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Trump rattles Obama on radical Islam

June 16, 2016

Trump rattles Obama on radical Islam, Israel Hayom, Richard Baehr, June 16, 2016

Trump’s critique of the Obama/Hillary Clinton policy on immigration, domestic intelligence gathering, fighting the Islamic State group (or ISIL as the president insists on calling the organization) and protecting homeland security clearly struck a nerve. Trump laid out what should be obvious: Radical Islamists despise gays, Jews and Christians. Islam as generally practiced in large swaths of the globe is extremely bigoted and accepting of violence against non-believers. The West has a much bigger problem than 100,000 active jihadis spread around the globe. There are many millions of radical Islamists.

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It has been a while since President Barack Obama was so visibly angry on camera.

When Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Obama lost his restrained cool composure for a few seconds. When discussing a few cases in which African-American men or teens were shot by police, he was also a bit enraged, noting that any of those boys could have been his son (as could of course the 6,000 or more African-American men and boys shot by other African-American men on the streets of American cities each year, who go unmentioned by the president except as a prop to support gun control).

Then came the Orlando slaughter of members of the LGBT community over the weekend, and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump lost no time tying the attack to the Obama administration’s policy failures. This was simply too much for the president, whose tantrum suggested an inability to accept criticism (especially not from Trump) or admit failure.

Trump’s critique of the Obama/Hillary Clinton policy on immigration, domestic intelligence gathering, fighting the Islamic State group (or ISIL as the president insists on calling the organization) and protecting homeland security clearly struck a nerve. Trump laid out what should be obvious: Radical Islamists despise gays, Jews and Christians. Islam as generally practiced in large swaths of the globe is extremely bigoted and accepting of violence against non-believers. The West has a much bigger problem than 100,000 active jihadis spread around the globe. There are many millions of radical Islamists.

Obama is fiercely protective of his legacy and actions, and seemingly unable to deal with being reminded about parts of his record that are nothing short of abject failures. Has Obama kept the American homeland safer than his predecessor? Has Obama’s withdrawal of American forces from Iraq and Afghanistan led to a more peaceful region? Has Obama contributed to the carnage in Syria, Iraq and Libya by his actions or inactions? Has Obama demonstrated weakness abroad and at home by failing even to identify that we face not just random terrorists, but killers tied to a radical strand of Islam, which has rapidly gained adherents all over the Muslim world the last half century, and whose members now control a significant number of Muslim majority countries, including our newest ally Iran? Are people really stupid enough to buy into an argument that the country will be safer and groups like Islamic State more easily defeated so long as Obama never says the words radical Islam? Is that the key recruiting tool that groups like Islamic State have been lacking so far, hence their failure to attract new holy warriors from the West or the Middle East?

Obama’s temper tantrum on Tuesday was much more about reacting to criticism of his record than Trump’s controversial call for a temporary ban on Muslim immigration to America. Part of the Obama attack on Trump was also of course a feature of a presidential campaign, in which Democrats now have their presumptive nominee, Hillary Clinton. Full fire on Trump, whether or not he says something new, will be part of the daily news cycle for the next five months, highlighted by a liberal press corps worshipful and adoring of both Obama and Clinton. The press is behaving this year as if it is doing sacred work by preventing Trump from winning.

Trump’s address in New Hampshire on Monday occurred less than two days after the Orlando mass murder committed by an American-born Muslim, who shot people in the head at short range while simultaneously declaring his allegiance to Islamic State and talking to police during the siege. He was married to a Palestinian woman who helped him scout out targets and dropped him off at the club prior to the attack, but never considered alerting authorities, and who may be indicted as an accomplice for the slaughter. His father claims to be the president of Afghanistan and states that his son was angered when he saw two gay men kissing on a street in Miami. The father says his son’s actions were unnecessary, since God will deal with gays. Afghanistan, the birthplace of Mateen’s parents, is one of the many Muslim majority countries where homosexuality is a crime punishable by death. Among the family members, the father rates as the “moderate Muslim” — he is O.K. with dead gays, but did not personally kill them or facilitate their murder.

The facts above are all pretty well known, including that Mateen was on the FBI radar as a possible threat twice earlier. But these facts have been utterly ignored as part of the ferocious pushback from the Obama administration and the Left to explain what happened. This is a troublesome attack for the Left — a group of individuals, mostly Latino members of the LGBT community in Orlando, were gunned down by a Muslim. Muslims and gays are two core constituency groups for the Democratic Party, the party that invented identity politics and believes it can win campaigns now and in the future by stroking the various racial/religious/ethnic/nationality groups that lean their way.

The pushback has been designed as a misdirection strategy, to make this horrible attack about anything but radical Islam. The killer was gender-confused. He was a lone wolf. He was deranged. Christians hate gays too (Sally Kohn) and their rhetoric probably inspired the killer (the ACLU). All religions have violent members (Julia Ioffe). This could not have happened had there been stricter gun controls in place in Florida (everybody in the Democratic Party and the mainstream media). This was gun violence, no different than Sandy Hook or Columbine.

So far, the pushback seems to be working. Unlike the primary campaign, when Trump seemed to have the airwaves to himself (good for audience size and advertising rates), now his critics are getting plenty of time and exposure to blast him, with favorable comments by major media personalities always preceding or following the political attacks on him by Obama or Clinton. Trump noted yesterday that Obama seemed angrier at him than he ever has been at terrorists who killed Americans. That is undoubtedly true. After every prior attack before San Bernardino last December, the president could show up at the funeral ceremony, express his sympathies, call for all of us to love one another and heal, and bash the National Rifle Association and Republicans for resisting commonsense gun laws. San Bernardino upset the pattern: The killers were Muslims, and the victims were not a core Democratic constituency, but really a cross-sample of the community. Obama skipped an appearance after this attack.

Americans feel less safe today than they did eight years ago. It is likely that Israeli-type security measures to guard public places will be far more prominent in years to come, especially given that there may be liability exposure for negligence if such places do not hire guards and attacks then occur.

But Israel’s lesson is more than just the need for security — it is that vigilance is a permanent feature of our modern, open societies. A few killers can do immense damage, and in America there is a real needle-in-the-haystack problem.

Categories: 2016 elections, Donald Trump, Gun control, Hillary Clinton, Islam and homosexuals, Islam and terrorism, Islamism, Islamists, Islamists in America, Obama and Islam, Obama and Islamic terrorism, Obama's legacy, Orlando massacre, Radical Islam
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House GOP Leaders Set To Endorse Obama’s Failed Anti-JIhad Strategy

June 16, 2016

House GOP Leaders Set To Endorse Obama’s Failed Anti-JIhad Strategy, Breitbart, Neil Munro, June 15, 2016

Domestic-Islamic-Terrorists-Radical-Islam-San-Bernardino-Fort-Hood-Orlando-Boston-Chattanooga-AP-640x480

House GOP leaders are set to endorse President Barack Obama’s failed domestic anti-jihad strategy, according to Texas GOP Rep. Louie Gohmert.

The GOP’s Obama endorsement is hidden in a new bill, titled the ‘‘Countering Terrorist Radicalization Act.” The showpiece bill’s title and language is undermined by numerous exceptions that allow the president to continue his failed “Countering Violent Extremism” strategy,  Gohmert said. 

The bill is a post-Orlando showpiece that actually entrenches Obama’s harmful policies, he said. “All this is doing is giving more and more credibility to this ridiculous term ‘CVE’ instead of describing the killers that were behind 9/11, the Boston bombings, the San Bernardino attack, the Orlando shooting, the bomber in Times Square… all these people who are trying to kill us in America,” he said.

“We’re doing the same thing as the president… we’re not identifying radical Islam” as the enemy which nurtures and motivates attackers, Gohmert. “There is going to be more and more killings of Americans … until we can train our people to recognize radical Islam,” he said.

