Obama Administration's Selling America "Cheap" to Islam

Nothing surprises me any more with the actions, statements and logic of the present administration and its supporters. Yesterday, John Brennan, deputy National Security Advisor, announced that we may no longer describe our enemy as ‘jihadists’ or ‘Islamists’ because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam.

I have news for Mr. Brennon, it is not Americans who invented the word jihadists, but it is Muslims who used that word for 1400 years. The word jihadist is derived from, Mujahada or Mujahidoun, to describe those who go to war for the sake of spreading Islam. Brennon is right in that jihad is a major tenant of Islam, but wrong in calling it legitimate because in fact it is a declaration of war and violence against non-Muslim individuals, governments and nations that has been going on for 1400 years. The Obama administration refuses to understand that the doctrine of jihad challenges the sovereignty of any non-Muslim country and denies it exercising its right to remain non-Muslim. But after standing against the Arizona law, I do not think the current administration cares much about sovereignty of the USA.

I feel kind of silly in explaining the obvious to Mr. Brennan because he cannot be that stupid. But just in case, this is the definition of jihad as given in mainstream Shafii law: “to war against non-Muslims, derived from the word mujahada, signifying warfare, to establish the religion” (Shafii law # o9.0 p 599). To ensure that all Muslims perform or at least support jihad, there is also a law that states that not performing jihad or fleeing from combat with “unbelievers” is considered an enormous crime (Shafii law 377 p. 987). Not only is jihad the duty of every Muslim, but every Muslim head of state. Sharia says: “The caliph fights all other peoples until they become Muslim” (o9.9 p. 603).

This definition of Jihad as above, is being taught today across the Muslim world and producing thousands of young men and women who are committed to killing us. Such jihad commandments to kill and engage in aggressive wars against non-Muslims are all over Muslim scriptures and preached from mosques across the Middle East and even in the West. Such violent jihad commandments all over Muslim scriptures have never been amended, annulled or denied by any Muslim group with authority in the Middle East. All we ever hear is unsubstantiated denials by Muslims in the West.

Here is another Sharia law: “The Caliph makes war upon Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians until they become Muslim or else pay the non-Muslim poll tax while being belittled”. Law# o9.8 p. 602. If that is not enough the following might convince Mr. Brennan: “When the caliph (Muslim Head of State) appoints a ruler on a region, (his duty includes) if the area has a border adjacent to enemy lands, (he will) undertake jihad against enemies, dividing the spoils of battle among combatants and deserving recipients.” (Law# o25.8 and 9 (8) p,647).

When it comes to the interpretation of Islam, many Muslim groups in the US say they abide by the interpretations of Al Azhar University in Cairo. Well, Al Azhar University in Cairo approved and signed the above Sharia laws and also teaches that jihad is a permanent war institution against Jews Christians and pagans.

There is a relentless campaign to dumb down Americans. There is daily massive, merciless pressure on the ordinary American citizen to conform to an unbearable state of giving up their culture, dignity and pride. Those in charge in New York have approved the building of a huge mosque at Ground Zero, which will be financed by the same people who financed the terror attack on 9/11. It will be considered by the Muslim world as yet another holy site for the triumph of Islam. Like holy mosque built on top of the Jewish second temple, in a few decades, Islam will claim this area of New York as Muslim holy grounds. American victims of 9/11 are buried next to a holy mosque of triumph and Muslims will come to visit from all over the world. Who knows, perhaps our great grand children will have an eternal war with Muslims over ground zero as a disputed area between Americans and Muslims.

To teach Americans another lesson, the Obama administration even brought a foreign leader, the President of Mexico, to come to our Congress and teach the American people a lesson about what is right and wrong.

We are told that Americans must never feel insulted, humiliated or that their noses are being rubbed in the ground by President Obma’s administration. You see, a good American must be sensitive to Muslim wishes, but asking Muslims to reciprocate would be insensitive.

A good American can no longer be patriotic, but must respect the patriotism of others. He must be tolerant, but must tolerate the intolerance of others. He must blame himself first, second and third, but never dare blame others. A good American must welcome Islamic penetration and agenda of jihad, but never suspect any ill will from those who call themselves jihadists and blow themselves up with fellow US citizens. He must never demand equal access in Muslim countries. He must resist feelings of pride in his culture, but celebrate the cultures of everyone else, even those who cut the clitorises of young girls. He must celebrate the diversity and division of America into little tribes even if some are hell-bent on imposing their religion, language and culture by any means necessary. A good American must abandon any reference in public to God, Christ, or Christmas. But he must celebrate other religions, especially Islam, while denying that Islam had anything to do with 9/11.

