Originally Published on the Sultan Knish blog The radical-moderate continuum that has defined the dialogue on Islam in the War on Terror is not an authentic perspective, it is an observer perspective.
To the Western observer, a suicide bomber is radical, a Muslim Imam willing to perform gay weddings is moderate and the Muslim Brotherhood leader who supports some acts of terror, but not others, is moderately radical or radically moderate.
These descriptions tell us nothing about Islam or about what Muslims believe, but do tell us a great deal about its observers and what they believe. They turn Islam into inkblots that reveal more about the interpreter than the splotch of ink being interpreted.
Muslims are not radical or moderate. The radical-moderate continuum is how liberal countries rate individuals and countries to decide how well they will harmonize with the national and international consensus. Even if that consensus only exists in their own mind. The label of moderate does not mean a rejection of violence. Otherwise it could hardly be applied to the Muslim Brotherhood. What it means is a willingness to collaborate with Western governments and progressive organizations.
The radical-moderate labels are useful for liberals, but useless for anyone who wants to asses reality. It is tied into a number of false notions that are necessary for maintaining the status quo of liberal democracies. Notions such as the equal moral stature and interchangeability of all religions and peoples are key to running a liberal democracy, but they make it impossible to have a rational conservation about Islam.
In liberal democracies, no one really discusses Islam as a religion. That discussion is preemptively aborted by the defense of the general category of religion. To criticize Islam is to challenge the category of protection for all religions, much as to attack Communism during the Cold War was to attack the First Amendment.
The general category makes it necessary to subdivide the specific religion or ideology into a moderate majority and a tiny minority of extremists. This categorization tells us nothing about Islam and everything about the political and intellectual classes that refuse to rationally discuss it.
Islam is neither moderate nor extreme. It simply is. Extremism and moderate are an observer perspective. That does not mean that Islam is all one thing, an impermeable block. But the one thing that it is not, is liberal.
Liberal Islam is secular Islam, in the same way that liberal Christianity and liberal Judaism are both secularized in their subservience to liberal values. There are indeed secular Muslims out there, but they are a tiny minority of secularists even in the secular West. Their influence is minimal. And it likely would be minimal even if the Saudis weren't spending fortunes in oil money to control the expressions of Islam in the West.
Even these secular Muslims are not necessarily non-violent. What they lack is the broader worldview of Islamic nationalism, that some label Islamism. They will support Arab Nationalist terrorism, which defines peoples by nation, rather than the Islamic Nationalism, which defines them by religion.
Islamic nationalism is not a religion. Nor is it a separate branch of Islam. It is influenced by movements within Islam, but those movements are largely reformist efforts aimed at returning to a more uncompromised Islam. And it is not limited to these movements. The majority of Muslims identify with Islamic nationalism to some degree.
Islamism is simply the political implementation of Islam which is already political. Islamism does not politicize an apolitical religion, it applies a political religion to politics. And most Muslims support that for the simple reason that they are Muslims and Islam is their religion. They may quibble over some of the details and they may be fooled by some smooth talk, but the same may be said of many supporters of National Socialism and Bolshevism. What matters is not whether every single German who thought Hitler had some good ideas supported the concentration camps or whether every single Communist supported the Gulags. Certainly not all did. What matters is that they supported the systems and leaders that made those things possible even when the warning signs were there.
No Islamist movement represents a complete break with Islam. Not even a partial break. The greatest stressors that Islamic terrorist groups impose on their religious codes is the treatment of other Muslims as infidels. And that alone is a telling statement about the tolerance for interfaith violence in their religion. It isn't war that stresses Islamic codes, it's internecine warfare.
Western observers may label those who identify with Al Qaeda as extremists and those who identify with the Muslim Brotherhood as moderates, but these are cosmetic differences. Islamist organizations are not a separate religion. They are the practical implementation of the religion. If we are to have a truer continuum, it would run from secular to religious, rather than moderate to extremist.
What makes Islamists dangerous are not their means, such as flying planes into skyscrapers, but their ends, which involve a global theocracy that reduces non-Muslims to enemies and slaves. Whether this end is accomplished through bombs or elections makes little difference. Hitler and Stalin would be no different whether they won elections or seized power by force. Not so long as their ends involved war, mass slavery and genocide.
The trouble with Islamic nationalism is Islam. There is no way of getting around that. Terrorism is an aspect of the problem. But the problem is a violent system that views the lives of non-Muslims and dissenting Muslims as worthless.
