Friday, April 26, 2013
Thursday, April 25, 2013
Why Muslims Kill
Why Muslims Kill
by DANIEL GREENFIELD
The murderer is the new celebrity. He emerges out of nowhere with a rags to mass murder story, and is swiftly accorded all the trappings of fame. Reporters track down anyone who knew him to learn about his childhood and his main influences. Relatives and friends both contribute fuzzy anecdotes, mostly indistinguishable from the ones they would present if he were competing on American Idol or running for president.
The disaffected form fan clubs around him. The experts discuss what his rise to fame means. Books are written about him and then perhaps a movie. And then it ends and begins all over again.
The Tsernaev brothers, the living one and the dead one, are already receiving that treatment. Like most murderers they have already become more famous than their victims. More famous than the rescuers. The original Tamerlane is better known than any of his countless victims. The new one is already eclipsing his victims. Before long one of those Chechen bards whose videos he tagged into his playlist on YouTube will write a ballad about the Boston massacre and the circle will be complete.
That ballad, murderous and vile, will still be more honest than most of the media coverage about the two Chechen Muslims has been. The media's coverage is weighed down by its old fetish of murder as celebrity. The media covers murderers and celebrities in the same way. It writes exhaustively about them, but rarely meaningfully. The murderer, like the celebrity, is famous for being famous. And fame clips context and suppresses meaning. It becomes its own reference. A thing is famous for being known. It is known for being famous. It enters the common language as a reference. A metaphor.
In the case of the Tsernaevs, the surface coverage, the endless rounds of interviews with friends and relatives, with anyone who ever met them or retweed them, is mandatory because it avoids the more difficult question of why they killed.
The better news outlets answer with convenient terms like "radicalization" or "self-radicalization" and much of the public, primed to react to meaningless political jargon as if it had meaning, will think that they understand. A radical, they know, is a bad person, except for a brief period when surfers and ninja turtles could use it and still be good people. They don't quite know why that is, but they also don't know why high debt is good for the economy or why Islam is a religion of peace.
Radical and extremist are convenient terms for dismissing people and subjects without discussing them. Mental shortcuts like that can be convenient. No one really wants to spend every waking moment debating the people who think that the moon landing was faked or that we are ruled over by miniature T-Rex's who somehow look just like people. But when the body count gets high enough, dismissing it as extremism or radicalism doesn't hold up. The question must be discussed.
The experts point to foreign policy, but Muslim violence began a thousand years before the United States existed as an independent political entity. The younger Tsernaev sibling scrawled something about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, prompted or unprompted, but Iraq is yesterday's news and America is in Afghanistan because of the Muslim attacks of September 11. We can keep retracing every event and connecting it to a prior event, but the constraints of history will swiftly take us back to before Independence Hall, Columbus and for that matter the English language.
If we are to flounder looking around for a first cause, we must either fetch up against the founding of Islam or try to make a case for Islamic violence predating Islam. Neither is very tenable. Dzhokhar can claim that he and his brother were defending Islam by murdering an 8-year-old, Hitler claimed that he was defending Germany by invading Poland and Japan is still waiting around for South Korea to thank it for protecting it from Western imperialism.
Prisons are full of 300 pound men who beat their 90 pound wives to death in self-defense and spree killers who felt bullied and misunderstood and defended themselves with killing sprees. The kind of evil we see in movies, the serial killer who gleefully whisper about demonic pacts and the joy of killing, are a rarity. Even human monsters are human. They explain things in terms of their egos. They are always defending themselves against some form of oppression and looking for someone to sympathize with their outrage.
Muslim terrorists are no different. The Taliban just poisoned a girls school as part of their campaign to defend Afghanistan from women who can read and write. Hamas fired an anti-tank missile at an Israeli school bus in defense of Palestine. Tamerlan Tsarnaev put down a bomb next to an 8-year-old boy in defense of Islam.
Islam, as one of the great world religions, has a long history of needing to be defended against small boys, blind female poets and elderly cartoonists. Sometimes Muslims have to defend Islam against each other, the way they are now doing in Syria. Other times defending Islam requires demolishing its archeological sites, the way that the Saudis are doing. Either way defending Islam is difficult work.
