The very day that homegrown jihadist Edward Archer fired 13 shots at Philadelphia Police Officer Jesse Hartnett, New York City was settling two long-standing suits with Muslim individuals and organizations challenging the legality of the City’s intelligence and surveillance programs vis-à-vis the Muslim community.
While New York refused to acknowledge any liability arising from its counterjihadist programs, the NYPD agreed to scrub from its website a groundbreaking 2007 analysis published by two senior analysts in its intelligence unit, Radicalization in the West [download it before it’s gone], that represents one of the most clear-eyed and sober publicly disclosed analyses of the jihadist threat.
Radicalization in the West, Page 75.
Eerily but tellingly, it provides a model of how an American goes from “pre-radicalization” to “jihadization” that matches perfectly the story and profile of the aforementioned Archer, and it argues that the chief animator of jihadists is theo-political Islamic supremacist ideology — something our national security establishment maddeningly and disastrously continues to ignore and/or deny.
The NYPD will not only purge what appears to be a valuable piece of analysis as a means of placating the Muslim community, but it has also agreed not to use the analysis to open or extend ongoing investigations.
I write about this politically-motivated travesty of a decision in a new piece at City Journal titled See No Islam, Hear No Islam.
Featured Image Source: PhillyVoice.
Father George William Rutler has written a piece over at the Catholic Crisis Magazine worthy of the West’s attention, and therefore consequently unlikely to get it in these times of willful blindness and unblissful ignorance.
In it, he pens a critical passage linking the prescient poet Rudyard Kipling to the persecuted Christians of the Middle East [emphasis mine]:
[O]ne still might echo Rudyard Kipling: “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet.” The Chaldean Catholic archbishop of Mosul, Amel Shumoun Nona, has warned from exile in Kurdistan: “Our sufferings today are a prelude to what even European and Western Christians will incur in the near future. Your liberal and democratic principles here (in the Middle East) are not worth anything. You need to rethink our reality in the Middle East because you are receiving in your countries, an increasing number of Muslims. You too are at risk. You have to take strong and courageous decisions, at the cost of contradicting your principles. You think that men are all the same. It is not true. Islam does not say that all men are equal. Your values are not their values. If you do not understand in time, you will become victims of the enemy you have welcomed into your home.”
East is East and West is West. Yet the Wise Men in their wisdom outwitted King Herod and such wisdom, mated with self-neglectful virtue, melts all physical and ideological boundaries with a charity that gives hope to the most helpless. That is why Kipling continued with his ballad:
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!
Jews have served as the historical canary in the coal mine of Western civilization, with the nation of Israel today’s first line of defense against Islamic tyranny.
But the unheeded cries of persecuted Christians in the Middle East are a harrowing reminder that Islamic supremacism’s enemy is Judeo-Christianity in toto.
We’re all infidels now, and indeed have been for all time.
There is a slow-motion global jihad being waged against us all, and we ignore the Islamic supremacist ideology that animates its soldiers abroad and at home at our own peril and to our own great detriment.
Here’s a taste of my latest at The Federalist, in which I question why Yale University is taking $10 million from a jihadi-tied Saudi billionaire to build an Islamic (read: Sharia) Law center that propagates an ideology under which Yale itself could not exist:
While America remains financially and militarily the mightiest nation on Earth, it is losing the war Islamic supremacism is waging against her because it is chiefly an ideological one. We have the strength to defend ourselves, but we lack the knowledge and the will to defeat our enemies. We are morally relativistic and therefore unable to acknowledge that different peoples are different and that not all ideologies are equal or seek the same ends.
But people like Saleh Kamal surely understand us. In the conquest ideology inherent to Sharia—Islam compels Muslims to extend the Islamic sphere, the ummah, over all the world—America has found an enemy able to best take advantage of our deeply held freedoms. Sharia explicitly calls for the use of the very tactics against which America is most vulnerable.
As a consequence of our willful blindness (contrasted with Islamic supremacists’ comparable clarity), we are constructing Islamic law centers, inviting Muslims to immigrate by the hundreds of thousands without recognition that Hijra is a form of jihad, and, 14 years after 9/11, our top military minds are arguing that we back al-Qaeda against ISIS—that is, the newly “good jihadists” against the “bad jihadists.” For the coup de grace, we are actively aiding, abetting, and enabling Iran’s Twelver jihadist regime in its quest for nuclear domination of the Middle East and beyond.
Read the whole thing here.
Featured Image Source: YouTube Screengrab/Firing Line.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was understandably kept abreast of all manner of news from all over the world during her tenure as Secretary of State.