The present administration and its supporters are following a policy of divide and conquer and are gambling with our future, thinking that in the end the jihadists will get tired and reform themselves of their own volition. The administration is trying to play word games to tell Muslims they are not at war with America, when even the children in the Arab streets know that Islamic jihad is at war with America. America might be afraid, but denial and playing word games is an insult to the intelligence of the American people. Mr. Brennon and those who agree with him have ignored 1400 years of Islamic jihad history. Only those cultures that fought the jihadists survived and preserved their language and religion. Wars at the gates of Vienna stopped the jihadists in their tracks, but with appeasement, political correctness and Muslim immigration, America might wake up one day asking “how did we lose Europe?”

The present administration is selling America cheap, very cheap, for votes, for approval from Saudi Arabia and radical Islamists. I wish to tell them, you are rewarding the enemies of America who will never love you. Our politicians are at least engaged in gross negligence and at worst playing with fire.
Is this a great country for Islam to conquer or what?

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Nonie Darwish is a former Muslims and the author of “Cruel and Usual Punishment; The Terrifying Global Implications of Islamic Law”.

The Internationalization of the Fight against the Jihadists

Future Terrorism is expected to witness the expansion of various types of Terror networks and forces existing today, including, on the one hand, the social class warfare (Marxist) such as Maoism in Asia or neo-Trotskyism in Latin America. On the other hand, the many separatist terror networks such the PKK in Turkey, Chechen in Russia, southern Philippines, Xingian Ughiur or in Kashmir in India are expected to continue with their attempts, short of political solutions, with regard to these issues. But beyond these forms of Terror, the widest network projected to expand and threaten most democracies around the world is undoubtedly the Jihadi Global web indoctrinated by the Salafi ideology.

Other forms of Jihadi terror groups, some supported by the Khomeini ideology, are also expected to expand in the Middle East and beyond, depending on the political future of the regimes that support them, mainly in Iran. Hence, what democracies in the West and Asia will continue to face off with, in the next two decades, are organizations and movements identifying themselves as Jihadist (al Jihadiyyun). Al Qaeda will continue to mutate and morph as well as the organizations that espouse the same ideology. We may even see new types of Jihadi groups emerging.

Based on a totalitarian ideology and a universal agenda, the global Jihadist threat targets democracies throughout the international community in an effort to establish what they coin as “Emirates,” from the kind we witnessed under the Taliban before 2001 and the attempts we see in Iraq’s Sunni triangle, Somalia and in Waziristan. These pockets are building blocks for the sought Caliphate, the ultimate goal of all Jihadi movements and organizations since the 1920s.The Jihadist movements have been diverse and have adopted different international strategies as I have explained in my book Future Jihad: Terrorist Strategies against the West.

Internationalization of the Jihadists

One major feature of these Jihadist Salafi movements is that they draw their principles from one universal ideology. Hence, they are able to assist each other against dispersed, and often divided, foes. The Jihadi terror forces were able to single out the United States, European democracies, Russia, India, Black Africa, China and many moderate Muslim countries. It is clear that the Jihadists are coordinating worldwide and their targets are not. Worse, the Jihadist propaganda often hijacked separatist causes and transformed them into a Jihadi battlefield making it difficult on the rest of the world to identify them as Terrorists, but as resistance movement. These are the cases in Chechnya, Kashmir, Southern Philippines, Gaza and Lebanon. The propaganda network of all Jihadi forces combined would isolate the United States and fight it on particular issues, rather than isolate an Arab or Muslim government on another issue, as in Pakistan, Nigeria or Egypt. Then the Jihadi machine would demonize India on the Kashmir issue and try to isolate New Delhi on the matter.

Internationalization of the Confrontation against the Jihadi Terror

Today’s central question is about the internationalization of the confrontation with the Jihadi forces operating in many countries. Salafists and their radicalization network worldwide aim at confronting their own foes, mostly democracies, one at a time and with various strategies. In our assessment, we are proposing a global response integrating the resources of all targeted countries by al Qaeda. Hence, future strategies must be based on the following principles:

a. That targeted democracies around the world, including India and Russia, would develop a joint platform on all levels to counter that ideology and isolate the threat instead of being isolated by it as I argued in my book The Confrontation: Winning the War against Future Jihad.

b. That regional coordination must also develop such as in Africa, in the Muslim world and in Latin America, to coordinate efforts based on the particularity of each region.

c. That the sum of all these platforms comes under an international platform of confrontation with the Jihadist forces.

