06/9/15

America’s See-No-Islam Problem Exposed With Boston Jihadism

By: Benjamin Weingarten
TheBlaze

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.”

Somewhat closer to the mark are comments of James Forest, director of security studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell’s Center for Terrorism and Security Studies, who says: “The ideology that motivates these kind of attacks, there are no geographical boundaries.”

What this “ideology” is, the reader is left to guess.

Usamma Rahim was wielding a knife when he was shot by Boston police. Rahim had planned to attack “boys in blue” according to his intercepted communications. (Source: WCVB-TV)

Next quoted in the piece is Farah Pandith, the first special representative to Muslim communities in then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s State Department.

Pandith asserts that Muslim millennials are “asking questions that parents aren’t answering. The loudest voices seducing these kids are extremists.”

Pandith notes that “extremism” is not so much a matter of geography as “what’s happening in virtual space around the world.”

As for the “seductive” “extremist” voices and the impact of social networks, of course the young and impressionable can be brainwashed, but what are they being brainwashed in, and who is doing the brainwashing? Should not these millennials and their parents be both rejecting as well as rooting out this ideology from their communities altogether?

Some experts seem to recognize an ideological component to what we have seen in Boston – an Islamic supremacist ideology that can proliferate wherever computers or cell phones are found, that thrives especially in tight-knit Muslim communities in free Western countries — yet they cannot bring themselves to define this ideology.

Credit: Steven Coughlin

Juliette Kayyem, another Obama administration official who served as Assistant Secretary for Intergovernmental Affairs in the Department of Homeland Security, is next given the floor.

Kayyem believes that Boston — which the columnists describe as a “global city that is diverse, tolerant, and welcomes immigrants and students” – is “a breeding ground for the disaffected to either radicalize or hide.”

Kayyem asserts that “We are going to see this kind of radicalization in any urban area globally.”

But do global cities become “breeding grounds[s] for the disaffected to either radicalize or hide” in a vacuum?

Throughout world history, international locales have been free of the scourge of “violent extremism,” a politically correct term used to avoid offending Muslims while simultaneously drawing moral equivalence with and thereby smearing “right-wing” Americans.

One would think that modern, cosmopolitan, liberal urban areas by their very nature would consist of modern, cosmopolitan, liberal people.

Only to the degree to which these global cities invite in people with retrograde views antithetical to these ideals does their diversity and tolerance make them “breeding grounds” for jihadism.

It is hard to fault the piece’s authors for quoting “mainstream” “antiterror experts.” Yet these “experts” all seem to subscribe to the very see-no-Islam philosophy that paralyzes our national security establishment more broadly, rendering us unable to defeat our enemy.

Parenthetically, the idea of an “antiterror” expert should itself draw our ire, given that terror is a tactic, not the name of an ideologically-driven enemy. After all, during the Second World War we didn’t call upon anti-Blitzkrieg experts to define our enemies. We understood and were able to articulate that we were at war with a foe, not a fighting method.

Meanwhile, today there is nary a mention of Islamic religious tenets like jihad, abrogation and taqqiya, nor a discussion of Islam’s ultimate goal to create a global Ummah under which all submit to Shariah law.

This is not an issue of semantics. If we fail to be precise in how we describe our enemy and its ideology, it will defeat us.

How did we get to a point over a decade after Sept. 11, 2001 when columnists writing about Boston jihadists dance on egg shells around the Islamic supremacist ideology that by the jihadists’ own admission animates them?

While Nazism and Communism were political ideologies, jihadists subscribe to a theo-political ideology based in Islam’s core texts and modeled on the behaviors of Muhammad.

This offends the sensibilities of Americans either ignorant of Islam or uncomfortable with the idea that religion could be used to justify the slow motion worldwide slaughter of Jews, Christians, Hindus, infidel Muslims, gays, women, apostates, cartoonists and others.

In the case of the recently killed would-be jihadist Usamma Rahim, a simple set of Google searches regarding Rahim and the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB) might have provided the Globe columnists and the antiterror experts they quote an illuminating fact pattern worth investigating in response to their question, “Is Boston more vulnerable to violent extremism than other parts of the country?”

