WarSclerotic

Millions March in Paris; Gov’ts & Media Scrub Islamist Motive, Clarion Project, Meira Svirsky, January 12, 2015

A banner that reads ‘We Are Charlie’ at the march in Paris in support of slain journalists from the Charlie Hebdo magazine. (Photo: © Reuters)

[T]he Islamists will have won on many accounts. The fact that leaders of the Western world have demurred to differentiate between Islam and Islamism (the implementation of Islam on a political level, including the instituting of sharia law) due to desire not to offend Muslims or be labelled racists means that they will not implement the measures needed to stamp out the Islamist ideology and its resulting violence.

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By refusing to censor themselves and bow to the requests of sharia law, the publishers of Charlie Hebdo refused to be part of this sabotage.The Western world needs to take up their gauntlet.

World leaders joined a march of one and a half million people today in Paris in a show of unity to the 17 slain in the Islamist terrorist attacks across France last week.

“Unity against extremism” was the theme in Paris’ Republique plaza, as reflected in the words of France Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who said Saturday, “We are all Charlie, we are all police, we are all Jews of France.”

The French prime minister was referring to the attacks on theCharlie Hebdo magazine on Wednesday that left 10 journalists and 2 policemen dead, another policewoman dead in a separate attack on Thursday and four hostages killed in a take-over of a kosher mini-market on Friday.

Two brothers armed with AK-47s along with another gunmen stormed the Charlie Hebdo magazine’s offices after deeming cartoons they had published offensive to Islam. The magazine’s headquarters had been firebombed in 2011 for the same “offense.” The magazine had police protection and its editor, who was killed in the attack, employed a policeman as a personal bodyguard.

In a video of the attack as it played out afterwards on the street  taken by a Parisian who had escaped to the roof of a neighboring building, the attackers could be heard shouting “Allahu Akhbar” (“God is Great” in Arabic) as they shot a policeman on the street, then finishing him off at point blank while he lay wounded.

Witnesses also reported hearing the gunmen yell, “We have avenged the Prophet Mohammed.”

As explained by British Islamist Anjem Choudary – and as well understood by the French president as well as every other world leader who will be attending Sunday’s rally — insulting the prophet of Islam is a crime punishable by the death penalty according to sharia (Islamic) law.

Which make it even more surprising that, in one of Francois Hollande’ s first statements following the attack on the magazine, the French president said, “These madmen, fanatics, have nothing to do with the Muslim religion.”

The White House press secretary Josh Earnest, took the obfuscation one step further when he kept referring to the attack as “violence,” prompting his CNN interviewer to pin him down saying, “Josh, when you talk about countering the message, you keep using the word violence. I mean, this is an act of terrorism, that’s what the president of France called it — an act of terrorism … Do you see this as an act of terrorism, and is this something that has to be condemned on that level?”

To which Earnest replied obscurely, “Based on what we know right now, it does seem that’s what we’re confronting here. And this is an act of violence that we certainly do condemn, and if based on this investigation it turns out to be an act of terrorism, then we would condemn that in the strongest possible terms, too.”

After the beheading of journalist James Foley,  U.S. President Barack Obama declare that the Islamic State “is not Islamic.”  Following this stance, Obama initially released a statement which read, “I strongly condemn the horrific shooting at the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris that has reportedly killed 12 people.”

Later, he managed to refer to the attack simply as “terrorism.”

For their part, many media outlets were busy scrubbing the frames of the video where “Allahu Akhbar” could be heard. The New York Times originally reported a quote from a survivor of the magazine attack, Sigolène Vinson, a freelancer who was at the magazine’s office that morning and later spoke to French media.

Relating how she thought she would be killed when one of the attackers put a gun to her head, Vinson reported that the gunman said instead, “I’m not going to kill you because you’re a woman. We don’t kill women, but you must convert to Islam, read the Quran and cover yourself.”

The quote was short-lived on the Times, who later edited Vinson’s quote from the attacker to read, “Don’t be afraid, calm down, I won’t kill you. You are a woman. But think about what you’re doing. It’s not right.”

CNN, for their part, managed to question whether the kosher store was chosen by the Islamist attacker for anti-Semitic reasons since “many Muslims shopped there” and because there were a “variety of shops” in the non-Jewish neighborhood.  The network chose to ignore a widely circulated report by a French reporter who spoke to the terrorist by phone. “He said he did it to defend oppressed Muslims, especially in Palestine, and he chose a kosher supermarket because it served Jews,” said the French reporter.

Amid the reporting was the recurring question asked by the media, “What can be done?” as well as the implied answer given by the French president when he said, “France has not seen the end of the threats it faces” – an answer unfortunately relevant to the rest of the Western world.

Hollande’s response will, regrettably, be the correct assessment if those in charge refuse to face the reality of the threat: Failure to address the “Islamist” component of the terrorism that is striking the West is not only disingenuous but erects an impenetrable barrier to overcoming it.

And so, the Islamists will have won on many accounts. The fact that leaders of the Western world have demurred to differentiate between Islam and Islamism (the implementation of Islam on a political level, including the instituting of sharia law) due to desire not to offend Muslims or be labelled racists means that they will not implement the measures needed to stamp out the Islamist ideology and its resulting violence.

“Everyone is focusing on the fact that that the jihadists went after cartoonists,“  said Clarion Project’s national security analyst Ryan Mauro in an interview on national news (see below for full interview). Yet, “there is always going to be a target [emanating] from this ideology that says that ‘Things like this are so illegal undersharia that they must be retaliated against violently in order to make societies conform to our belief system of sharia.’”

Our leaders must realize that speaking about terror motivated by Islamist ideology does not connote anti-Muslim sentiment.

“The issue we face is not, as Islamist groups falsely claim in the United States – ironically the very ones invited to the White House, Homeland Security, Department of Justice, and State Department — that using the term Islamic terrorism connotes a generalization that all Muslims are terrorists any more than using the term “Hispanic drug cartels” means that all Hispanics are druggies or that the term “Italian mafia” means that all Italians are mobsters or that the term “German Nazis” mean that all Germans were Nazis, “ writes Steve Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism.

“The term Islamic terrorism means just that: terrorist attacks with an Islamic motivation — whether they attempts to silence critics of Islam, impose Sharia, punish Western ‘crusaders,’ commit genocide of non-Muslims, establish Islamic supremacy (or a Caliphate), or destroy any non Muslim peoples (e.g. the Jews and Christians) that are ‘occupying Muslim lands,’” says Emerson.

Failure to identify the Islamist ideology driving terrorism necessarily means we will not succeed in our battle against it. Moreover, we will be willingly complicit in our demise.

If we don’t want to be part of that, the events in France teach us, “Don’t censor yourself,” says Mauro. “Recognize that this attack is a means to an end. Victory for them isn’t the attack itself, the victory comes when we censor ourselves. Because they are not powerful enough to enforce their form of sharia governance upon us, what they can do is to intimidate us into implementing it on ourselves.”

In a document recovered from a 1991 meeting which outlines the Muslim Brotherhood‘s strategic goals for North America, the founders of the Islamist movement in America wrote, “The Ikhwan[Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers…”

By refusing to censor themselves and bow to the requests of sharialaw, the publishers of Charlie Hebdo refused to be part of this sabotage.

The Western world needs to take up their gauntlet.