Everyone in a war usually claims to be defending against something. But the younger Tsarnaev was not really angry about Afghanistan or Iraq. He wasn't defending them. He was defending Islam. If you want to defend Afghanistan, then all you have to do is board a plane to Pakistan and then make the right contacts and find your way across the border to join a band of likeminded fellows fighting to defend your new country from women who can read. But to defend Islam, you can stay at home in Boston and kill little boys.
What is this thing called Islam? We can call it a religion, but that doesn't tell us much. Defining religion is a famously tricky affair. The bombmaking instructions in Al Qaeda's Inspire magazine begin by telling the would-be defender of Islam that the key ingredient in building a pressure cooker bomb, like the one used at the Boston Marathon, is trust in Allah. There is a kind of faith in that, but it's more like the kind of prayer you expect to hear Jeffrey Dahmer or Charles Manson utter to a god that they made in their own murderous image. Serial killers praying to a patron deity of serial killers to help them murder little boys in defense of a religion whose faith is in the murder of little boys.
But the whole thing need not be all that mysterious. Western man spent much of the last century threatening to fight to the death over the political and economic system that he would live under. Dispense with the label of religion and the sight of two angry young men setting off bombs in an American city is not all that alien. Neither is their motive.
There are two Islams that we can conceive of; the private and the public. It is it not difficult to see which of these the Tsarnaevs were defending. Despite the morbid fantasies of the real Islamophobia industry, practiced by CAIR and the left, no one was holding down either of the brothers and shoving pork in their mouths or forbidding them from reading the Koran. The government has carved out broad swaths of entitlements for Islamic religion in a country where Iftar is celebrated in the White House and the Department of Justice sues any store that thinks twice of frowning at a Hijab.
It's the public Islam that Tamerlan and Dzhokhar were defending. The private Islam forbids Muslims to eat pork or drink liquor The public Islam bars pork or liquor from being sold. The private Islam tells women to cover their hair. The public Islam establishes an entire system of police and judges to compel them to cover their hair.
Western liberals like to think of Islam as a private religion, in the tradition of most of its extant religions, but it isn't. Islam cannot function for very long as a private religion just as Communism could not function for very long as a private experiment on a few communal farms. It is an all or nothing system. Its fundamental expression is public. In private, it withers and dies.
The private Islam need not be defended with bombs. The public Islam must be. And as with so many totalitarian systems, when it speaks of freedom, it means slavery, when it talks of peace, it means war, and when it claims defense, it means attack.
Why did Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev detonate bombs at the Boston Marathon? They were engaged in an old disagreement over political systems. Terrorists of the left set off bombs to force a political revolution. Their Islamist fellow-travelers are doing the same thing. Dig away enough of the trappings of the celebrity murderer and you come to the ideas buried underneath all the rubble.
The Tsarnaevs are not the first terrorists to kill Americans in the name of a political idea. If they are radicals and extremists, than so are the likes of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. What difference is there between the radicals who detonated bombs to impose the rule of the left and those who detonate bombs to impose the rule of Islam?
When it comes to the Weather Underground, the media is eager to discuss their ends, but not their
means. And when it comes to the Tsarnaevs, the media will discuss their means, but not their ends. Dealing with the violence of the left would only make the left look bad. And dealing with the agenda of the terrorists would make the left's plan for a multicultural society seem unworkable. It would make it clear that terrorism is not random, but a violent means of imposing an idea. And it is the idea that is the issue.
If we are going to discuss Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, let us spend a little less time on their endless parade of relatives and former friends, and a little more time on the idea in whose defense they chose to kill and maim so many. Let us discuss Islam, not just as an abstract idea, but as a concrete political system. Let us discuss it the way that we discuss the plans and platforms of the Republican and Democratic parties. Let us look at Saudi Arabia, at Pakistan and at the new Egypt to see what this thing that the terrorists would like to impose on us is.
Despite thousands dead, a searching examination of that sort is exactly what the media would like to avoid. It does not want another "Better Red than Dead" or "Better Dead than Red" debate. It wants us to speak of foreign policy as an isolated American act and of random violence as arising from thin air. It does not want us to understand the nature of the struggle. It does not want us to know why we die. It is determined to keep from us the reason why Muslims kill.
Al Qaeda and Iran - The Unlikely Partnership
The article comes from DAWN.