Below are some of those relevant data points:

Usamma Rahim had been a security guard at the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center (ISBCC) in Roxbury, Massachusetts, an affiliate of the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB)
The ISB’s executive director pulled the ISBCC out of President Barack Obama’s own Countering Violent Extremism Summit, essentially deeming the program Islamaphobic
Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev prayed at the ISB’s Cambridge, Massachusetts mosque
Notwithstanding ISB denials, Tsarnaev had been the latest in a long line of jihadists linked to the organization:
The ISB was founded by Abdul Rahman al-Amoudi, a supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah currently serving a 23 year prison sentence on terrorism charges
ISB’s Cambridge mosque is operated by the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Muslim American Society
According to Discover the Networks, among other revelations:
“FBI surveillance documents show that two days before the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Suhaib Webb, Imam of ISB’s Boston mosque, joined al-Qaeda operative Anwar Awlaki in headlining a fundraiser on behalf of the Atlanta-based Muslim extremist Jamil al-Amin (formerly H. Rap Brown), who had recently murdered two police officers in Georgia.”
“Aafia Siddiqui, who occasionally prayed at ISB’s Cambridge mosque, was arrested in Afghanistan in 2008 while in possession of cyanide canisters and plans to carry out a chemical attack in New York City. Siddiqui subsequently tried to gun down some U.S. military officers and FBI agents, and is now serving an 86-year prison sentence for that offense.”
“Tarek Mehanna, who worshipped at ISB’s Cambridge mosque, received terrorist training in Yemen and plotted to use automatic weapons to inflict mass casualties in a suburban shopping mall just outside of Boston. In 2012 he was sentenced to 17 years in prison for conspiring to aid Al Qaeda.”
“Yasir Qadhi, who lectured at ISB’s Boston mosque in 2009 and again in 2012, advocates replacing American democracy with Sharia Law; characterizes Christians as “filthy” polytheists whose “life and prosperity … holds no value in the state of Jihad”; and accuses Jews of plotting to destroy Muslim peoples and societies. Further, Qadhi is an acolyte of Ali al-Timimi, a Virginia-based Imam who is currently serving life in prison for inciting jihad against U.S. troops in Afghanistan.”

The Boston Globe article is instructive because it represents the very line of thinking and questioning that is mandated in the halls of America’s national security institutions.

It is also instructive — in light of the facts about the ISB — that a see-no-Islam national security stance leads us to ignore the threats hiding in plain sight, to America’s great detriment.

Those who ignore the nature of the Islamic supremacist threat we face are doomed to submit to it.

12/17/14

The Compassion of the Religion of Peace is Fatal

By: Richard Cameron
Blasted Fools

One of the main issues that commenced my fallout with George W. Bush, was the incredible statement he made that “Islam is a religion of peace”. From that moment forward, I began to see the fiction of the ‘War On Terror’ in an entirely new light. There could be no war on terror if the ideology behind the terrorists was being redefined by the leader of the free world as something other than the vicious, hateful and divisive creed that it is.

It was my first, but not last clue that regards whatever war we were conducting – defeating terror and opposing the foundational beliefs inspiring it, wasn’t the object of our mission. If the Koran and the other related commentaries of Islam were dictating attacks on infidels and we weren’t at war with it, just what were we at war with?

Later, our government stripped away all pretense of such a purpose, by mothballing the expression ‘War on Terror’ altogether.

It’s interesting to hear apologists for Islam claim that hateful behavior of Muslims is not mainstream, but only from radical groups that have “hijacked the faith”. As a rationale for dismissing the likelihood that Islam contains within itself something inherently toxic, progressives will argue that the actions of certain individuals bombing abortion clinics, demonstrate that there are extremists in all religions.

The obvious problem with that argument is that if persons representing themselves as Christians committed even a tiny fraction of the number of barbaric acts that Muslims perpetrate, we would be inundated with reports of them in the mass media.

Islamic hate crimes are the statistical norm among the followers of that religion, whereas, sectarian crimes by Christians, Buddhists, Jews and Hindus are anomalies by comparison.

From Africa to Syria to Pakistan and Egypt and throughout the Islamic world, the conditions of fear and terror that Christians and other religious minorities live under on an hour to hour basis, defy imagination.

One can only read the testimonies of the survivors to begin to conceive of the atrocities committed by Islam’s faithful – and a full accounting of the thousands of such attacks would fill several volumes. What’s more, these would be in addition to the well publicized activities of the Islamic State.