But buried amidst the thousands of emails recently released by the State Department is one news report of particular interest sent from top Clinton aide Huma Abedin.
Here is Abedin’s note:
Unclassified email from Huma Abedin to Hillary Clinton dated September 12, 2010 and released August 31, 2015. Doc No. C05772407.
This email begs the question: Why did Huma Abedin feel the need to bring the desecration of a Koran in East Lansing, MI to the attention of the Secretary of State?
Did Abedin feel that Clinton might be concerned about the news “inciting” attacks in America or abroad?
Might she have felt that such a story could be leveraged politically?
Was it just something Abedin as a Muslim found personally reprehensible, that she felt her confidant ought to be made aware of?
Actions like Koran-burning presumably would have been important to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, given her stated support for suppressing such activity.
As I noted elsewhere:
In an age of victimology, moral relativism and a supreme lack of confidence in Western Civilization, you get comments like this from senior military officials:
“In testimony on Capitol Hill this year, Lt. Gen. Vincent R. Stewart, the [Defense Intelligence] agency’s director, said sending ground troops back into Iraq risked transforming the conflict into one between the West and ISIS, which would be ‘the best propaganda victory that we could give.'”
Lt. Gen. Stewart’s statement fittingly comes from the Times’ exposé on the alleged politicization of intelligence estimates regarding our nation’s supposed military campaign against ISIS in Iraq.
The half-hearted effort against ISIS as dictated by President Obama — more political than substantive in nature — is a symptom of which Stewart’s demoralized mindset is part of the cause.
We are in a war in which Islamic supremacists are and have been fighting infidels worldwide for multiple decades, while the infidels cower.
We do not need to transform any conflict into one between the West and jihadists because the jihadists have already defined their war with us as such.
We are losing today to ISIS and to Islamic supremacism more broadly not so much because we lack the capability to destroy them
In the wake of the courageous takedown of a would-be (likely) jihadist on a Paris-bound train by three Americans, the New York Times published a piece on the Spanish mosque to which Ayoub El Khazzani belonged.
I think the following excerpt speaks for itself:
But while the authorities point to the mosque as a crucial part of Mr. Khazzani’s transformation from onetime petty hashish dealer to someone suspected of being a radical, Mr. Mohamed Ahmed said the preaching here was not to blame.
“Women are also allowed to pray here,” he said, “which certainly wouldn’t happen if this was a radical place.”
Methinks that Mr. Mohamed Ahmed is lacking in self-awareness.
Ahmed’s defense of Khazzani is perhaps even better:
According to the invaluable MEMRI, an Arab writer named Majed Hadib recently published an article in a PLO-affiliated publication in which he compared Hamas to Hitler and the Nazis.
In particular, he argues that the terrorist group’s tactics are going to lead those under its control to destruction akin to that of the Germans during WWII:
[Hamas’] measures resemble those taken by Hitler when he sought the permission of the Germans to lead Germany and its people towards years of glory. [However,] Hitler led Germany to collapse and division, after murdering, arresting and oppressing the German people. The laws he passed were meant to protect his regime on the one hand, and on the other hand to rally the people behind him and lead Germany towards the ‘glorious skies,’ as he called it. If Hamas continues to march on his path and try to rally the people around it without any comprehensive and unified national strategy, and under the pretext of letting the resistance win – it will lead our people to doom and to the end of its lengthy historic struggle, which is soaked in the blood of martyrs…
The author continues:
Hamas must understand now, before it is too late, that its adherence to the principle of attempting to eliminate the other, the steps it is taking to silence others, its increasing oppression of Palestinian national forces and of the people of Gaza, the legislation of the so-called ‘Mutual Responsibility [Tax] Laws’[2] and the taxation that preceded them, the restriction of general liberties… and the hobbling of all media that oppose its activity – all this will not cause the Palestinian people to rally behind it. This, because the Palestinian people is not a herd, but rather a people with a national cause [which has shown] creativity throughout its lengthy struggle. The attempts to eliminate the national forces of the Palestinian people or suppress them will not enable Hamas to lead [the Palestinians] to victory and to the establishment of a Palestinian state. Rather, [Hamas will lead them] where Hitler led the German people – namely to defeat and years-long destruction.
He concludes:
… Will Hamas learn a lesson and cease seeing the other components of the people as something that must be uprooted in order to strengthen [itself], under the pretext of ‘resistance’ and of leading the people towards victory? Or will it insist on following in Hitler’s footprints by levying taxes, legislating harsh laws, and taking increased security measures – [which] will lead the people to the brink of disaster and cause it to deteriorate for many years, even decades, has happened to Nazi Germany?
Now I grant that the rationale behind the comparison of Nazi Germany to Hamas-controlled Arab is not the one I would have made.