Iran’s unlikely Al Qaeda ties fluid, murky and deteriorating
When Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri spoke in an audio message broadcast to supporters earlier this month, he had harsh words for Iran. Its true face, he said, had been unmasked by its support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad against fighters loyal to Al Qaeda.
Yet it is symptomatic of the peculiar relationship between Tehran and Al Qaeda that in the same month Canadian police would accuse “Al Qaeda elements in Iran” of backing a plot to derail a passenger train.
Shia Muslim Iran and strict Sunni militant group Al Qaeda are natural enemies on either side of the Muslim world’s great sectarian divide.
Yet intelligence veterans say that Iran, in pursuing its own ends, has in the past taken advantage of Al Qaeda fighters’ need to shelter or pass through its territory. It is a murky relationship that has been fluid and, say some in the intelligence community, has deteriorated in recent years.
“I wouldn’t even call it a marriage of convenience. It’s an association of convenience,” said Richard Barrett, former head of counter-terrorism for Britain’s MI6 Secret Intelligence Service and later head of the UN Security Council’s monitoring team maintaining the world body’s Al Qaeda and Taliban sanctions blacklists.
“It’s not a strategic alliance. An Al Qaeda presence may suit the Iranians because it allows them to keep an eye on them, it gives them leverage in the form of people who are akin to hostages,” he added.
“There has been a lot of travel between Iraq and Pakistan and I cannot imagine the Iranians are not aware of that,” he said. But it was unlikely that Iran would take the risk of actively collaborating with Al Qaeda against North America: “I don’t think the Iranians would take it kindly if it turned out that there had been plotting by Al Qaeda on their territory.”
Canadian police have said there was no sign the plot had been sponsored by the Iranian state. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said Al Qaeda’s beliefs were in no way consistent with Tehran’s.
As yet, many details of the alleged plot remain unclear. However, a US government source cited a network of Al Qaeda fixers based in the Iranian city of Zahedan, close to the borders of both Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The source said they served as go-betweens, travel agents and financial intermediaries for Al Qaeda operatives and cells operating in Pakistan and moving through the area.
Another Western source suggested that with relations deteriorating between Iran and Al Qaeda over the civil war in Syria, Tehran had acted recently to stop fighters crossing through from Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) to join Islamist militants fighting to overthrow Assad.
“Although the relationship between Iran and Al Qaeda has always been strained, this worsened after 2011 when the two sides lined up on opposite sides in the Syrian civil war,” said Shashank Joshi, a researcher at the Royal United Services Institute think-tank in London.
“Syria’s strongest rebel group is allied to Al Qaeda, and both have sharply criticised Iranian support for the Assad regime.”
It is unclear whether the planning for the alleged Canadian plot, which Canadian police said had been in the works for some time, was carried out before Syria’s war deepened the strain between Tehran and Al Qaeda.
“There has been a loosening of the ties,” said Barrett, noting that documents released after US forces caught and killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011 showed the Al Qaeda leader saying he was not able to trust the Iranians at all.
“Since then we have Zawahri castigating Iran quite recently. So clearly something had gone wrong.”
Iranian control far from clear
If indeed the Al Qaeda network was based in and around Zahedan — which lies on the main road to Pakistan and is the capital of Sistan-Baluchestan province — it is far from clear how easy it would be for Iran to control.
The region is home to a toxic mix of drug smuggling, illicit trade and gun-running by insurgents. Afghan refugees long ago crowded into poor neighborhoods on the outskirts of Zahedan, although Iran, like Pakistan, periodically tries to push them out, arguing they are a security risk.
Iranian authorities have also been battling a Sunni insurgency of their own in recent years by ethnic Baloch complaining of discrimination. The Jundollah group has claimed several attacks including a bombing that killed 42 people in 2009 — there is no sign it is linked to Al Qaeda, though it is often confused with a Pakistan-based group of the same name.
At the same time, on the Pakistan side of the border, Pakistani security forces are fighting an insurgency by secular Baloch separatists, while Al-Qaeda linked militants in the Sunni sectarian Lashkar-i-Jhangvi group have carried out a string of attacks against the Shia population there.
Pragmatic approach
Despite a common Western misconception that Iran, as the pre-eminent Shia power, is motivated by religion, it has always been much more pragmatic in pursuing its national interest, analysts and diplomats say, allowing it to turn a blind eye to Sunni Al Qaeda using its territory.
