The ability to prevent the next act of terror is being hamstrung by a fear of being offensive.

Soon after the horrific Islamic terror attack in Orlando, Florida, it was revealed that a former co-worker of Omar Mateen — the Islamic terrorist who carried out the attack — had reported Mateen to their employer on multiple occasions.

“This guy was unhinged and unstable. He talked of killing people.”

“I quit because everything he said was toxic,” Daniel Gilroy said, “and the company wouldn’t do anything. This guy was unhinged and unstable. He talked of killing people.”

While the exact reasons for the company’s refusal to “do anything” about Mateen are currently unknown, many are pointing a finger at political correctness. It wouldn’t be the first time such an attack could have been prevented were people not paralyzed by the fear of offending the left’s sacred cows of diversity, multiculturalism — and, of course, tolerance.

In the aftermath of the Islamic terror attack in San Bernardino, California, it was revealed that neighbors had noticed suspicious activity at the home of shooter Syed Farook, as well as at his mother’s home, but did nothing for fear of causing offense.

Aaron Elswick, a neighbor of Farook’s mother, said that another neighbor told him that the Farooks had “been receiving packages — quite a few packages within a short amount of time, and they were actually doing a lot of work out in the garage.”

“She was kind of suspicious and wanted to report it,” said Elswick, “but she said she didn’t want to profile.” That we live in an age in which someone is more afraid of offending liberals and ethnic or religious minorities than they are of being murdered by a terrorist is truly astonishing, and might be funny were the implications not so devastatingly tragic.

It’s not difficult to understand how we reached such a sad state of affairs. When someone like former Attorney General Eric Holder says that “profiling by law enforcement is not only wrong, it is profoundly misguided and ineffective,” it erodes one of the last best defenses against terrorism: common sense.

This insidious political correctness not only discourages people from speaking up before attacks happen — it also silences people from speaking out after attacks happen.

Meanwhile, organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union are more concerned about the “rights” of foreigners than they are about the lives of Americans. When Holder released updated restrictions on profiling in 2014, the organization claimed they didn’t go far enough.

“It’s so loosely drafted that its exceptions risk swallowing any rule and permit some of the worst law enforcement policies and practices that have victimized and alienated American Muslim and other minority communities,” said Laura Murphy, then-director of the ACLU’s D.C. legislative office.

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This insidious political correctness not only discourages people from speaking up before attacks happen — it also silences people from speaking out after attacks happen.

Hours after the attack, anti-Islamization activist Pamela Geller’s 50,000-strong “Stop Islamization of America” Facebook group was deleted by Facebook. Soon after, Geller’s personal page was suspended.

Facebook charged Geller’s page was “hateful, obscene, or threatening,” a claim Geller denied emphatically in an interview with Breitbart News. “It is not hateful, obscene, or threatening to oppose jihad terror such as we saw in Orlando last night,” said Geller.

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“Truth is not hateful or obscene. What is hateful, obscene, and threatening is that Facebook is moving to silence everyone who speaks honestly about the motivating ideology behind such attacks,” she said.

It seems that to Facebook, the one thing worse than Islamic terrorist attacks is pointing out the fact that they’re Islamic. It’s a dangerous politically correct pathology that now permeates the West. Liberal-minded people are so afraid of being seen to be intolerant of Islam that they are unwilling to take action to stop violence from Islamist actors.

Last week it was reported in the German newspaper Hessian Niedersächsische Allgemeine that German girls in Kassel, a town in the western part of the country, were subjected to months of sexual assaults by older Muslim migrant males en route to and from school. The attacks began in September 2015 and only just came to light.

Astonishingly, the girls allowed themselves to be subjected to such assaults for the better part of an entire school year as they feared the “social-political” implications of coming forward. “We do not want refugees to be discriminated against. We do not want people making sweeping accusations [about Muslim migrants],” one of the victims told the German newspaper .

The girls were “paralyzed by political correctness,” the paper reported.