(Adapted from Professor Phares’ speech to the Asian Security Conference 2010 under the theme “Asian Strategic Futures 2030: Trends, Scenarios and Alternatives.” Professor Phares’ presentation was under the title: “The Future of Terrorism: Jihadi threat in the Indian Subcontinent”)

Jihadists and the "Wretched of the Earth"

One of the striking things in the three most recent high profile jihadist attacks -- the "Underpants Bomber," the Ft. Hood assassin and the attacker on the CIA base in Afghanistan -- has been the attackers themselves.

While many studying terrorism have understood that the threat is not from the dispossessed of the earth, but from an educated elite in the semi-Westernized (or completely Westernized) world who radicalize in different ways.

Yet there is still a policy, going back many years and continued now, that aims at a completely different social and economic demographic -- the poor and wretched of the earth who are believed to be angry at the U.S. and the West for its policies in the Middle East.

We spend vast amounts of money to convince one group that we have virtually no way to reach that they should like us, while having little strategy to deal with those who have repeatedly shown themselves to be the greater danger.

Yet we have Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a a doctor who was the son of middle-class, English-speaking Jordanians; Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who grew up in a wealthy Nigerian family and studied at University College London; and Nidal Hasan, who was born in Arlington, graduated from Virginia Tech and did his psychiatric residency at Walter Reed.

One of the chief radicalizing influences in the case of the latter two was Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen who did not rise out of the teeming ghettos or dirt-poor villages, but family that lived in the United States, a country he returned to in order to study at George Washington University.

Perhaps this will put an end to the myth of the poor and wretched jihadist waging a form of religious class struggle.

As Anne Applebaum wrote in the Washington Post, we are seeing a "international jihadi elite" that resembles international elites of the Bolshevik days who were no more working class than the Tsar. As she notes:

These people are not the wretched of the Earth. Nor do they have much in common, sociologically speaking, with the illiterate warlords of Waziristan. They haven't emerged from repressive Islamic societies such as Iran, or been forced to live under extreme forms of sharia law, as in Saudi Arabia. On the contrary, they are children of ambitious, "Westernized" parents who sacrificed for their education -- though they are often people who, for one reason or another, didn't "make it," or didn't feel comfortable, in their respective societies.

What makes this slice of Islamists so difficult to counter is that they move with ease in Western societies, acquire passports or citizenship in countries that do not arouse suspicion, and have no ethical difficulties in hiding their Islamist beliefs if necessary to advance the cause of

How to counter this is something we should spend much more time on than trying to figure out how to get the average Yemeni to embrace Western liberal democracy.

One of the fascinating things to note is the perceived affinity by many of the international jihadists with the radical left or radical right. Defne Bayrak, the wife of al Balawi, wrote a book titled "Bin Laden: Che Guevara of the East," apparently trying to link the two to liberation struggles of the poor. Iran's Ahmadinejad and Venezuela's Hugo Chávez (along with his acolyte, Evo Morales in Bolivia and Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega) regularly link the authoritarian governments of the Bolivarian revolution with the repressive Muslim revolution of Iran.

On the other side, one of the great deniers of the Holocaust was Ahmed Hubber, a neo-Nazi leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe, and others like him.

It is interesting to note that Hubber, like Chávez and those who claim the mantle of the revolutionary left, was welcomed by Ahmadinejad. Perhaps that is because all three totalitarian tendencies, from the neo-Nazi to the 21st Century Socialism to Islamism, have more in common than any of them would care to recognize.

The Making and Dealing With Jihadists

Bewildered by what fanatic Muslims do, some conclude that Muslims are brainwashed. Otherwise, how can their totally illogical belief system and barbaric behavior be explained? But the notion of “brainwashing” that is bandied about is the stuff of science fiction and Hollywood movies such as the Manchurian Candidate.

The human person arrives in this world with his brains already washed in the sense of being what John Locke called tabula rasa, blank slate—ready for experience to imprint its script on it. John Locke was only partly correct. The brain also arrives with numerous predispositions already in place. It is a combination of life’s influences and a person’s own decisions that determine which of these dispositions develop and which ones fail. It is through this process that a unique human being is formed.

Many animals come with already in-place programs that automatically run much of their lives. Birds’ migration, mating courtship and thousands of other complex behaviors are instances of this type of specific programming. A catchword for this type of behavior is “instinct.” As a general rule, the higher the organism the less is its rigid pre-programs and the greater its latitude to exercise choices.