Under the CVE strategy, Obama has blocked FBI investigators from examining the supposedly non-political and peaceful networks of mosques that actually nurture jihadi attitudes, while redirecting FBI attention to less dangerous non-Islamic groups, such as small-government militias. The strategy has also put FBI agents under the supervision of an oversight panel influenced by Muslim political activists, including an immigrant who reportedly welcomed the slaughter of 3,000 Americans in 2001 by her Muslim co-religionists.  

Moreover, Obama’s tight restrictions on investigators have not earned the expected cooperation from Islamic groups. In fact, many self-segregating Islamic groups have rejected Obama’s proposal to allow local Imams to police their young men in exchange for sharing information about jihadi groups with the FBI.

The GOP endorsement bill is slated for a vote as early as Thursday, June 16.

Under a subtitle, “AMPLIFYING LOCAL EFFORTS TO ROOT OUT TERROR,” the bill simply authorizes extra training, the creation of a committee and establishes some conditional reporting requirements, according to the draft given to Breitbart. The bill does not reform Obama’s CVE strategy, training rules or investigative priorities.

The bill was drafted by staff working for Rep. Michael McCaul,  R-Texas, who is the chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security.  Press aides at the committee declined to comment on the bill, or even if the committee plans to hold oversight hearing on Obama’s failed CVE strategy in the run-up to the 2016 election.

In March, McCaul endorsed Obama’s tacit alliance with U.S-based Islamic religious groups, many of which share overlapping umbrella networks that are exempt from normal FBI anti-terror monitoring.

“The effective thing is … effective outreach to the Muslim community, so you can pull the religious leaders really on to our team, if you will, to protect us from radicalization from within those communities,” he said March 27. “I think we can get good intelligence from the Muslim communities in our outreach efforts, in our working with the religious leaders in the communities in the United States,” he said.

In contrast, federal prosecutors do not offer political favors to let the Catholic priests run law-enforcement tasks in Latino neighborhoods, for example, keeping track of MS-13 and various drug-gangs.

In practice, much of that hoped-for intelligence about emerging jihadis has been blocked by determined opposition from Islamist advocates. For example, Linda Sarsour, a prominent Islamic advocate who is called a “Champion of Change” by Obama’s deputies, is a strong opponent of the information-exchange.

The government’s practice of providing funds to Muslim community partners in the fight against violent extremism has also raised concerns about the true goal of these partnerships. Are they being formed in order to gather intelligence and information about community members, or to actually engage in valuable community outreach about civil rights protections? CVE programs can foster mistrust between government entities and community members.

In December 2015, George Selim, then the  director of the Office for Community Partnerships at the Department of Homeland Security, told NPR that Muslim communities are not identifying emerging jihadis. 

The research and the statistics have all indicated that peers, people that are in close association with subjects that ultimately commit an act like this, see something that’s a little bit out of the norm, but they don’t necessarily report it. And so part of our goal is to create the type of partnerships in which peers know when and how to elevate those type of suspicions.

There’s growing evidence that wife of the Orlando jihadi knew of his pending attack, but did not warn Americans.

Gohmert is trying to reform the McCaul bill before the vote — but he’s skeptical the GOP leadership is willing to fight for an effective anti-jihad strategy.

“There are plenty of representatives who are concerned about this, but the Speaker [Rep. Paul Ryan] and the Majority Leader [Rep. Kevin McCarthy] control what comes to the floor for a vote. and they have no intentions of bringing a bill that says we’ll stop radical Islamists,” he said.

Anti-jihad groups are urging voters to protest the planned bill. “Congress is about to help President Obama whitewash his approach to Counterterrorism to hide any mention or focus on Islamists or their Jihad against the free world,” said Jim Hanson, an executive vice president at the Center for Security Policy. “The Countering Violent Extremism Bill ignores the very Islamic nature of the Sharia ideology that motivates our enemies to slaughter innocents from Paris to Orlando,” he added.

The problems in Obama’s CVE strategy, said Gohmert, include the tight curbs on FBI investigations and training, the gag order to prevent any discussion of Islamic ideas — such as ‘jihad,’ ‘sharia’ or ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ — an intrusive oversight panel staffed by Islamic advocates, the legal shield for Islamic networks and political groups, and an eagerness to direct stigma and investigations against non-Islamic groups, such as “right wing militias,” plus its failure to win cooperation from self-segregating Islamic political groups.

For example, the gag-order means “the FBI is not allowed to learn or discuss or look for the things that radical islamics read, or the type of activities they’re doing when they going through radicalization,” Gohmert said.

In contrast, GOP 2016 candidate Donald Trump has called for more oversight over the Islamic networks. “We have to maybe check, respectfully, the mosques and we have to check other places because this is a problem that, if we don’t solve it, it’s going to eat our country alive,” he said during his June 15 campaign rally in Atlanta, Georgia.

Obama’s CVE strategy also created an advisory group of outsiders who have much influence over FBI investigations.

The committee has pushed for a FBI focus on non-Islamic groups, and just before the Orlando massacre, presented a report to top DHS officials asking for a gag-order that would prevent officials from studying, debating or even recognizing jihadi ideas. Officials should “reject religiously-charged terminology and problematic positioning by using plain meaning American English,” said the report, which also urged officials to use “American English instead of religious, legal and cultural terms like ‘jihad,’ ‘sharia,’ ‘takfir’ or ‘umma,” according to the The Daily Caller. 

That’s the equivalent of President Franklin Roosevelt and his generals and their soldiers waging war against National Socialist Germany without mentioning “Blitzkrieg,” “U-boat,” “Fuhrer,” “Lebensraum,” “Panzer,” “Stuka,” or “Untermensch” or “Flak,” “Panzerfaust” or “SS.”

Committee co-chair Farah Pandith was born in the Muslim-vs.-Hindu battleground of Kashmir. For decades, that area has suffered from Muslim attacks, and many non-Arab Muslims consider that war to be as important as the Arab fight to destroy the Jewish state.

In 2012, co-chair Adnan Kifayat threatened this reporter with criminal charges for asking George Selim about the White House’s many quiet contacts with the Council on American Islamic Relations. “That was wrong… it is really bad form … You’re putting a career at risk by asking [questions] without telling him… you cannot ambush people and expect them to actually cooperate,” Kifayat told this reporter.

The CAIR group is so closely entwined with Islamists and with jihadis that court documents and news reports show that at least five of its people — either board members, employees or former employees — have been jailed or repatriated for various financial and terror-related offenses. Critics show that CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in a Texas-based criminal effort to deliver $12 million to the Jew-hating HAMAS jihad group, and that CAIR was founded with $490,000 from HAMAS.

Another member, Mohamed Elibiary, quit in 2014 after he tweeted that the Islamic empire, dubbed the “caliphate,” will return.

CAIR tweets

Obama’s deputies have recently appointed a young Muslim activist from Syria to the panel, Laila Alawa. She wears a hijab in observance to Islam, has tweeted a message supporting the 9/11 atrocity by her fellow Muslims, and tweeted a series of hateful messages about jihad opponents, according to a new report in The Daily Caller.

Alawa1

Alawa2

The new GOP bill eliminates any GOP oversight or leverage over Obama’s counter-productive CVE strategy by adding numerous loopholes in the weak GOP bill, Gohmert said. For example, the bill says;

COORDINATION.—The Secretary of Homeland Security shall, where appropriate, coordinate the efforts described in subsection (a) with the heads of other Federal departments and agencies, as appropriate, and, to the extent practicable, engage nongovernmental and international partners in the identification and use of testimonials described in such subsection.