When Muslim terrorists set off bombs in Boston, Mumbai, Jerusalem or anywhere else, what they are really communicating is not some passionate grievance, but an ideology that has no regard for the lives of non-Muslims. That same message is communicated by the treatment of Western prisoners in Dubai or the treatment of Western hostages in Nigeria. It is a message rooted in the xenophobia of the Koran and it is a warning of the system that these acts of oppression and terror are intended to build.
The extent to which most Muslims are committed to the final ends of Islamism, including a total war with the rest of the world and its subjugation under Islamic law, may vary, but there is no denying the fact that in open elections, Islamists have won again and again. The Arab Spring conclusively demonstrated that the Islamist agenda is more compelling than any other. Indeed it is hard to find any political movements in ascendency in the Muslim world today except Islamist ones.
The tiny minority of extremists are not the Islamists who have dominated the Arab Spring as thoroughly as they have dominated the Islamic institutions of the West, it is the secularists who still cling to forms of solidarity based on national identity or economic class.
If their moderate Islam, which will have co-ed prayers in mosques, female prayer leaders and gay Imams is the solution, then there is no hope for a solution because it has no trajectory. The forces that forged a liberalized Christianity and Judaism in Europe are in decline. And they could hardly impose their worldview on a religion whose centers of power are out of their reach.
Liberal Islam is not in ascendency anywhere. In much of the world, including the Muslim world and totalitarian nations such as Russia and China, the continuum is not that of the radicals and the moderates, but the government clerics who are not moderate, but lack all conviction, and the Islamists who want to overthrow them.
Government clerics are rarely moderate. They often support terrorism, so long as it is aimed at other nations. The moderate cleric in Egypt supports war with Israel, but not domestic theocracy. The moderate cleric in Russia supports terrorism against New York, but not Moscow. The moderate cleric in Saudi Arabia supports war with Syria but not assassinations at home. There are exceptions, but these exceptions, when they are sincere, are the tiny minority.
Everywhere Islam is weaponized to be used against someone else, just as Carter once believed that he could use the Iranians and the Afghans against the Soviet Union. But it is folly to think that the means of religious violence can be directed toward any other ultimate end than religious supremacy.
Islamism is applied Islam. It is not extreme, only illiberal, but then Islam is an illiberal religion. It is a religion built on war and conquest.
The Islamist only reminds Muslims of what their religion stands for. It is not a separate entity from Islam because it is rooted within Islam. Its solutions are Islamic solutions. It may break in some ways with history, but not with theology.
The pragmatic solution of denying this is so to keep Muslims from embracing Islamist solutions to political problems is doomed. Muslims do not define themselves by Western standards of liberalism and extremism. They do not rely on Western thinkers to determine their religion for them. They are outside the consensus of liberal democracies and the best evidence of that is the triumph of Islamists in the political spheres of the Middle East and the West.
Tactics that ignore reality are doomed. We have learned that the hard way in many wars. We are learning it now in Afghanistan and in London, Paris and Boston. We can waste time trying to fit Muslims into our categories or we can understand that they are not part of our categories.
Islamism is not a sect, it is the Islamic consensus. It is the closest thing that the Muslim world has to match the liberal worldview of the West. The Islamist is not radical to his own. He represents the majority view of the Muslim world that power and politics should derive from Islam and that Muslims should assert a collective power based on their common Islamic nationalism,
Islamism won in the Arab Spring. It won the Western Diaspora. The idea that we can detach Islam from its political application by branding its political application extremist has failed. The two are intertwined. We cannot weaken Islamism except by weakening Islam, economically, militarily and demographically.
Originally Published on the Sultan Knish blog The media coverage of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has one theme and one tack. Like 30 of the 31 men on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists list, they were terrorists who just happened to be Muslim.
While the New York Times dispatched its best and brightest lackeys to Boston to write sensitive pieces on how hard it was for the two Tsarnaevs to fit in leaving them no choice but to bomb the Boston Marathon and then send LOL texts to their friends, it fell to a UK tabloid like The Sun to conduct an interview with the ex-girlfriend of the lead terrorist and learn that he wanted her to hate America and beat her because she wouldn't wear a Hijab.
There are all sorts of jobs that Americans won't do. Like pick lettuce, bomb the Boston Marathon and report honestly on the motives of the bombers. The only news network that operates outside the media consensus is owned by an Australian mogul who also owns The Sun.