Making choices depends on what there is to choose from and to what extent a given choice appeals to the person. And the human newborn enters the arena of life without the means of being other than a passive recipient of “things” already chosen for him.

It is like the old joke by Henry Ford who reportedly told his customers that they could have the choice of color for their car as long as it was black. Things are almost as bleak for the new arrival. He didn’t have a say in choosing his parents, his socio-economic condition, his environment of birth and much more. All are already in place and he is to start in life from the context of his birth.

The development of a newborn in any family is importantly influenced by many factors, among them how hands-on the parents are; how religious they are, how severely they micromanage him in an attempt to make him not only a good person but also a person better-one than they themselves.

Parents tend to live vicariously through their children by programming them, the best they can, so that the children become or achieve much of what they themselves had failed to become or to accomplish. This attitude covers all areas of life such as giving the child the education they didn’t have, helping him with fame and fortune, nurturing him to become a topnotch athlete and so forth.

It is a fact that early influences play a cardinal role in shaping the person. For this reason, for instance, the overwhelming majority of Muslims have born into Muslim families, Catholics into Catholic families, Hindus into Hindu families and so on. It is also a fact that the degree of religiosity ranges from mild to strong, with most people falling somewhere between the two extremes.

Interestingly, two siblings raised by the same set of parents under the same influences may end up at the opposite extremes in their religious views and practices. It is here that the human dynamic of freedom of choice comes into play and steers one to one extreme and the other to the other extreme. Occasional extreme deviations notwithstanding, the great majority of siblings of a given family end up with various degrees of that family’s overall religious and other values. The same general principle of subscribing to a set of common values exists in all human groupings, in some cases with a broad flexibility and inclusiveness while in others with rigidity and exclusivity.

In order to enjoy the privileges of belonging to a group, the person must also pay his dues of membership.

The very young human faces, beginning with the minute he can make some sense of the world, a bewildering array of mysteries, challenges, and enticements. There are questions at every step, fears, and hopes entangled with the need to survive and possibly thrive.

Who am I? What is this world all about? What’s the purpose? What am I supposed to do and how? Where am I headed? People die. Where do they go? And on and on and on. The information booths available to him in the fairground of life provide him with answers that may help relieve his innate existentialistic anxiety. And it is here that religion plays its critical role and holds a great appeal. Religion provides a surefire answer to those who are willing to take it on faith.

And Islam is a powerful magnet for the masses that are unable to deal with the uncertainties of life and death on their own. It is from this population, many already thoroughly indoctrinated from birth, that the majority of diehard jihadists emerge.

It is the bargain the jihadist makes. He surrenders totally to the religion of surrender in exchange for blanket security. Islam gives him all the answers he really seeks for dealing with this world and promises him a most lush and eternal paradise of Allah once he leaves it. And leaving this world in perfect submission as the foot-soldier of the paradise’s creator gives the faithful unimaginably glorious sensual eternal reward in his next life. It’s a bargain that some buy in whole, some in part, some refuse and seek other means of dealing with their questions and the unrelenting existentialistic anxiety.

The great majority of jihadists emanate from the ranks of those born into the religion of Islam, simply because they are the ones who are most thoroughly indoctrinated and influenced by the Islamic dogma in their most receptive early years. Yet, there are others who embrace Islam in adulthood, on their own, and enlist themselves as devoted jihadists for the same rewards that Islam offers them.

Islam has a great advantage of the first call on the new arrival. It is an omnipresent system with masses of believers, mosques and madresehs, and a host of other social and economic organizations that overpower the person and steer him into the same fold; it is a sea of people who seem to know what they are all about, what life and death are all about, and what one must also do.

Within this sea of surging humanity composed of some 1.5 billion Muslims, each individual believer—a drop—through a combination of choice and forces beyond his control, ends up in one of its many waves. It is the jihadist wave that is highly attractive to the deeply-indoctrinated and poorly-adjusted in dealing rationally and independently with life. Here, he finds the iron-clad perfect solution to his anxieties and perplexities.

To a jihadist, death is nothing more than casting off a shell of the worthless earthly existence and donning the suit for winging joyously to the life of bliss promised by none-other than Allah’s beloved final emissary, Muhammad.

Eradication of jihadism is a daunting task, since Islam is truly a virulent persistent pandemic disease. Massive education efforts, combined with resolute confrontation of all sources and people that support and promote this deadly philosophy, hold the best promise of dealing effectively with this affliction of humanity.