But the phrase “to the extent practicable” really means “only if you want to … if it is not too much trouble,” Gohmert said. The phrase “where appropriate” really means “if you feel like you want to,” he said. 

“Shakespeare has the appropriate phrase— much ado about nothing,” he added.

“We all know most Muslims are not terrorists,” said Gohmert. “At the same time, it is ridiculous to not recognize there are radical islamists who are in America, who want to bring this country down and who think they go to paradise if they kill Americans.”

Categories: CAIR, Countering violent extremism, Homeland Security, Islamic integration, Islamic supremacy, Islamic terrorism, Islamisation, Islamism, Islamists in America, National secuity, Obama and Islam, Obama and Islamic terrorism, Radical Islam, Republicans, Sharia law, Supporting terrorism, U.S. Congress
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Making America unsafe

June 15, 2016

Making America unsafe, Israel Hayom, Judith Bergman, June 15, 2016

When Obama claims, as he did on Tuesday, that “there’s no magic to the phrase ‘radical Islam.’ If someone seriously thinks we don’t know who we’re fighting, if there’s anyone out there who thinks we’re confused about who our enemies are, that would come as a surprise to the thousands of terrorists we’ve taken off the battlefield,” he is simply dissembling. You cannot know an enemy when you prohibit your law enforcement and intelligence personnel from studying or even mentioning them.

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There is a deep and unacknowledged irony to the fact that U.S. President Barack Obama, of all people, has opined in the days since the terror attack in Orlando that how you term things makes no difference.

“What exactly would using this label [‘radical Islam’] accomplish? … Calling a threat by a different name does not make it go away. This is a political distraction,” Obama said on Tuesday in response to the heavy criticism poured on him after he, once more, refused to use the term in connection with the mass shooting. Islamic State quickly claimed responsibility for the attack, perhaps frustrated that no one in the U.S. administration, nor the Democratic presidential candidate, will give it credit for it.

Positing that calling something or someone a particular name makes no difference is the very epitome of hypocritical dissembling, especially coming from the person at the very top of the Democratic echelons.

These are the same people who for decades fought to entrench political correctness into American society, making it impossible to call certain things by their rightful names without facing a barrage of vilification and personal smears. The American Left has fought ceaselessly to shape language according to its ideas and has succeeded so tremendously that Americans are now afraid to report suspicious activity out of fear of coming across as “Islamophobic.” This has already cost lives. Before the attack, the security company that Omar Mateen worked for was afraid of reporting him, despite his suspicious behavior, exactly because it feared being castigated as “Islamophobic.”

The U.S. has much to learn from Israel in this regard. Israel is so efficient at fighting terrorism precisely because it cannot afford the luxury of integrating political correctness into its security doctrines. The very idea is preposterous. Nevertheless, this is exactly what Obama has done.

Five years ago, Obama erased all references to Islam in the educational materials used to train the American law enforcement and national security communities. In 2011, U.S. Deputy Attorney General James Cole confirmed that the Obama administration was recalling all its training materials to eliminate references to Islam that some Muslim groups had claimed were offensive.

In 2013, The Washington Times also reported that countless experts on Islamic terrorism had been banned from speaking to any U.S. government counterterrorism conferences, including those of the FBI and CIA. Government agencies were instead ordered to invite Muslim Brotherhood front groups.

If it is only a matter of labels, then why has Obama endangered American lives by deliberately blindsiding law enforcement and national security communities on the nature of Islamic terrorism? How are they supposed to grapple with the urgent issue of jihad if they are prohibited from learning about the nature of jihad?

When Obama claims, as he did on Tuesday, that “there’s no magic to the phrase ‘radical Islam.’ If someone seriously thinks we don’t know who we’re fighting, if there’s anyone out there who thinks we’re confused about who our enemies are, that would come as a surprise to the thousands of terrorists we’ve taken off the battlefield,” he is simply dissembling. You cannot know an enemy when you prohibit your law enforcement and intelligence personnel from studying or even mentioning them.

These are all relevant questions that the mainstream media has consistently refused to ask the administration — instead, dangerously dismissing them as conspiracy theories. The price is now being paid by innocent Americans, from a Christmas party in San Bernardino to a gay nightclub in Orlando.

Words matter tremendously, and you cannot fight an enemy that you are forbidden to name. Imagine Churchill telling the British that there was “no magic” in calling out the Nazi ideology and prohibiting his intelligence community from studying Nazi Germany’s strategy and tactics.

Hillary Clinton, feeling the backlash after publishing identical statements to those of Obama, has now opportunistically declared that she is ready to say those “magical words.”

But this is meaningless pandering, especially when you know she was part of the administration that purged training materials of all things Islam.

“In my perspective, it matters what we do, not what we say,” Clinton said. “To me, radical jihadism, radical Islamism, I think they mean the same thing. I’m happy to say either, but that’s not the point.”

The administration pretends there is no Islamist threat. This is what it has firmly projected to its law enforcement and intelligence communities, and Clinton is of course fully aware of the intricate details of this fact. Stating that it matters “what we do” then becomes an empty and even dangerous statement, because it deludes Americans into believing that there is a solid and credible intelligence effort underway to prevent future Islamist terror attacks in the United States, when this cannot logically be the case given that the U.S. law enforcement and intelligence communities are not allowed to study jihad or Islamic extremism.

Categories: CAIR, Hillary Clinton and Islam, Islam, Islamic radicalization, Islamic terrorism, Islamists in America, Islamophobia, Obama and Islam, Obama and Islamic terrorism, Obama's hypocrisy, Political correctness, radical Islam, Violent extremism
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‘By the Numbers’: Watch Clarion’s New Short Film

December 11, 2015

‘By the Numbers’: Watch Clarion’s New Short Film, Clarion Project, December 11, 2015

“By the Numbers” is an honest and open discussion about Muslim opinions and demographics. Narrated by Raheel Raza, president of Muslims Facing Tomorrow, this short film is about the acceptance that radical Islam is a bigger problem than most politically correct governments and individuals are ready to admit.

The film addresses the questions: Is ISIS, the Islamic State, trying to penetrate the US with the refugee influx? Are Muslims radicalised on U.S. soil? Are organizations such as CAIR, who purport to represent American Muslims, accepting and liberal or radicalized with links to terror organizations?

 

Categories: Islam, Islamic myths, Islamic supremacy, Islamism, Islamophobia, Obama and Islam, Radical Islam, Sharia law
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Islam — Radical, Extremist and Mainstream

November 21, 2015

Islam — Radical, Extremist and Mainstream, Dan Miller’s Blog, November 21, 2015

(The views expressed in this article are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM

In largely secular western societies, Islam and its history are viewed by many non-Muslims as substantially irrelevant to how devout Muslims behave. Perhaps the view that religion is of little importance to devout Muslims is based on the role, minor if any, that religion and religious history play in their own secular lives. However, both Islamic teachings and history give devout Muslims their grounding in Islam and teach them that Islam is the religion of war, not peace: Islam must become the world’s only religion by extirpating all others.

Islam was founded by Mohamed ( c. 570 CE – 8 June 632 CE) in the sixth century. Mohamed

is considered, almost universally,[n 2] by Muslims to have been the last prophet sent by God to mankind[3][n 3] to restore Islam, which they believe to be the unaltered original monotheistic faith of Adam, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and other prophets.[4][5][6][7] [Emphasis added.]

Islam considers the words of Mohamed, as transcribed in the “Holy” Quran and Hadith, to be the words of Allah. “Restoring” other monotheistic religions means changing them to comport with Islam as dictated to Mohamed by Allah; unaltered, those other religions cannot continue to exist; it is the duty of Muslims to force them to change or to exterminate them.