“The thing that has stymied people is that ‘Al Qaeda is Sunni and the rest of the people we are talking about here are Shia. They don’t mix and match.’ Well, they do. And they do it whenever they want to. They just look the other way,” said Nick Pratt, a retired US Marines colonel and CIA officer now with the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies.
Before the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Iran cooperated with India and Russia against the Pakistan-backed Taliban then in power in Kabul. When Al Qaeda members fled Afghanistan after the overthrow of the Taliban, it detained them under house arrest in Tehran.
“Since 9/11 a number of senior Al Qaeda figures including one of Osama bin Laden’s sons and senior commander and strategist Saif al Adel made their way to Iran,” said Nigel Inkster, former director of operations for Britain’s MI6.
“They were detained under quite strict conditions by the Iranian authorities who subsequently sought to use them as a bargaining chip with the US government in their ongoing dispute about Iran’s nuclear program,” added Inkster, who is now director of Transnational Threats and Political Risk at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Vahid Brown, a US-based researcher who has written extensively on Al Qaeda, said in an article on the Jihadica website earlier this year that the men who fled to Iran constituted a dissident faction within Al Qaeda, which in recent years had become increasingly vocal in their criticism of Osama and Zawahiri.
Divided by their views on the advisability of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, broadly speaking, “the pro-9/11 group, including bin Laden and Zawahiri, fled to Pakistan, while the anti-9/11 group ended up in Iran, where they were placed under house arrest by Iranian authorities,” he wrote.
Iran had been willing to cooperate with the United States on Afghanistan initially, but relations soured after Tehran was denounced by then President George W. Bush as part of the “axis of evil” in 2002 and worsened further after the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Later, analysts say, Tehran allowed Al Qaeda members — among them Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — to transit through Iran.
But Iran has been vulnerable to Al Qaeda as well. After one of its diplomats was kidnapped in Pakistan some years ago it released some of the Al Qaeda members it had under house arrest in exchange for his freedom, according to Pakistani media reports.
“About 18 months ago the Iranians released most if not all of those they were holding, for reasons still not entirely clear,” said Inkster.
“There may well be a residual AQ presence in Iran though I would be cautious about presenting it as something very structured or hierarchic,” he added.
“AQ is far from being the organisation it once was and what matters more are relationships between like-minded individuals. And that may well be what we are seeing in the Canada case. There seems to be no evidence of Iranian official involvement.”
Wednesday, April 24, 2013
CAIR Tries To Bridge Relationships Between Americans and Muslims By Calling Adam Carolla an "Islamophobe"
If you say the Qur'an preaches violence, you're an islamophobe according CAIR. If you make the claim that 90% of the world's terror attacks are committed by Muslims, you're an islamophobe according to CAIR. If you point out that Muslim clerics daily ask for "death to America", you're an islamophobe according to CAIR. So when CAIR decided to call Adam Carolla an islamophobe after his appearance on Fox News, well, I guess it's kind of lost its punch now hasn't it?
The story comes from The Daily Caller via The Religion of Peace.
CAIR attacks Adam Carolla for ‘Islamaphobia’
The Council on American Islamic Relations, a Muslim advocacy organization known for its strong-armed tactics to stifle criticism, took issue Tuesday with comments comedian Adam Carolla made on “The O’Reilly Factor.”
In his appearance Monday, Carolla pointed out that some religions cause more problems than others and that Islamic terrorism is not something to be understood.
“You know, this whole thing of — and it has been going on throughout time, what did we do to offend them? We must have done something to offend these people. Why do they hate us so much? Why are they bullying us up? Perhaps, if we play nice with them, they will stop doing this,” Carolla said, describing the idea of self-doubting appeasement.
“They hate our culture,” he explained. “They hate our way of life. They hate the fact that our women’s boobies get bigger, our cars get longer, our swimming pools get deeper and we’re building skyscrapers and bridges. And Allah is supposed to take care of all this decadence but Allah never does. So they take it upon their hands to do it themselves. And we act like, ‘Well, if just make friends with them, then maybe, they’ll back off.’ They’re not going to back off as long as we’re enjoying our decadent life.”
Tuesday, CAIR National tweeted out The Daily Caller’s article highlighting Carolla’s appearance claiming that it represents Islamophobia.