Americans like to think of their press as freer, but it's only free in the sense that it voluntarily puts on its own muzzle. European tabloids get into bloody brawls with regulators. American newspapers have nothing to brawl about. They will gleefully report anything that undermines national security at the drop of a hat, knowing that they won't be touched, but there is a long list of subjects that they won't touch with a million mile pole.
In Europe, editors risked their lives to publish the Mohammed cartoons. In America, on the rare occasion that they were depicted, they were usually censored. CNN, which could show Kathy Griffin trying to molest Anderson Cooper, without the benefit of pixelation or a suicide button, blurred out Mohammed's face; assuming that Muslims would appreciate the sensitivity of treating their prophet's face like an obscene object.
The American media does not need to be censored. It censors itself.
Did the New York Times really fail to come across Tamerlan Tsarnaev's ex-girlfriend and domestic abuse victim while they were busily interviewing every single person in Boston who ever ran into the future terrorists? Doubtful. The New York Times may be incompetent, but it isn't that incompetent. If it could track down Tamerlan's old coach, it could track down his old girlfriend. It chose not to.
So did every other paper.
Either The Sun is staffed with crack journalists who could do what no American newspaper, news channel and network news program could, or The Sun got the scoop on Nadine Ascencao because no newspaper on this side of the ocean wanted to touch it. And it's easy to see why.
Nadine talks about being beaten in the name of Islam, forced to memorize Koran verses and being taught to hate America. Most journalists on this side of the ocean want quotes on what nice boys the two Tsarnaevs were and how, in true liberal fashion, no one could have expected them to do something like this.
Every background story on them is filled with the same pabulum, because the endless march of “We couldn’t have known” quotes provides the government-media complex with the plausible deniability it needs to continue doing the same thing all over again. If the people couldn’t have known, then it stands to reason that their government or their media couldn’t have known either.
No Islam please, we're American was the mainstream media's unspoken message. We don't do Islamic terrorism. We only report on terrorists who happen to be Muslim.
The only newspaper besides The Sun to do an interview with Nadine Ascencao was the Wall Street Journal; which just happens to be owned by the same tabloid mogul. But there is an interesting difference between The Sun and the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ piece doesn't mention Hijabs, Koran verses or hating America. It doesn't mention Islam at all.
Co-written by a Pakistani journalist, it emphasizes only that Tamerlan was a bully of no particular religion. That reporter's twitter feed features a retweet from another Muslim WSJ reporter who broadcasts that the plans of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to head to Times Square amounted to nothing. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Nothing to see here is the theme of the media's coverage. Like a movie, it begins with inspirational tales of courage, and then just when the villains were about to come on the scene, the credits began to roll. It's only been twenty minutes, but the audience gets hustled out of the theater and told to leave their sodas and popcorn behind.
The "folks who did this", in Obama's patently false folksy parlance, were caught. Or at least one of them was. The sacred liberal ceremony of the Miranda warning was recited by a judge at his bedside and the trial will now move through the traditional phases of expensive lawyers paid for by the taxpayer pleading that their client was traumatized by our foreign policy and the entire story being shoved to the back of the media's coat rack behind the next sports star who comes out of the closet.
This is the surreal world of the American media, which wields its weapons of mass distraction with clinical precision, so that the news hour and the local paper are virtually indistinguishable in content from an old episode of The Jerry Springer Show. But it can't possibly spare the time for a coherent discussion of the real world motives of two men who carried out a major terrorist attack in Boston.
Soviet citizens listened to the Voice of America to find out what their own government wouldn't tell them. American citizens have to read The Sun and the Daily Mail, publications whose standards are slightly above that of The Huffington Post and yet, like the National Inquirer, have become one of the few outlets that will chase after the stories that the media has embargoed as effectively as Pravda.
Instead of wasting time on a dead end like Islam, the media has spent its time chasing down every other possible angle.
Did Tamerlan turn terrorist because he took too many blows to the head while boxing? Could the Boston Marathon bombing have been prevented if only we had let him win?
The New York Times assembled a touching story of an aspiring immigrant boxer radicalized by the petty restrictions of a government that wouldn't let him apply for citizenship because of his history of domestic violence and appearance on a terrorist watch list. But how does that jibe with the Tamerlan from five earlier who beat up a boy that his sister was dating because he wasn't Muslim?