Islam provides the basis for Sunni and Shiite (principal branches of Islam) efforts to govern world civilization according to Islamic principles as voiced by Allah through his prophet, Mohamed. Since Islamic principles tolerate no religious or political freedoms (let alone contemporary gender equality or homosexuality notions), such western ideas must be extirpated — as they have been in Saudi Arabia (now the head of the UN Human Rights Council) and Iran. Islamic principles are also manifested by the hopes and efforts of the Islamic State (Sunni, like Saudi Arabia) and the Islamic Republic of Iran (Shiite) to achieve their own caliphates.

Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah Nasr is a scholar of Islamic law and a graduate of Egypt’s Al Azhar University — regularly touted as the world’s most prestigious Islamic university. Al Azhar University co-hosted Obama’s 2009 “New Beginnings” address in Cairo, to which Obama insisted that at least ten members of the Muslim Brotherhood be invited. According to an article at Jihad Watch,

After being asked why Al Azhar, which is in the habit of denouncing secular thinkers as un-Islamic, refuses to denounce the Islamic State as un-Islamic, Sheikh Nasr said:

It can’t [condemn the Islamic State as un-Islamic].  The Islamic State is a byproduct of Al Azhar’s programs.  So can Al Azhar denounce itself as un-Islamic?  Al Azhar says there must be a caliphate and that it is an obligation for the Muslim world [to establish it].  Al Azhar teaches the law of apostasy and killing the apostate.  Al Azhar is hostile towards religious minorities, and teaches things like not building churches, etc.  Al Azhar upholds the institution of jizya [extracting tribute from religious minorities].  Al Azhar teaches stoning people.  So can Al Azhar denounce itself as un-Islamic? [Emphasis added.]

Nasr joins a growing chorus of critics of Al Azhar.  Last September, while discussing how the Islamic State burns some of its victims alive—most notoriously, a Jordanian pilot—Egyptian journalist Yusuf al-Husayni remarked on his satellite program that “The Islamic State is only doing what Al Azhar teaches… and the simplest example is Ibn Kathir’s Beginning and End.”

Since the world’s preeminent Islamic university teaches Islam as proclaimed by the Islamic State, how can non-Muslims claim that the Islamic State is not Islamic? Why do many, even conservatives, refer to the Islamic State and its allied Islamic terror groups as “radical” or “extremist?”

Martin Luther was “radical” and “extreme” because he tried to reform aspects of Roman Catholicism which he deemed malign.

He strongly disputed the claim that freedom from God’s punishment for sin could be purchased with money. He confronted indulgence salesman Johann Tetzel, a Dominican friar, with his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517. His refusal to retract all of his writings at the demand of Pope Leo X in 1520 and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms in 1521 resulted in his excommunication by the Pope and condemnation as an outlaw by the Emperor.

Unlike Martin Luther’s eventually successful efforts to reform aspects of Roman Catholicism, the efforts of Egyptian President Sisi and other moderate Muslims to reform Islam have thus far gained little traction. Obama appears to support President Sisi’s principal opponent in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliate, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Sisi and other moderates — rather than the Islamic State and Islamic nations such as Iran and Saudi Arabia — should be characterized as “radical” or “extreme” because they dispute the teachings of Allah as relayed through his prophet, Mohamed. The proponents of Islam as it now exists are “mainstream,” and therefore neither “radical” nor “extreme.” We should support “radicals” like President Sisi.

As noted in an article titled Beware of Islamic Terrorism,

All Islamic terrorists — not only the Islamic State group and al-Qaida — systematically and deliberately target civilians, stabbing their Muslim and “infidel” host countries in the back, abusing their hospitality to advance 14 centuries of megalomaniac aspirations to rule the globe in general, and to reclaim the “waqf” (Allah-ordained) regions of Europe in particular.

Emboldened by Western indifference, these destabilizing and terror-intensifying aspirations have been bolstered by the Islamic educational systems in Europe, the U.S. and other Western countries. These proclaim a supposedly irrevocable Islamic title over the eighth-century Islamic conquests of Lyon, Nice and much of France, as well as all of Spain; the ninth-century subjugation of parts of Italy; and the ninth- and 10th-century occupations of western Switzerland, including Geneva. [Emphasis added.]

Europe has underestimated the critical significance of this long anti-Western history in shaping contemporary Islamic education, culture, politics, peace, war, and the overall Islamic attitude toward Europe, North America, Australia, and other “arrogant infidels.” “Infidel” France has been the prime European target for Islamic terrorists, with 11 reported attacks in 2015, despite France’s systematic criticism of Israel and support for the Palestinian Authority — dispelling conventional “wisdom” that Islamic terrorism is Israeli or Palestinian-driven.

Europe has ignored the significant impact the crucial milestones in the life of the Prophet Muhammad have had on contemporary Islamic geostrategy, such as his seventh-century Hijrah, when Muhammad, along with his loyalists, emigrated or fled from Mecca to Yathrib (Medina), not to be integrated and blend into Medina’s social, economic or political environment, but to advance and spread Islam through conversion, subversion and terrorism, if necessary. Asserting himself over his hosts and rivals in Medina, Muhammad gathered a critical mass of military might to conquer Mecca and launch Islam’s drive to dominate the world. [Emphasis added.]

According to a moderate Muslim, Maajid Nawaz, writing in an article at the Daily Beast titled ISIS Is Just One of a Full-Blown Global Jihadist Insurgency,

Our political leaders have been restricting the definition of this problem to whichever jihadist group is causing them the biggest headache at the present time, while ignoring the fact that they are all borne of the same Islamist ideology. Before ISIS emerged, the U.S. State Department strangely took to naming the problem “al Qaeda-inspired extremism,” even though it was not al Qaeda that inspired the radicalism. Rather, Islamist extremism inspired al Qaeda. And in turn, ISIS did not radicalize those 6,000 European Muslims who have traveled to join them, nor the thousands of supporters the French now say they are monitoring. [Emphasis added.]

This did not happened overnight and could not have emerged from a vacuum. ISIS propaganda is good, but not that good. No, decades of Islamist propaganda in communities had already primed these young Muslims to yearn for a theocratic caliphate. When surveyed, 33 percent of British Muslims expressed a desire to resurrect a caliphate. ISIS simply plucked the low-hanging fruit, which had been seeded long ago by various Islamist groups, and it will now require decades of community resilience to push back. But we cannot even begin to do so until we recognize the problem for what it is. Welcome to the full-blown global jihadist insurgency. [Emphasis added.]

The author of that article claims that Islamism (often referred to as “political Islam“) is not Islam:

I speak as a former Liberal Democrat candidate in the U.K.’s last general election and as someone who became a political prisoner in Egypt due to my former belief in Islamism. I speak, therefore, from a place of concern and familiarity, not enmity and hostility to Islam and Muslims. In a televised discussion with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria on the issue, I have argued that of course ISIS is not Islam. Nor am I. Nor is anyone, really. Because Islam is what Muslims make it. But it is as disingenuous to argue that ISIS has “nothing to do with Islam” as it is to argue that “they are Islam.” ISIS has something to do with Islam. Not nothing, not everything, but something. . . . [Emphasis added.]

It is important to define here what I mean by Islamism: Islam is a religion, and like any other it is internally diverse. But Islamism is the desire to impose a very particular version of Islam on society. Hence, Islamism is Muslim theocracy. [Emphasis added.]

In another article, Mr. Nawaz acknowledges,

Islamism has been rising in the UK for decades. Over the years, in survey after survey, attitudes have reflected a worrying trend. A quarter of British Muslims sympathised with the Charlie Hebdo shootings. 0% have expressed tolerance for homosexuality. A third have claimed that killing for religion can be justified, while 36% have thought apostates should be killed. 40% have wanted the introduction of sharia as law in the UK and 33% have expressed a desire to see the return of a worldwide theocratic Caliphate. Is it any wonder then, that from this milieu up to 1,000 British Muslims have joined ISIS, which is more than joined the Army reserves.