In addition to the family, places such as mosques and madresehs, Islamic associations and charitable organizations, prisons, and the like are incubators of jihadists. Massive efforts are required, on the one hand, to drain the breeding swamps of the Islamic virus, while on the other hand helping Muslims adopt an alternative perspective of life that addresses their perplexities and offers a degree of comfort that religions dispense without pitting one segment of humanity against another.

In the monumental task of dealing with jihadism, every individual, group and government must combine their resources and energies to prevail. The destiny of the civilized life hangs in the balance. It is an unpardonable act of shirking responsibility for anyone to adopt the attitude of “let George do it.” George is you. George is I. George is every enlightened human being and organization that values human liberty and dignity.

Warning: The Jihadists are Mushrooming Inside America

Dr. Walid Phares It is unprecedented in American counterterrorism annals: in one day, the nation was dealing with three separate jihadist plots to blow up civilian and other targets inside the homeland. Although the cases were addressed at different time periods by the FBI and other agencies, nevertheless, the thickening web of terror attempts breached the crossing line of U.S. national security. This past week, authorities revealed three conspiracies by American jihadists: Michael C. Finton, a 29-year-old man who wished to follow the steps of American-born Taliban John Walker Lindh, was arrested after trying to detonate what he thought was a bomb inside a van outside a federal courthouse in Springfield, Illinois. Hosam Maher Husein Smadi, a 19-year-old Jordanian national, was arrested after placing what he believed was a bomb at a downtown Dallas skyscraper. But perhaps the most troubling case is of Afghan-born Najibullah Zazi, who set up shop in suburban Denver, scouting the Web and visiting beauty supply stores in a hunt for chemicals needed to build bombs for al Qaeda. Sources called the alleged plot one of the most significant terror threats to the U.S. since 9/11. Add to the list the North Carolina Jihad cell, led by Daniel Patrick “Saifullah” Boyd, which was planning on attacking civilian and military targets across the country. The immediate question being raised by an increasingly worried public regarding all of these terror cases is: are they all connected? While law enforcement and certainly judicial authorities proceed in a bottom up reasoning – that is, to build the case for a global connection between all what is happening with the help of legal evidence – analysts in the field of counterterrorism and conflict are already realizing the meaning of what is happening inside America. In my book Future Jihad: Terrorist Strategies against America (2005-2006), I clearly projected that jihadists, individuals and cells will be mushrooming and expanding inside the United States within few years from that writing and that they would do precisely what they are trying to do now. I also projected how large a group they will become with time. It was a simple deduction: if the government doesn’t counter this ideological growth, jihadists will keep coming. And in fact, they are coming, spreading crossing the barriers of ethnicities, races, nationalities and geographical frontiers. The jihadists are committed to harming the U.S., and are now based inside our borders by the hundreds. When I suggested this fact on CNN in 2006, and reiterated it on Oprah Winfrey’s show so that the public would realize what is to come, I raised a few eyebrows. Now, unfortunately, we are discovering the cells of jihadism in our cities and little towns and sadly, the expectation is that we will see more. We may not be able to stop them all from reaching their goals. The North Carolina cell, the New York subway plot, the Dallas attempt, the Illinois case, and the previous cases of the shooting of a soldier in Arkansas, the New York cells, Georgia’s young jihadists (all the way back to the infamous Virginia paintball network). If anything gives us the genome of what is morphing inside the country – a vast body of dispersed cells with at least one binding force – the jihadi ideology. We must find out who is propagating the doctrines of jihadism: who is funding it; who is protecting the indoctrination operation which leads naturally to the rise of homegrown or foreign linked jihad, lone wolves or packs of jihadist terrorists. That is the real question: where is the factory? What should the U.S. government do? It must first face the threat and lead the nation against it. This is not a matter of just local police or law enforcement efforts. President Obama and Congressional leaders from both parties must give this spreading plague a top priority. For if one of these groups is successful, our national economy will crumble again, or at least will be wounded even more severely – not to mention the human consequences of terror. Americans are watching these terror plots being revealed with great concern. They expect their elected officials to address these fears before the worst happens. FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Dr Walid Phares is the author of The Confrontation: Winning the War against Future Jihad. He is the Director of the Future Terrorism Project at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a visiting scholar at the European Foundation for Democracy. He also serves as a Co-Secretary General of the Trans Atlantic Legislative Group on Counterterrorism.