When the media must deal with Tamerlan's theology, it keeps him in the category of the troubled man who turned to some wacky extremist version of Islam propounded by a YouTube convert. The man who beat his sister's boyfriend because he wasn't a Muslim and beat his ex-girlfriend because she wouldn't wear a Hijab wasn't some brainwashed drone who had his mind stolen by YouTube videos. He was a Muslim.
The Tamerlan of 2007 might not have watched as many Jihadist videos, but it would be a mistake to assume that he would have disagreed with their content. That Tamerlan might not have been looking at bombing targets, but neither would he have been upset and angry if some other Muslim had done what he would go on to do. Like Dzhokhar's two Muslim friends, his first reaction would have been to cover it up.
When it comes to serial killers and mass shooters, the media is conditioned to look for a break that follows some life crisis. But with Muslim terrorists there is no discontinuity, only continuity. A few setbacks might have made terrorism more appealing to Tamerlan, but that would not have happened if it had not already been on his menu of life choices. Or that of his brother.
That angle is the most terrifying one that the media can think of. It's the one that they can't touch. It's the one that they won't let anyone else touch either. If they have to mention the "I" word, they will sandwich it between "extremist" and "radicalization". But it's not Tamerlan who was the radical extremist. Among Muslims, his views were mainstream. The Wahhabis are in ascendance in most parts of the world, including the United States. Islamist parties roundly won the Arab Spring.
What was the difference between Tamerlan Tsarnaev and any of the Syrian Jihadists held up by the media as the epitome of courage and bravery? What is the difference between Tamerlan Tsarnaev and the Hamas and Fatah terrorists that the media peevishly contends Israel must make peace with? What is the difference between Tamerlan Tsarnaev and any of the tens of thousands of Muslim terrorists fighting in conflicts around the world?
While the European media, for all its faults, occasionally grapples with the incompatibility of liberal values and Muslim values; on this side of the ocean the topic is all but untouchable. There is no national censorship body that does this. Instead stories are held down by the weight of a consensus that insists the media exists to promote liberal values. All else follows from there.
The stories that promote liberal values are reported. The stories about a future Muslim terrorist beating his girlfriend because she wouldn't wear a Hijab are not because those stories create a sneaking suspicion that Muslim multiculturalism is incompatible with liberal values. And the incompatible Muslims, like Mohammed’s face, have been pixelated out of existence in reports on the terrorist attacks by disgruntled boxers, doctors and perfume salesmen who just happen to be Muslim.
These are the Muslims that the media doesn’t see. And it is doing everything possible to make sure that we don’t see them either.
Originally Published on the Sultan Knish blog The left has a clearly defined set of responses to a terrorist attack. After all the hopes for a properly right wing terrorist have come to naught, it begins the long slow process of rolling back the laws and emotional attitudes stemming from the attack.
For it, terrorism, like anything else, either fits into its narrative or conflicts with it. The narrative defines the world, past, present and future, in terms of the political agenda of the left. An event that clashes with the agenda must have its meaning changed so that the power of the narrative is restored.
Most violent attacks, from a street mugging to September 11, cause people to seek out security by combating the attackers. The left's task is to shift the narrative so that people see it in an entirely different way. The perpetrators become the victims by the trick of transforming the real victims into the real perpetrators. The lesson shifts from going on the offense to learning not to give offense.
The process is gradual and the playbook is infinite. Weapons of mass distraction are brought out. New villains are introduced and the emotional resonance of the events is drowned in ridicule. The tones are also many, from urging everyone to let love defeat hate to displays of virulent hate against the people "truly" stirring up trouble, but they all share a common agenda. Only the tactics vary.
Unlike the right, the left is systematic. It studies structures and people and plots its lines of attack accordingly. It pits emotion against emotion and law against law. It waits for the initial shock to fade before launching its first wave of attacks over process.
The left's honest response, the one that shows up on its Twitter feeds and in posts on its own sites, is that the country is overreacting. Some leftists will even be bold enough to say that we had it coming. But its public response is more discreet. It exploits the grief for its own ends, diverting shocked city residents into interfaith memorials, some of which are progressive enough to include denunciations of American foreign policy and vigils for the dead on both sides.
But even here, the left generally restrains itself. It waits until the weeks or months have passed to begin deadening the emotion surrounding the event with sarcastic remarks and jokes until the sacred becomes fully profane. It waits somewhat less time to begin lecturing the country on how our foreign policy made them hate us, knowing that in a contest between the establishment's narrative of inexplicable Islamic radicalization for unknown reasons and their narrative of American evil, they have the upper hand because they provide a realistic motive and the establishment does not.