I wish Mr. Nawaz well and hope that his efforts to change Islam succeed. However, in drawing distinctions between Islam and Islamism, he seems to have forgotten, or perhaps to have chosen to ignore, the teachings of Allah as relayed by his messenger and Islam’s founder, Mohamed, referenced at the beginning of this article. Mohamed (and presumably Allah himself) would be surprised by and even horrified at such notions as “Islam is what Muslims make it” and that Islam does not contemplate a Muslim theocracy. So, in all probability, would be many of the clerics at Egypt’s Al Azhar University.

Here are a few videos of Islamic clerics spreading their messages of Islamic peace, love and tolerance. The last of the bunch is about one of Obama’s favorite Muslims.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CQwU_QhrHE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNYZX6lt49k

To close on a somewhat lighter note, here are a few observations by Jonah Goldberg taken from his Goldberg file (November 20, 2015 e-mail),

If you Google “Christian terrorism,” you’re probably a jackass to begin with. But if you do — bidden not by your own drive to jackassery but by the natural curiosity inspired by this “news” letter — you’ll find lots of left-wingtrollery about how the worst terrorist attacks on American soil have been committed by Christians. Much of it is tendentious, question-begging twaddle. But I really don’t want to waste a lot of time on whether Tim McVeigh was a Christian or not (he really wasn’t).

What I find interesting is that many of the same people who clutch their pearls at the mere suggestion that Islamic terrorism has anything to do with — oh, what’s the word again? — oh right: Islam, seem to have no problem making the case that “Christian terrorism” is like a real thing. Remember how so many liberals loved — loved — Obama’s sophomoric and insidious tirade about not getting on our “high horses” about ISIS’s atrocities in the here and now because medieval Christians did bad things a thousand years ago? They never seem to think that argument through. Leaving out the ass-aching stupidity of the comparison, it actually concedes the very point Obama never wants to concede. By laying the barbaric sins of Christians a thousand years ago at the feet of Christians today, he implicitly tags Muslims with the barbarism committed in their name today. [Emphasis added.]

Now, I see no need to wade too deeply into the theology here, but I think I am on very solid ground when I say that Islamic terrorism draws more easily and deeply from the Koran than Tim McVeigh drew from the Christian Bible. Of course, you’re free to disagree. In a free society, everybody has the right to be wrong in their opinions. (But don’t tell anyone at Yale that.)

. . . .

But it is simply a lie — an obvious, glaring, indisputable, trout-in-the-milk lie — that Muslims have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.

Simply put, this is nonsense. . . .  The jihadists say they are motivated by Islam. They shout “Allahu akbar!” whenever they kill people. “Moderate Muslims” in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere have been funding Islamic radicals around the world for nearly a century. This morning in Mali, terrorist gunmen reportedly released those hostages who could quote the Koran. The leader of ISIS has a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies and openly talks about restoring the Caliphate. [Emphasis added.]

Despite all of this, don’t be distracted from the greatest threat to our security; or perhaps we should be:

theo3

Categories: Al Azhar University, Caliphate, Christianity, Egypt, Foreign policy, Iran, Islam, Islam - the religion of war, Islam and Christianity, Islam and Jews, Islamic indoctrination, Islamic invasion, Islamic jihad, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Islamic supremacy, Islamism, Israel, Jews, Moderate Muslims, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama and Islam, Obama and Islamic State, Palestinian heroes, Political Islam, Radical Islam, Saudi Arabia
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Radical Islam: The invisible Enemy

November 20, 2015

Radical Islam: The invisible Enemy, Front Page Magazine, Caroline Glick, November 19, 2015

(Islam has long sought to dominate civilization by establishing a caliphate. Why then, is trying to accomplish that goal considered “radical?” Please see also, Beware of Islamic terrorism. — DM)

Radical Islam does not exist

Originally published by the Jerusalem Post. 

Radical Islam is an ideology that serves both as an organizing principle for civil societies and a military doctrine. By ignoring it, the US and the rest of the free nations of the world have made it impossible to conceptualize or implement a strategy for either discrediting it or defeating its adherents.

On the one hand, there is the Sunni version of radical Islam propounded by the Muslim Brotherhood.

They want the Islamic empire to be an Islamic caliphate. On the other hand, you have the Shi’ite version of radical Islam propounded by the Iranian regime in Tehran. Its adherents want the Islamic empire to be ruled by an ayatollah in Tehran.

Every day the US and its allies maintain their refusal to acknowledge that radical Islam exists and that the regime in Tehran, al-Qaida, IS, Hamas and all the rest are mere expressions of this larger ideology, the danger radical Islam poses to the survival of free societies will continue to mount and grow.

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As the cleaning crews were mopping the dried blood from the stage and the seats of the Bataclan concert hall in Paris, a depressing act appeared on stage in distant Iowa.

Saturday night the three contenders for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination took to the stage in Iowa for a debate. The moderator asked them whether they would be willing to use the term “radical Islam” to describe the ideology motivating Islamic terrorists to massacre innocents. All refused.

Like her former boss, US President Barack Obama, former secretary of state and Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton not only refused to accept the relevance of the term. Clinton refused to acknowledge what radical Islam stands for.

She merely noted some of what it rejects.

In her words, “I think this kind of barbarism and nihilism, it’s very hard to understand, other than the lust for power, the rejection of modernity, the total disregard for human rights, freedom, or any other value that we know and respect.”

Her opponents agreed with her.

But of course, it is easy to understand what motivates Islamic terrorists. They tell us all the time.

They want the world to be run by an Islamic empire.

When they are in charge, they will kill, subjugate, convert or enslave all non-Muslims, except Jews.

The Jews will be obliterated.

The attacks they carry out in the Western world are viewed both as battles for the soul of Muslims worldwide and as a means to terrorize non-Muslims into accepting subjugation.

True, there are competing schools inside of the world of radical Islam.

On the one hand, there is the Sunni version of radical Islam propounded by the Muslim Brotherhood.

They want the Islamic empire to be an Islamic caliphate. On the other hand, you have the Shi’ite version of radical Islam propounded by the Iranian regime in Tehran. Its adherents want the Islamic empire to be ruled by an ayatollah in Tehran.

For Americans and the rest of the free world though, this is a distinction without any real meaning.

The radical Islamic goal of destroying America – and the rest of the world – is the same regardless of who ends up winning the intramural jihad contest.

And as we have seen repeatedly in recent years, the sides are happy to come together to achieve their common goal of killing us and destroying our societies.

The Americans’ avoidance of reality is not unique.

The Europeans also refuse to see it.

Following the jihadist massacres at Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher in Paris in January, French President Francois Hollande insisted that the attackers who killed in the name of Islam had nothing to do with Islam.

After jihadists in London beheaded British soldier Lee Rigby outside his barracks in 2013, British Prime Minister David Cameron insisted that the attack, carried out in the name of Islam, had nothing to do with Islam.

The operational consequences of the West’s refusal to acknowledge the nature of the forces waging war against it have been disastrous.

Radical Islam is an ideology that serves both as an organizing principle for civil societies and a military doctrine. By ignoring it, the US and the rest of the free nations of the world have made it impossible to conceptualize or implement a strategy for either discrediting it or defeating its adherents.

Rather than develop comprehensive plans for dealing with this enemy, the Americans, the Europeans and others have opted for a mix of policies running the spectrum from appeasement to whack-a-mole operations.

