.‘s airstrikes against ISIL that killed Abu Waheeb. Waheeb was one of the lesser-known leaders in ISIL. These transcripts discredit the statements made by Barack Obama and Attorney General Loretta Lynch a few days after the attack. Lynch said, “I cannot tell you definitively that we will ever narrow it down to one motivation. People often act out of more than one motivation.” Remember at the time, Obama and the Leftmedia blamed Republicans for not moving to further restrict guns as they tried to spin the focus away from an ISIL-inspired terror attack. The bigger problem according to Obama was the availability of guns, once again deflecting any responsibility away from himself and his handling of ISIL.

Interestingly, but not surprisingly, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson stated that as ISIL has been losing territory in Syria and Iraq it has “increased its plotting on targets outside of Iraq and Syria and continues to encourage attacks in the United States.” This is a message that many conservatives have been saying for quite some time, but the key issue at hand is directly dealing with the destructive ideology of radical Islam. It’s well and good to recognize the threat in general, but if peripheral side issues which have little bearing upon the problem at hand are allowed to be used to explain away the primary motivation for these terror attacks, then we can only expect to see the threat increase.