Still this too comes later. The left knows that there is a window on human emotion. There is a time when people need to mourn and a time when they will feel a diminishing outrage and even begin to agree with observations whose thrust is that the United States of America is the real terrorist. And so there are things that the left will say on DailyKos and then on Salon that it will not say on CNN or the editorial page of the New York Times.
The editorials explaining how a lack of American support for Chechen independence led to the marathon massacre are coming. They just haven't splashed ashore in mainstream liberal newspapers yet. Timing is everything and the difference between the left of the counterculture and the left of the culture is that it knows what people will be willing to listen to and when. And it knows where to begin.
Against the horror of the bombing, the left juxtaposes the horror of police state. It pits the fear of terrorists depriving us of our lives and freedoms against the fear of the government doing the same. And considering the history of government abuses, it does not take long for this line of argument to make a compelling emotional dent in the responses of even many ordinary people to the attacks.
The left begins by raising all sorts of procedural questions about how law enforcement and the military are treating the enemy. It develops a burning conviction that our civil rights are the only thing about the country worth keeping. It hammers away at any law enforcement or military mistake, no matter how minor, and collects these together to amass a narrative of the police state.
At this stage the left puts on a show of maintaining its objectivity. It pretends that it is the principle that matters, not the perpetrator and most of those gullible people nodding along never notice that there is only one issue and two groups of perpetrators that this principle applies to: terrorists and leftist activists working in support of terrorists.
For months or even years, the left wraps itself in a Constitution that it does not believe in on behalf of those who want to abolish and destroy it.
The attacks on law enforcement and the military prove the left's core thesis that America is the oppressor and therefore deserving of terrorism. Whatever action, no matter how little, we take to defend ourselves proves that the terrorists were justified in attacking us. Even if all we do is lock up terrorists or shoot back at them when they shoot at us, the left will find enough grounds for indicting us as irredeemable monsters who deserve all that we have coming to us.
The left doesn't put it that way of course. It begins by asking us to believe that the terrorists are not attacking us, they are attacking our government, even if they keep murdering people who are by no means in the government. But once we have accepted the notion that the terrorists are justified in attacking our government, the left is then able to argue that we deserve to be attacked because living in a democracy, we elect our governments.
It's a neat trap that the left uses to turn questioning government policy into supporting terrorism.
That line of argument is cushioned at first. The left understands that arguments are won on emotion, not reason. It seeks out any family members of the victims who agree with its views and surrounds its spokesmen with them to give them moral sanction for their vileness. It emphasizes that understanding its theories is the only way to prevent another attack thereby making its negative tack seem positive.
And so the left moves from issues of process to polarity using our defense against terrorism to argue that the terrorists are only defending themselves against us. The arguments that seem initially untenable when the blood is still on the streets slowly sink in as baffled people try to come to terms with what happened.
All this is old hat for the left which has been excusing violence and revising history long before Islamic terrorism was an issue for anyone on this side of the Atlantic. Its tactics are polished and effective; though they would be far less so without the high ground of the media, the arts and the educational system, but the same could be said of any group. If David Icke had the unquestioning allegiance of 95 percent of media outlets and universities, most people would consider the existence of reptilians nothing more than common sense.
It is that very power which makes the narrative so insidious. The views of the streetcorner lunatic handing out pamphlets can be transformed in context without being transformed in content by the simple expedient of being read on the air in a sonorous voice by a news network anchor. But the greater insidiousness of the snake in the bloody garden comes from its ability to break up the narrative into stages to make it more palatable.
The left understands that it is working against natural emotions of loyalty and loss, and so it uses deception. It pretends to grieve, when it is sneering on the inside, and it pretends to want to help, when it is really seeking to destroy. It waits long enough to be able to pit the imaginary suffering of terrorists against the real suffering of their victims. It encourages its own brand of cynicism for the suffering of the victims and the heroism of their rescuers, while defending the sacred nature of the misfortune of its terrorists. It insists that its defense of terrorists in a time of terror invests it with a superior moral power and it uses that power to support terrorism.
Six years ago journalist & author Lela Gilbert left her home in Southern California to live in Jerusalem, Israel. Lela talks to Ann-Marie Murrell about the Boston bombing and the many ways terrorism can affect people's lives. Be sure to buy Lela Gilbert's book, "Saturday People, Sunday People: Israel Through the Eyes of a Christian Sojourner".