Abroad, appeasement has taken its most significant form in the US-led nuclear deal with Iran. As the largest state sponsor of terrorism and the most active radical Islamic imperialist force in the Middle East, Iran is the ground zero of radical Islam. It not only oversees and directs the operations of its puppets, like Syrian President Bashar Assad, and its foreign legions, like Hezbollah. The Iranian regime has also played a key role in developing Muslim Brotherhood offshoots like al-Qaida, which received, and likely continues to receive training and direction from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. As for Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, if Iran had been interested in preventing its rise, IS would never have taken over any territory in either country.

At home, appeasement of radical Islamic forces has involved embracing Muslim Brotherhood front groups and insisting that radical Islamic clerics are moderates because they aren’t pulling any triggers.

The West’s whack-a-mole war against radical Islam at home and abroad has meant that even as one group – like core al-Qaida – is cut down, it is swiftly replaced by other groups, like Islamic State. And if IS is eventually cut down, it too will be replaced by another group, and then reconstitute itself as IS when the West’s attention is taken up by the next major group.

Obama has enabled this state of affairs by defining the enemy as narrowly as possible, reducing the whole sphere of radical Islam to a few discrete groups – like al-Qaeda and IS – that he seeks to defeat or contain.

It is not simply that the whack-a-mole strategy doesn’t work. It is self-defeating. Since the radical Islamic trigger pullers in the West are usually no more than a few people who get together to murder people, insisting that someone has to be a card carrying member of a recognized terrorist group before authorities will go after him makes it almost impossible to find operatives and prevent attacks.

The murderers Friday may well never have received formal orders to commit their attacks from a central jihadist headquarters. They may have met at a mosque in Paris or Brussels and decided to do it.

Certainly they needed no advanced training to mow down people eating dinner or watching a rock concert. They didn’t even really need to know how to shoot straight.

As for their explosives vests, all they needed was a guy with a working knowledge of explosives to set them up with the means to turn themselves into human bombs. Maybe he trained in Syria. Maybe he has a degree in chemistry from the Sorbonne.

Maybe he is just good at following YouTube videos.

The most important component of Friday night’s massacre was the terrorists’ radical Islamic motivation.

Their belief in their ideology motivated them to die killing innocent people. Everything else was secondary. They may have been inspired and loosely directed by the heads of IS. But if Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had been killed six months ago, they would have found another source of inspiration.

And that’s the main point. While Friday’s killers may have given their allegiance to IS, they were operationally and ideologically all but indistinguishable from their predecessors in the London subways in 2005 and the Madrid commuter rails in 2004 who hailed from al-Qaida. Likewise, while the US may have seriously degraded core al-Qaida in the Middle East over the past seven years, IS in Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Libya is an organic extension of al-Qaida.

To defeat these groups, the US and its allies need to adopt a strategy that is rooted in an acknowledgment of the nature of our true enemy: radical Islam.

Armed with this recognition, the nations of the free world can determine operational guidelines for combating not only specific, discrete groupings of adherents to this ideology, they can develop overall strategies for combating it at home and in the Middle East.

At home, such strategies require Western governments to penetrate, disrupt and destroy radical Islamic networks on the ground in a sustained, concentrated manner. In the Middle East, they require the free world to stop seeking to appease leaders, regimes and militias that support and ascribe to radical Islam.

Sunday night, a group of Parisians stood outside one of the sites of Friday night’s massacre and sang “La Marseilles.” Without fear, a woman garbed in the black robes of radical Islam stepped into the crowd and began bellowing out “Allahu Akbar.” She probably isn’t a card carrying member of IS. Rather, in all likelihood she is just someone who ascribes to radical Islam and so sees France as her enemy.

Assuming the women doesn’t belong to a terrorist group, French officials will not monitor her or her relatives. If she or any of her relatives murder their fellow citizens of France, authorities will probably say they were lone wolves.

Every day the US and its allies maintain their refusal to acknowledge that radical Islam exists and that the regime in Tehran, al-Qaida, IS, Hamas and all the rest are mere expressions of this larger ideology, the danger radical Islam poses to the survival of free societies will continue to mount and grow. Saturday night’s Democratic debate was a depressing reminder how low we have fallen.

Categories: Caliphate, Islam, Islamism, Radical Islam
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Hashtag for Paris: #LET’SJUSTCAPITULATE

November 19, 2015

Hashtag for Paris: #LET’SJUSTCAPITULATE, Front Page Magazine, Tibor Krausz, November 19, 2015

nov.-13-paris-attacks-memorial

Within hours of the slaughter came the usual fatuous memes. The peace sign with an Eiffel Tower in it. The French tricolor superimposed over Facebook profile images. The #prayforparis hashtag on Twitter. If fervent emoting was a viable anti-terrorism strategy, we would have Islamic terrorists on the run in nothing flat. As matters stand, however, the West is facing a massive civilizational challenge from radical Islam, which has been waging a global war on free societies for decades. And not only are most Europeans out of their depth intellectually about this threat; they seem both unable and unwilling to defend themselves from it in any meaningful manner. Most of them can’t even bring themselves to name the threat (radical Islam, which has gone mainstream globally) — as if doing so would unleash some sinister, occult force that would instantly destroy all the comforting illusions of the modern West’s collectivist religions: political correctness and multiculturalism. Then again, you also get labeled a racist instantly for doing so: those comforting illusions must be enforced at all cost.  

********************************

No sooner did Islamic militants massacre 132 concertgoers, partygoers, pedestrians and coffeehouse patrons in Paris last week than the world jumped collectively to its feet. “The world stands with Paris,” the Bloomberg news agency declared. “World stands by France,” USA Today stressed. “The world stands with France,” The Australian insisted. “World stands behind France,” The South China Morning Post in Hong Kong explained. “World stands in solidarity with Paris,” The National in Abu Dhabi, News World in India and CCTV Africa in Kenya all concurred.

Good to know. But we might as well sit down now. It’s not as if “the world” was going to do anything anyhow beyond just standing there and trotting out the usual platitudes that have become routine in the wake of daily atrocities by Islamic terrorists over the past weeks, months and years, from Kenya to Canada and from Thailand to Tunisia. And so there the world was, standing with Paris and by France, posting faux-lachrymose status updates on social media, projecting the colors of France’s national flag onto cultural landmarks, and attending candlelight vigils where someone inevitably led a soulful sing-along to John Lennon’s “Image” and “Give Peace a Chance.”

And the world had barely just started. Within hours of the slaughter came the usual fatuous memes. The peace sign with an Eiffel Tower in it. The French tricolor superimposed over Facebook profile images. The #prayforparis hashtag on Twitter. If fervent emoting was a viable anti-terrorism strategy, we would have Islamic terrorists on the run in nothing flat. As matters stand, however, the West is facing a massive civilizational challenge from radical Islam, which has been waging a global war on free societies for decades. And not only are most Europeans out of their depth intellectually about this threat; they seem both unable and unwilling to defend themselves from it in any meaningful manner. Most of them can’t even bring themselves to name the threat (radical Islam, which has gone mainstream globally) — as if doing so would unleash some sinister, occult force that would instantly destroy all the comforting illusions of the modern West’s collectivist religions: political correctness and multiculturalism. Then again, you also get labeled a racist instantly for doing so: those comforting illusions must be enforced at all cost.

In a video that has gone instantly viral on social media, a father and his young son are being interviewed, in French, by a television reporter at a memorial in Paris to the victims of the attacks. With people laying flowers and lighting candles in the background, the reporter asks the boy, who is around five, if he knows what happened. Yes, the boy answers, some bad people killed others. Why? “Because they’re very, very evil,” he explains solemnly. “They are not very nice. They are bad guys. You have to be very careful [with them]… They have guns and they can shoot us.” The father gently interrupts him. “Yes, but we have flowers,” he tells his son. “Look, everyone is laying flowers. That’s the way to fight guns.” The boy remains unconvinced. “But flowers don’t do anything,” he explains. But the father remains persistent. We need flowers and candles to fight evil, he reassures his son until the boy relents.