Hamas seeks the annihilation of the Jewish state of Israel, and I think that pretty much says it all. Not to mention the fact that we could loosely trace Hamas’ ideology to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini, one of Hitler’s close allies.
But given the comparison of Hamas to the Nazis, one wonders what ESPN would say.
In the case of current ESPN anchor and former pitching great Curt Schilling, he might have had a more compelling case than this Palestinian author, and his comment was far less pointed.
The image Schilling tweeted, deleted and paid for — with ESPN canceling his telecast assignment for the Little League World Series — made the comparison of Islamic supremacists to Nazis.
(Image Source: Twitter)
First, here’s my scorecard from last night:
Losers: Paul, Christie, Kasich, Trump, Bush Winners: Rubio, Huckabee, Middle: Walker, Cruz (though no fault of his own), Carson #GOPDebate
— Benjamin Weingarten (@bhweingarten) August 7, 2015
Now to the takeaways:
Perhaps it is naive to think that this matters in a world in which identity politics, sound bites and snark frequently trump all else, but I found the debate sorely lacking when it came to giving candidates the opportunity to expound upon their political philosophies.
As a proxy for this point, guess how many times the Constitution was raised during the debate?
In the case of the moderators, only once, on a question from Chris Wallace to Gov. Mike Huckabee regarding his belief in Constitutional amendments banning gay marriage and abortion.
Only Senators Cruz, Paul and Rubio even invoked the Constitution.
I understand we are living in the Roberts/Pelosi era, in which the Constitution is selectively applied when not treated as a mere piece of parchment, but come on.
I also understand that the moderators were likely more concerned with drilling the candidates on perceived weaknesses and/or questions that would elicit compelling and/or viral responses.
And it’s not lost on me that voters care most about how they are going to put food on the table, education and national security.
But for GOP primary voters, philosophy matters too.
Or perhaps I’m just an old fashioned conservative curmudgeon.
Was this calculated? Particularly interesting was that Sen. Rubio was not pushed at all on his support of the Gang of Eight immigration legislation even during a question explicitly about immigration.
That is, Sen. Rubio always comes across as polished, charismatic and likable. This is why in spite of his lagging poll numbers to date, if I were a betting man — as someone who will work to be perceived as the most “conservative” (in spite of his support of “Chuck Schumer’s” Gang of Eight Bill as Sen. Ted Cruz deftly put it), “electable” candidate, who it is thought can pull in Hispanic votes (rightly or wrongly) — I would bet that the party will ultimately throw its weight behind him for the nomination. Of course I would add all the usual caveats about how early we are in the campaign, the fact that there is likely opposition research to be leveled at him (looking at you Gov. Bush), etc. It will be interesting to see how the poll numbers shift in the coming days, and where Rubio’s support comes from as he rises.
He’s a very good speaker, no doubt honed by his time in elective office and at Fox News. He is also no conservative beyond his Christian bona fides and solid foreign policy rhetoric. Nevertheless, Gov. Huckabee will likely have staying power through Iowa at the very least, which bodes poorly for Sen. Ted Cruz in particular, whose candidacy rests on being able to garner the support of Huckabee Evangelicals, Paul libertarians, Reagan conservatives and everyone else outside the “mushy middle.”
Nevertheless, he was on point when questioned, and was interestingly given some layup questions after the tired “Why are you tearing the country/party apart?” One wonders if his strategy is to simply state that he is the most conservative candidate as indicated by his efforts in the Senate, while letting the other candidates rumble until the field is whittled down and he can start making dramatic surgical strikes.
The Boston Globe published a column in the wake of the shooting of an Islamic State-linked jihadist from Rosindale, Massachusetts that is a quintessential example of why the West is losing to Islamic supremacists.
In “Are Boston terrorism cases a trend?” two Globe authors reach out to several “antiterrorism specialists” and ask why it is that Boston appears to be so “vulnerable to violent extremism.”
Some submit that Boston’s “emergence as an international hub may leave it exposed to strains of radicalized behavior.”
Others find the existence of Boston-based jihadists curious given these jihadists “cannot be traced to one network, and individuals and groups do not appear to be connected.”
One such expert who has written on the Islamic State, J.M. Berger, acknowledges that “There is some degree of social network here that seems to be involved in radical thought.”
Halfway through the Globe article, the reader is left utterly unaware of any link between Boston jihadists and…jihadism. In fact, readers will not find the word “jihadist” in the column.
What readers do see is the lexicon of our see-no-Islam national security establishment, including euphemisms such as “violent extremism,” “homegrown terrorist,” and “radical presence.”
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