Later in the day Tuesday, CAIR issued a press release claiming there has been a “wave of of inflammatory anti-Muslim rhetoric following the Boston Marathon bombings and the revelation that the suspects in the case are Muslim.” The group highlighted a series of television appearances and statements in which Islam was painted in a poor light — including statements made by columnist Ann Coulter, Democratic pundit Bob Beckel, New York Republican Rep. Peter King, Carolla and others
“We believe it is a positive sign that the vast majority of Americans have rejected the type of guilt by association advocated by extremist commentators seeking to exploit the tragic events in Boston to further their personal agendas,” CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad said in a statement. “As a nation, we have learned to judge a person based on their actions, not on their faith or ethnicity.”
Ignoring Islamism at Our Own Peril
Ignoring Islamism at Our Own Peril
The terror attacks in Boston, perpetrated by the Tsarnaev brothers, have finally come to an end with the capture of the younger brother Dzhoakhar in Watertown on Friday evening. One hopes that Dzhoakhar survives just long enough to tell us whether he was working with any foreign or domestic Islamist groups before he hopefully meets the same fate of his victims. Our nation will certainly be resilient, and we cannot let terrorists achieve their goals of unraveling our society.
Perhaps Boston’s terror may finally be the impetus to begin the long overdue process of retooling America’s current counterterrorism strategies. Since 9-11, except for the Fort Hood massacre, we have been fortunate enough to avoid the kind of devastation and loss of life that we saw this week in Boston.
That was certainly not for a lack of trying by our enemies, with over 300 arrests on terrorism charges since 9-11. Of these, over 80 percent were Islamists. I’ve said it before — after 9-11, after Fort Hood and after Times Square, this is a Muslim problem that needs a Muslim solution.
The Tsarnaev brothers prove that the current Homeland Security “whack-a-mole” strategy is severely limited and rather flawed. The United States must address head-on the ideology of political Islam, which is the root cause of Islamist terrorism.
As details emerge about the identity and ideologies of the Tsarnaev brothers, it should quickly become clear that these individuals did not go to sleep one night normal American Muslims and wake up the next day Al-Qaeda jihadists putting together pressure-cooker bombs.
Their pathway towards radicalization will now be obvious to those who honestly connect the dots in retrospect. Far more important now is that leading reform-minded American Muslims, along with the U.S. government, the media and academe, begin to confront and dissect the early stages of radicalization (Islamism), not just the last one (violent extremism).
Despite our devotion to our faith, I and other leading anti-Islamist Muslims were vilified by Muslim Brotherhood legacy groups in America, along with their choir on the left, for participating in Representative Peter King’s (R., N.Y.) hearing in Congress on American Muslim radicalization and the central role of Islamism.
I believe history will show Chairman King’s hearings to be prescient. I was also vilified by those same groups for my role in narrating the Clarion Project's documentary The Third Jihad, which happened to open with an illustrative scene from the terror in Beslan, Russia, in September 2004, when militant Chechnyan Islamists killed 334 civilians, 186 of them children, after a two-week standoff.
The 2008 documentary was about the threat of militant Islamism to the West and the need for anti-Islamist Muslims to counter that threat. How many attacks like that suffered by the people of Boston this week must we see before we recognize the need to drill down against the separatism of the global movement of political Islam and their dreams of an Islamic state?
Though these two brothers may have acted like regular American youth to unsuspecting neighbors -- participating in sports, attending public schools and hailing from neighborhoods in the Boston community -- at some point they were taken in by the ideology of political Islam, which, like an intoxicating drug, lured them down the path of separatist Islamism and its common endpoint of militant jihadism against both non-Islamist Muslims and non-Muslim societies.
We at the American Islamic Forum for Democracy hope that our nation can begin to awaken from the anesthetic belief that we are simply fighting the nebulous threat of “violent extremism” to the fundamental realization that we need to counter early on the identifiable infection of Islamism that penetrates the mind of susceptible Muslim youth.
The struggle between Western and Islamist ideologies rips to the core of a young Muslim’s identity. This is what I confront head on in my book A Battle for the Soul of Islam: An American Muslim Patriot’s Fight to Save His Faith. Our nation must develop a robust “liberty doctrine” that acknowledges this battle both at home and abroad.