In other words, the young boy instinctively understood the world better than the adults around him. But we can’t have that, can we, so he, too, was cajoled into seeing things through the rose-tinted illusions of insipid banalities. Many Europeans’ solution to the ever-present threat of murderous Islamic fanaticism is to pretend that the only way to combat it is to bring flowers to a gun fight. If you can’t beat them, try to hug them. (Their suicide belts might get in the way, though.)

If we needed any more confirmation, the general reactions to the Paris attacks have provided it: Today’s Western European societies are in an advanced state of civilizational decline. Rather than rouse themselves from their stupor and face down the Islamic threat as earlier generations would doubtless have done, the continent’s policymakers and citizens alike prefer to look the other way and carry on insisting that all we need to do is to try and get along. If that takes curtailing our freedoms, giving in to yet more demands from Islamic radicals, and abjectly apologizing constantly for our forebears’ misdeeds in centuries past as if modern Europeans were collectively responsible for the Crusades, so be it. At the same time, the very idea of expecting “moderate” Muslims to take a robust public stance against the endless blood-soaked crimes their coreligionists commit is reflexively dismissed as intolerably racist. That is to say, intellectual coherence isn’t much of a virtue these days.

“France is at war,” French President Francois Hollande declared after the November 13 attacks in Paris, which featured militants from an enviably “multicultural” tableau that politically correct Europeans can be proud of: native-born Belgians, French nationals, recently arrived Syrian “refugees.” Hollande promised a “ruthless” response. Needless to say, his ephemeral impersonation of Charles de Gaulle didn’t last. “We are not committed to a war of civilizations because these assassins don’t represent any civilization,” he waffled. “We are in a war against terrorism, jihadism, which threatens the whole world.” In other words, what France is up against is the nebulous concept of “jihadism,” which is unrelated to any creed or culture or community.

But let’s not blame Monsieur Hollande for his weak-kneed obscurantism. It’s the default position of Western politicians and “intellectuals.” President Barack Obama has likewise opined that the Islamic State, which has claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks, “no more represent[s] Islam than any madman who kills in the name of Christianity or Judaism or Buddhism or Hinduism.” Leaving aside the logical fallacy in that garbled statement (are we to believe that any madman who kills in the name of those other faiths represents Islam just as much as the Islamic State?), what to make of his follow-up insight? “No religion is responsible for terrorism,” Obama added. “People are responsible for violence and terrorism.”

So long, common sense. Goodbye, logic. Farewell, reason.

France will retaliate by bombing ISIS targets in Syria and Iraq while simultaneously rounding up scores of Islamic militants on French soil. It will also boost security at popular venues at great cost to taxpayers. What France and most other European nations won’t do is even try and tackle the real root cause of the problem, which is an extensive homegrown infrastructure of Islamic radicalism. Schools and mosques will continue to indoctrinate impressionable young Muslims with a hatred of their host societies on the trumped-up charge that the West is waging a collective war of extermination against innocent Muslims worldwide. More Europeans will continue to die in brutal terror attacks as a result.

Even as France and other nations cut off one head of the hydra of Islamic radicalism by eliminating a militant cell or two, other ones will spawn instantly in their place. France prohibits polls based on the religious beliefs of respondents, but according to solid evidence at least 15 percent of French Muslims identify with the ideology and goals of the Islamic State. In nearby Britain a quarter of young Muslims said they approved of the Islamic terrorists who murdered almost the entire editorial staff of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January. Such figures translate into millions of young Muslims, providing Islamic terrorists with a potentially limitless pool of new recruits.

The West is light-years ahead of the Muslim world when it comes to technological, industrial and military might, but it lacks the essential ingredient of long-term success: staunch belief in the justness of its cause and the superiority of its values. What’s the use of pounding away at targets thousands of miles away, in Syria and Iraq, when back home we’ve already capitulated?

Categories: Fairy tales, France, Islamic invasion, Islamic jihad, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Islamic supremacy, Paris Muslim attack, Radical Islam
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EU’s head of security said what about political Islam?

July 3, 2015
Published on Jul 2, 2015

The Head of Security for the EU has just announced that radical Islam is a legitimate political force in Europe.

She says “Islam is a victim” and “diversity is our strength.” Ezra Levant of TheRebel.media says her comments violate the spirit of separation of church and state and invite the spread of sharia law in the public square.

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Kerry Says ISIS ‘Insults the Religion They Falsely Represent’

February 10, 2015

The self-appointed Secretary of Religion has ex-communicated Muslim terrorists from Islam.

By: Tzvi Ben-Gedalyahu

Published: February 10th, 2015

via The Jewish Press » » Kerry Says ISIS ‘Insults the Religion They Falsely Represent’.

I,am not able due health reasons to place a picture of this something here

 

Secretary of State John Kerry clearly placed the Islamic State (ISIS) out of the realm of Islam, or even radical Islam, and declared that its terrorists “are an insult to the religion they falsely claim to represent.”

Kerry’s statement Tuesday, following the announcement that American aid worker and ISIS hostage Kayla Mueller has been confirmed dead, came one day after President Barack Obama did not refer to radical Islamists as such but instead commented here on “vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris.”

Kerry made it clear that “ISIL, and ISIL alone, is the reason Kayla is gone,” but he then disassociated them from Islam, to wit:

Like our friends in Jordan, our resolve is unshaken to defeat this vile and unspeakably ugly insult to the civilized world and to defeat terrorists whose actions – killing women, killing children, burning people alive – are an insult to the religion they falsely claim to represent.

Eulogizing Mueller, Kerry said that she was “a compassionate young American who represented everything good about the human spirit.”

He added, “She so purposefully had one mission in life from the very start, and that was to help people…. She embraced children who had lost their parents. She comforted the sick and the wounded…. Kayla’s sense of values, her humanity and generosity, her idealism – this is what will endure, and it will endure long, long after the barbarity of ISIL is defeated.”

If Kerry can say that the Islamic State falsely represents Islam, can he say the same about Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Taliban, Al Qaeda and their jihadist allies?

If the Islamic State is not defined as radical Islam, will its eventual defeat mean that radical Islam is guaranteed a long life?

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What Are the Metaphysics of Islamic Denial?

February 2, 2015

What Are the Metaphysics of Islamic Denial?

February 2nd, 2015 – 12:45 am

By Victor Davis Hanson

via What Are the Metaphysics of Islamic Denial? | Works and Days.

 

obama_weakness_big_1-27-14-1

After six years, it is no surprise that the Obama administration does not see the Taliban as “terrorists” or that it will not associate “violent extremism” with radical Islam or just Islam.

After all, when Maj. Hasan murdered U.S. soldiers it was nothing more than “workplace violence,” as if he were a disgruntled post office employee of the 1970s. Our two top intelligence chiefs assured us that the Muslim Brotherhood was “largely secular” and that jihad “was a legitimate tenet of Islam.” Add in “workplace violence” and the old “overseas contingency operations.” Do we remember that Ms. Napolitano’s Department of Homeland Security warned us about right-wing returning veterans as the most likely to terrorize us? When someone blows up people at the Boston Marathon, beheads a woman in Oklahoma, or puts a hatchet in a NYPD officer’s head, he is not a terrorist or proselytizer fueled by Islamic hatred of non-Muslims as much as mentally confused. (I suppose in a way that a Hitler or Stalin was not.)

The problem is not that the administration is just too fond of euphemisms. At times it can be quite candid. The Republican House has been characterized as “terrorists” in their efforts to stop more federal borrowing. The Tea Party was slurred as “tea-baggers” — a derogative sexual term.  Mr. Netanyahu is variously a “coward” or “chickensh-t” — pejoratives not floated for even the vicious Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

So why the elaborate façade about the Islamic roots of global terrorism and spreading instability in the Middle East? There are a few possible explanations.