Since the Boston terrorist attack on 4/15/13 we’ve been learning a whole lot about the two Muslim morons who blew up little children and severely injured hundreds of innocent onlookers and merry marathon runners.
Speaking of the Boston terrorist attack, how long do you think it’ll be before the Leftists and their co-belligerent compadres, the Muslims, start whining about building a mosque close to the finish line of the Boston Marathon? I’ll give it … eh … six months. One-year tops.
Back to getting to know the demonic Frick and Frack brothers.
Of the all the revelations spilling out about the two tools that rained terror down on Bean Town, I guess the one that really gets my goat more than all others is that Massachusetts’ taxpayers actually, albeit unknowingly, pimped these punks’ jihad dreams out. Yep, your tax dollar helped fund these wicked weeds.
Now, I’m not from Massachusetts and I’m not a Red Sox fan, but that sure as shizzle ticks me off, that somehow your hard won cash, over taxed by the state of Mass., was rolled into money for nothin’ for two Muslim asses to bomb your unsuspecting masses.
That. Is. Jacked. Up. People. Jacked Up. I’m talking Capital J … capital U … Jacked Up.
With this blistering revelation of Muslim murderers being on the government dole, I guess we must now instill checks and balances within our welfare system to make certain that they’re not going to hurt us, at least not on our own dime, any longer. No mas, jackwagons.
I don’t know if you guys saw the video released last February where a cleric from England, who actually pulls down a little under $40k from our snaggle-toothed brethren’s welfare coffers, said “free cash” is what we “kuffars” owe Islam. The malcontent actually called it his “Jihadi Allowance”. Yes, he said with preening glee, that we infidels are indebted to Islam for being … well … infidels. I swear, I’m not making this up. You can check it out here.
This makes me wonder if that same mindset has trickled across the pond to the miserable jihadists who’ve rocked up on our shores. Hmmm. Could it be? It appears it was, at least, with the two Boston Bomber twits.
So, what should we do people?
Should we urine test wannabe terrorists that desire our cash while they sit on their asterisks? Can we detect jihad in pee? No? Well, crap. How then are we going to know whether or not we’re funding someone who’s going to blow up a pressure cooker at the next marathon?
That’s a question folks. What do you propose we do to make certain they don’t get one red cent to spill one ounce of our red blood?
HBO's Bill Maher interrupted his show to warn a politically correct guest about the dangers of radical Islam. Are liberals like Bill Maher finally realizing that radical Islam is a threat to U.S. security, or is the liberal comedian having a unique awakening? Find out what Trifecta thinks.
What would motivate two young Muslims to blow up innocent men, women, and children? What did America do to deserve such an outpouring of irrational, blind hatred? In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings, it is clear that most Americans still do not understand the ideology of radical Islam.
Bill O’Reilly noted that America had been very kind to the Tsarnaev family, wondering how they could have paid back our generosity with such barbaric acts of terror. America is a great, open-hearted country that welcomed this immigrant family and made the American dream accessible to them. Now they kill and maim our people?
More than two decades ago, Daniel Coleman, an American intelligence agent, wondered what it was that fueled the fires of an obscure Islamic radical named Osama bin Laden. Reading one of bin Laden’s writings, Coleman observed that “one of the striking features of the document was that time seemed to have stopped a thousand years ago. There was now and there was then, but there was nothing in between. It was as if the Crusades were still going on in bin Laden’s universe. The intensity of the anger was also difficult for Coleman to grasp. What did we do to him? he wondered” (as recounted by Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower).
As Coleman was to learn, and as all of America should have learned by now, in the eyes of radical Muslims, America has done much to deserve their wrath.
First, America’s wars in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan are considered to be Western intrusions into the Muslim world, power-grabbing moves aimed at world domination, sometimes motivated by greed (= oil), always motivated by a sense of the superiority of American democracy.
What we view as wars of liberation at the cost of precious American lives, they view as acts of exploitation, as murderous incursions that are wiping out hundreds of thousands, if not millions of their people. (I am not supporting these views; I am simply stating how radical Muslims view us.)
How many Iraqi and Afghani citizens have been killed by American bombs? they would ask. How many innocent Muslim men, women, and children have been slaughtered? They will now inflict that same terror on us, not by dropping bombs on us from the air (since they don’t have the capability of doing so), but by planting bombs on our busy city streets.