Since the FBI actually interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011, it will also be important to unravel in this case how the administration determines who actually poses an ideological risk for radicalization. As our diverse American Islamic Leadership Coalition (AILC) of anti-Islamist Muslim organizations in North America wrote in 2011, to date the administration has been unwilling to even recognize that there is an identifiable ideological threat.
Instead its strategy relies on the meaningless phrase “violent extremism,” or, in the case of Major Nidal Hasan’s Fort Hood massacre, “workplace violence.”
While these brothers were immigrants from Chechnya, they were not recent immigrants. It appears from their YouTube and Facebook pages that their Islamism was nurtured in just the past few years, after they had been in the U.S. for some time.
So their radicalization was likely less about Chechnya than it was about the transnational Islamist supremacism that they brought with them. Tamerlan’s trip to Russia may ultimately reveal some indoctrination or training. Most likely, as we see the clues so far, is that they became obsessed with “Muslim victimhood” and became estranged from the America they had embraced to only fill that vacuum with militant Islamist hatred and supremacism.
This supremacism often originates from Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi or Salafist ideologues, now positioned around the world and in social media. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, for example, had lauded the radical sermons of Feiz Muhammad out of Australia. On his Facebook page he described his own world view as “Islam,” which is synonymous with the Islamist desire to create theocratic Islamic states and a global neo-Caliphate. This is also code for the ultimate defeat of non-Islamic-majority nations by the ascent of Islamist states.
To jihadists, terror is a tool against societies that they dehumanize in order to disrupt their harmony and economy. Through terrorism, they can also make the West less comfortable or attractive for liberal Muslims, making it much easier for them to win this battle within the House of Islam. Their narrative is not new.
Brothers like this, despite outward appearances of being “normal Americans,” never actually bought into the idea of Americanism and a truly pluralist society. We’ve seen it before in Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square bomber, and so many of the other radicalized jihadists found since 9-11 on our soil.
Even in Boston itself, a quick look at various competing Muslim and non-Muslim narratives finds the arrest and conviction of Tarek Mahenna — a recent, important teachable moment. In April 2012 the MIT graduate and pharmacist received more than 17 years in prison for aiding Al-Qaeda. His arrest, trial and conviction were reviled by the left and Islamist groups alike including the bizarre New York Times op-ed “A Dangerous Mind?” Just see the FreeTarek.com website for a virtual clinic into how the soil of Muslim victimization is tilled.
An obsessive mindset of “Muslims as victims” rather than as Americans is how many of these radical Islamists start. Put another way, Muslims are indoctrinated by many Muslim Brotherhood legacy groups and the like in the West to sympathize with the grievances and supremacist identity of the transnational theo-political movements of political Islam.
Notice the brothers’ aunt and parents in Canada and Russia, who were brimming to the media with conspiracy theories and excuses. But then, as many point out, the Islamists of Chechnya have been fueled for decades by radicalization from Salafi and Wahhabi ideas brought in by Saudi masters. Russia’s authoritarian and repressive response to entire swaths of Muslims in Chechnya certainly didn’t help empower moderate Muslims to defeat the radicals.
In A Battle for the Soul of Islam I dissect how my own patriotic upbringing in the Midwest, as the son of Syrian expatriates, taught me that I could practice my faith more freely in America than any where else in the world.
I was raised with the sense that my primary allegiance was always to America and its fabric of Americanism, which can be realized only through a rejection of “Islamism” and its ideology. The idea of liberty must be nurtured within the Muslim consciousness in order to inoculate youth against the ideology of Islamism. This requires Muslim leaders who both believe in the separation of mosque and state and reject the “Islamic state.”
Until most Muslims begin to harness our resources and our efforts to counter the ideology of Islamism and its attraction of vulnerable American Muslim youth and its pathway towards jihadization, we will continue to see youth ages 13 and up turn against us. The “morphine” of jihadism numbs their identity and drives them to destroy free societies. It infects them, dehumanizes their fellow Americans and instructs them to commit acts of terrorism against their own — Muslim and non-Muslim alike.
As is often the case with Islamists, their radicalization is preceded by misogyny and a learned behavior that dehumanizes women and then all those who seek to be free. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was arrested in 2009 for assault and battery against his girlfriend.
The warning signs in these two youths were obvious. But as a society that refuses to engage Islamism, we ignored them at our own peril.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)