I. Strategy

The Obama administration knows full well that the Taliban, ISIS, al Qaeda, Boko Haram and the rest of the pack draw their zeal from the Koran. But to say such might turn off two or three useful constituencies — the hard Left at home that hates any judgmentalism, “moderate” Muslims in the Middle East who are essential to nullifying the “radicals” in their midst, and the global community that is always suspicious when America goes to war against a particular group or ideology. The Obama administration with a wink-and-nod, then, accepts radical Islam as the problem, but for strategic reasons, and in the manner occasionally of the Bush administration, prefers euphemisms. Nonetheless, the administration goes on Predatoring thousands of suspected Islamic terrorists even as it won’t say what its targeted victims all have in common. Given that Americans know that the enemy is radical Islam, why turn off potential allies by reiterating that fact?

II. Appeasement

The Obama administration is terrified of radical Islamic terrorism, in the manner that Europeans are — and were scared stiff in the 1930s of Nazi Germany. They know full well that caricaturing Islam is dangerous in a way joking about other religions is not. They are afraid of more televised beheadings, more torturing, and more Benghazis. If they can blame a pathetic U.S. resident for making a video for the deaths in Benghazi, then perhaps the appreciative Islamist culprits will leave it at one harvest at Benghazi (especially before the 2012 elections). If the Taliban sense that Obama will not dare to call them terrorists, then maybe they will negotiate in good faith and enter a stable “coalition” government when we depart entirely from Afghanistan. Bowing to a Saudi royal might assuage his anger at the U.S. Carefully avoiding reference any longer to Syrian regime change might win back Assad to our side. When we don’t condemn “Islamic terrorism,” then perhaps even ISIS mutters, “Hmmm, these Americans are not that bad after all; shoot rather than behead the next hostage.”

Note that essential characteristic of appeasement, the narcissism of the appeaser: An FDR lecturing Churchill that he alone had the skills to win over “Uncle Joe” Stalin, a Jimmy Carter’s unique understanding of Iranian theocracy that as thanks would release the hostages, and the locus classicus of Neville Chamberlain alone with the fluency and sensitivity to make Herr Hitler see what is in his real interest. So, too, only the Peace Prize winner Obama can suavely appease radical Islam and convince them why leaving America alone suits their interest as well. The more we accommodate radical Islamists through euphemism and circumlocution, the more likely they might just go away.

III. Postmodern Therapy

The Obama administration has a fuzzy therapeutic view of human nature in general, as does much of America by now. There is no “welfare” anymore, just “pubic assistance” or better “health and human services.” Beau Bergdahl is confused and complex, hardly a “traitor,” a slur that leaves no room for nuance. The purpose of language is not disinterested and accurate description; rather, language is employed for the political, whether you know it or not.

So the unwillingness to use the world “Islam” in connection with global terrorism simply reflects the leftwing, relativist view that nothing is ever absolute. There is not good versus evil, failure or success, but only gradations that are conditioned by the preexisting prejudices of elites who make up these categories largely to protect their own privilege. Generalization is always reactionary stereotyping. “Islam” or “Muslim” hardly can characterize 400 million people from Indonesia to Dubai. (To be fair, I think the Left’s postmodern relativism is itself mostly political and ad hoc; after all, it often enjoys blanket categorization and has no problem with disparagement like “Republicans,” “tea-baggers,” “conservatives,” “males,” or “whites” as inclusive terms that serve well enough to stereotype millions — or for that matter “gays” and “women” in the hagiographic sense.) “Islam” and “Muslim” are meaninglessly vague, and are used as pejoratives rather than descriptive terms; like most of our race/class/gender vocabulary these rubrics cannot be used as inclusive terms when the aim is not laudatory.

IV. Multicultural Understanding

Finally, perhaps the Obama administration does not see us in a war at all or at least a righteous conflict against cold-blooded religious fanatics from the Islamic world. While it disproves of the methodology of terrorism, it is ambiguous about the origins of such anti-Western rage. Thus Obama chose to skip the march after the Paris killings in a way he would not miss going overseas to lobby for a Chicago Olympics. Collate the apology tour, the initial Al Arabiya interview, and the Cairo speech, and perhaps add in the relevant passages from Dreams from My Father and keen voluntary attendance at Rev. Wright’s sermons. What arises is a consistent Obama worldview that the present U.S.-inspired global order is not fair, but rather fuelled by neo-colonialism, past imperialism, racism, and capitalist exploitation, Western but especially American in nature. In such a moral landscape, obviously some liberationists, revolutionaries, reformers and dissidents will go too far, in the manner that Castro killed or jailed a bit too many or Arafat himself was on occasion a little bit too much the killer.

But as Andrew Young once said of Khomeini that he “will be somewhat of a saint when we get over the panic,” so, too, the Obama administration more or less understands why young men in the Middle East take up arms against the U.S. Note the leftwing hatred of American Sniper, or Michael Moore’s (the object of hero-worship at the Democratic Convention of 2004) rationale for September 11 (“If someone did this [9/11] to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, D.C., and the planes’ destination of California — these were places that voted AGAINST Bush!”). In the world of Michael Moore’s leftism, the problem was not that Islamists had killed Americans, but rather that they blew up the wrong Americans who were against what the other bad red-state Americans — quite deserving of death — had done.

The point is not that the administration simply sympathizes with radical Islamists or thinks in lockstep with a Michael Moore or Bill Ayers, only that it is intellectually, politically, and culturally unable to damn entirely the Islamist cause by dubbing it “terrorism” or Islamism, given the complexity of past Western culpability for the present mess of the Middle East.

Why do they hate us? For Obama, it is not because of Islamic self-induced pathologies that are the logical result of entrenched tribalism, gender apartheid, religious fundamentalism and intolerance, statism, anti-Semitism, and autocracy, which can only lead to stagnation, poverty, and repression that in turn present as envy, jealousy and hatred of the West.

No, the West is responsible for the lack of parity, and thus the anger of the Middle East is somewhat legitimate and understandable. Just as Obama has apologized for Western culpability of Middle East pathologies, so, too, he does not necessarily see Islamic terrorists as primordial enemies driven on by religious zealotry, as much as variants of more legitimate groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and the Palestinian Authority.

Summary

These four exegeses are not entirely constant, but transmogrify to meet the administration’s current political realities (e.g., the euphemisms may cease for a while should there be another 9/11).  They also overlap and are not mutually exclusive. Nevertheless, which of them most often drives the Obama’s administration peculiar institution of Islamic denial?

I doubt Strategy is the prime mover, although many naïve people in the administration may mistakenly believe that it is. Appeasement is closer to the mark, but perhaps in this case better applies to individuals such as journalists and cartoonists than the U.S. government that protects its own and is all-powerful. Moreover, appeasement is a tactic. It can be conditioned by ideology or individual temperament, but is not a consistent ideology (Chamberlain was a conservative appeaser). Most liberals embrace Postmodern Therapy’s view of human existence, but not all of them to the degree to deny Islamic culpability for global terrorism. I am left with explanation IV, Multicultural Understanding. The Obama administration is preconditioned to consider anti-Americanism not as a logical tic of anti-capitalist, anti-democratic systems or just the whining abroad of the jealous and envious of an exceptional United States, but rather as something often legitimate that has its origins in our inequality, unfairness, and exploitation.

In such a mental landscape, it is almost impossible for those in the administration with any confidence to say that Islamists or even radical Islamists hate us for what we are and will do everything in their power to destroy us, and that the larger neutral Middle East is watching the struggle to see which side proves the stronger horse and thus is worthy of alliance with, or at least worthy of not offending.

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