Second, while Israel is known as the Little Satan in the radical Islamic world, America is called the Great Satan, and not only because of our support for Israel (although that is obviously one of our greatest evils in their eyes). We are seen as the champion of Western decadence, the chief exporter of sexual immorality to the rest of the world. (Tragically, the Muslim world in general sees this as the fruit of Christianity, since America is a perceived as a “Christian nation,” whereas the reality is that we have a great and wonderful Christian heritage but we have largely departed from it.)
In a USA Today interview in 1997, Islamic radicals in Egypt expressed their views: “They cite figures on the divorce rate in the United States. They point to crime and drug use. They talk about America’s preoccupation with sex. ‘You will never find these things where true Islam exists,’ argues Ziad Ali, 34. ‘Islam is the only answer, not Christianity, not Judaism, not Buddha. Without it, America is going to hell.’ He points to a young Muslim woman . . . who is fully clothed from head to toe and even wearing gloves. . . . . ‘That is how a woman must dress, not the way they dress in America, in Britain,’ Ali says. ‘In America, your women dress like harlots. They have no dignity. We want to change that here in Egypt so our harlots don’t go to hell.’” (Cited in my book Revolution.)
They see Islamic dress as preserving the dignity of their women; we see it as suffocating and oppressive. They see Sharia laws that call for the beheading of adulterers as safeguarding the honor of marriage; we see them as primitive and barbaric. (Is it any surprise that the media is now reporting that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was married and that his wife is an American convert to Islam who wears a black hijab?)
Third, young, radicalized Muslims love death the way Americans love life, being taught that martyrdom for the cause of Allah guarantees them entry into the heavenly kingdom, replete with 70 virgins (per man!) and many other sumptuous pleasures. In contrast, even the most devout Muslim in the world is not guaranteed acceptance into Paradise, since he might somehow have fallen short of the mark.
And if, in fact, there is a connection between the Boston bombings and Chechnyan Muslims, the tradition of martyrdom is very relevant, as General Mashkadov, a Muslim leader of the breakaway republic, commented on the tenacity of his troops in the late 1990’s as they fought against Russia: “I can only wonder at the strength with which my men fight. . . . All we can do is fight on, to show not only that we want our independence, but that we are willing to die for it.”
Fourth, our killing of Osama bin Laden is viewed as the cold-blooded murder of one of their most revered leaders. If Islamic soldiers assassinated one of our greatest heroes, how would we respond?
And so, bin Laden may be dead, but radical Islam is far from dead. We had better wake up to reality.
Remember when Republican Rep. Peter King, Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, held hearings in 2011 and 2012 on the radicalization of Muslims here at home?
"Today, we must be fully aware that homegrown radicalization is part of Al Qaeda's strategy to continue attacking the United States," King said. "Al Qaeda is actively targeting the American Muslim community for recruitment. Today's hearing will address this dangerous trend.”
Democrats stopped short of calling King a racist publically but howled, “How dare he stereotype Muslims?” Well, the Boston marathon terrorist attack suggests King was right and Democrats were wrong. The left leaning news media was wrong too. Moments after the attack many in the mainstream media suggested the bombings looked like the work of “right wing radicals,” even though the pressure cooker bombs used in the Boston attack are a trademark of al Qaeda.
Chechen brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who emigrated from Chechnya and were legally living in the US for the past 10 years, set off bombs at the Boston marathon finish line then terrorized the city for nearly a week. The older brother Tamerlan posted Islamic extremist videos on YouTube, one of which “extolled an extremist prophecy associated with al Qaeda.”
Chechnya is predominately Muslim country and according to the Wall Street Journal most Chechens are Sunni Muslims. The Tsarnaev brothers are Muslim, and early evidence suggests it’s highly possible they became “radicalized Muslims” during the time they lived in America.
Before the two terrorized Boston, Muslims living in America were committing terrorist attacks on the “homeland.” The 2009 Fort Hood shooting and the 2011 Times Square bomb attempt. If the shoe fits, well then Muslims are wearing it well.
Yet in the changing face of terrorist threats to America, President Barack Obama and Democrats are loathe to use the word terrorist and Muslims in the same sentence for fear of offending the jihadists. During King’s first hearing in 2011, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), a practicing Muslim, said, "This committee's approach to this particular subject is contrary to the best of American values and threatens our security." Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) chimed in that "This hearing today is playing right now into al-Qaeda, around the world.”
After the Boston attack, perhaps Rep. Ellison can see what’s contrary to American values and threatens our security is Muslim terrorists who injured over 175 people and killed three with their bombs. Perhaps it’s time for Mr. Ellison to get off his political correctness high horse and face the facts, however offensive they may be to him.
Jackson also should take note that it was her comment not the hearing that played right into the hands of al-Qaeda and radical Muslims. Radicals like the Tsarnaev brothers probably watched King’s hearings and thought Democrats like Jackson’s obsession with political correctness “played right into their hands,” making it easier for them to wage terrorist attacks on cities like Boston. Democrats and Obama need to worry more about the safety of Americans and less about offending our enemies, which include Muslims at home and abroad.
On Monday’s episode of Fox News Channel’s “The Five,” Greg Gutfeld sounded off on those who have made it their primary focus to understand the motivations behind Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s alleged decision to place a bomb at the site of the Boston Marathon.
“After every terror attack each motive shall be discussed, but one,” Gutfeld said. “It is the terror that dares not speak its name. Well, actually it does speak. Our media just won’t hear it. Instead we explore the pain of the poor thugs. Which could be why some terrorists get movies made by Robert Redford, and others get tenure. So what do hacks do when they are wrong about terror? They cling to relativism.”
That relativism, Gutfeld explained, just doesn’t add up when you actually look at other types so-called extremism since Muslim extremism is more prevalent around the world.
“Yeah, Muslim extremism is no different than any other extremism. But in order to make that stick, you have got to suck at math. Muslim versus Christian extremism is not apples to apples. It is comparing Hurricane Katrina to a squirt gun, which is why they embrace root causes — the detached response to evil. Let’s simply focus on the personal turmoil of the bombers, not the real turmoil they caused.”
I’m not really in the mood to write a column. The reason why I’m in a foul disposition is I just saw the picture, taken a few minutes before the Boston blast, of the Muslim POS, better known as “Suspect #2”, dropping off his backpack filled with a pressure cooker bomb right behind eight-year-old Martin Richard, his little sister Jane, his mom Denise and scores of others. This image made me both sick and pissed off.
Minutes after this picture was captured, as we now know, Martin would have nails and buckshot blast his body to smithereens, Jane would have her little leg severed from her frame and their mom would have shrapnel penetrate her head at 3300 feet per second -- leaving both her and little Jane clinging to life and Martin dead on the street. This left me thinking: “What kind of jacked up people do this kind of crap?”
Well, by and large, it is the “Religion of Peace” who does this kind of crap with great regularity, that’s who.
If you’re not hearing this on the evening news please allow me to inform you that two Muslim young men did this. Not right-wingers, as Chris Matthews and Peter Bergen predicted early on. Not Evangelicals or Catholics as the DHS has warned Americans repeatedly to be on the look out for. Nor was it your generic “angry white bogey man” that Salon’s writer David Sirota had hoped; but at least two male Muslims between the ages of 18-35.
I say “at least two” because early on there was a Saudi national that everyone was real interested in who, by the way, will be deported next week. This is the same cat that Michelle Obama secretly visited in the hospital last Thursday. I sure wish that young Saudi male could hang out a few more days here in the states and we could have someone seriously interrogate him; but alas, Big Government says he’s got to go back home and quick.
How quaint. And how strange…
As stated at the outset of this screed, I’m in no mood to write. However, I would like to wrap this piece up by saying two more things: One -- my prayers are with the victims of this baseless slaughter of innocent human lives by Muslim men, again. And Two – you can bet your last buck that if I see a backpack dropped off by a religion of peacer behind a crowd of kids I’m going to tackle that mule.
Originally Published on the Sultan Knish blog
To the Western observer, a suicide bomber is radical, a Muslim Imam willing to perform gay weddings is moderate and the Muslim Brotherhood leader who supports some acts of terror, but not others, is moderately radical or radically moderate.
No Islamist movement represents a complete break with Islam. Not even a partial break. The greatest stressors that Islamic terrorist groups impose on their religious codes is the treatment of other Muslims as infidels. And that alone is a telling statement about the tolerance for interfaith violence in their religion. It isn't war that stresses Islamic codes, it's internecine warfare.
Tactics that ignore reality are doomed. We have learned that the hard way in many wars. We are learning it now in Afghanistan and in London, Paris and Boston. We can waste time trying to fit Muslims into our categories or we can understand that they are not part of our categories.