According to one estimate, a Christian is martyred every five minutes. Of 50 countries where Christians are under attack, 42 have either a Muslim majority or have sizable Muslim populations. That would indicate to any reasonable observer that there is something in the Islamic ‘water’.

Most people have heard the accounts of school children in Nigeria abducted by the hundreds by the Islamic militant group Boko Haram. Garnering less publicity are the distressing accounts of ethnic cleansing being perpetrated by the group.

It was reported in August by Voice of the Martyrs that Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram beheaded a six-year-old boy on June 1 because he was a Christian. The attack occurred in Attagara, Gwoza district, Borno State – a predominately Christian community. Over 100 militants descended upon the village, slaughtering men, women, and children.

In this incident, a man named Sawaltha Wandala witnessed children being murdered on his way to church service. A six-year-old boy had been slashed and thrown into a ditch, but was alive. Wandala picked him up to carry him to a hospital in Cameroon, when he was confronted by a gang of terrorists. They took the child from Wandala, cut his head off then beat 55 year old Wandala and struck him over the head with a large stone, leaving him to die.

During another attack on Attagara, John Yakubu returned to his family’s home to gather their animals so his family wouldn’t starve in the refugee camp in Cameroon. He was spotted by Boko Haram members and taken captive.

“We know you’re John,” they said to him, according to Voice of the Martyrs. “You must convert to Islam or else you will die a painful death.” When Yakuba refused to denounce Christ, they tied his arms and legs to a tree, and hacked his hands with a knife.

“Can you become a Muslim now?” “You can kill my body, but not my soul,” Yakubu cried out. The men continued to cut his feet and back with a machete and knife to torture him. “We will show you.” Yakuba’s head was slashed, and an axe was driven into his knee, reaching the bone. He lost consciousness and was left tied to the tree for three days before someone found him, after which he was taken to the hospital in a coma.

In another incident, a teacher of a school for boys in Northeast Nigeria described the group’s killing of 29 young men. The militants locked the door of one dormitory where male students were sleeping and then set it ablaze, slitting the throats of those who tried to clamber out of windows and gunning down those who ran away, said teacher Adamu Garba.

Rape of Christian women and girls is widespread in Muslim countries such as Pakistan – one of America’s counterfeit ‘allies’. The attorney of one victim – a 12 year old, who was raped by a gang of Muslim men, describes the government’s collusion with Islamic criminals:

“In Pakistan rape is used as an instrument of arbitrary power over Christian girls, who come from poor and marginalized families. It is a form of violence that wants to reiterate the submission to Muslims. The rest of society is not outraged because the victims mostly belong to religious minorities, who are the most vulnerable. Rarely rapists are punished. Furthermore, rape victims face terrible difficulties; they do not receive adequate medical treatment for sexual assault. Many girls are traumatized and become depressed and in need of psychological assistance.”

No one, whether it be a Catholic nun, a small child, a baby, a young girl not yet in puberty, or the elderly – are spared the ferocity of hate and spiteful treatment from these denizens of Hell. Their targets are not limited to just those of the Christian faith. Jews, Hindus, Yazidis and others are subject to their wrath as well.

Kirsten Powers of USA Today recounts an interview with Human rights lawyer Nina Shea, in which Shea described the horror in Mosul . “(The Islamic State) took the Christians’ houses, took the cars they were driving to leave. They took all their money.

One old woman had her life savings of $40,000, and she said, ‘Can I please have 100 dollars?’, and they said no. They took wedding rings off fingers, chopping off fingers if they couldn’t get the ring off. “We now have 5,000 destitute, homeless people with no future,” Shea said. “This is a crime against humanity.”

The men of faith who have stood in the eye of the Islamic storm have a message to us in the West. Patriarch Ignace Joseph III Younnan, head of the Syrian Catholic Church in Lebanon, describes the campaign against Christians as religious cleansing:

“I want to tell American Christians to stand up, wake up and no longer be a silent majority. American-elected representatives need to stand up for their principles on which the U.S. has been founded: the defense of religious freedom … and respect for human rights.”

The exiled Chaldean Catholic archbishop of Mosul, Iraq, warned the West that its turn will come. Archbishop Amel Shimoun Nona, writes:

Our sufferings today are the prelude of those you, Europeans and Western Christians, will also suffer in the near future. I lost my diocese. The physical setting of my apostolate has been occupied by Islamic radicals who want us converted or dead. But my community is still alive.

Please, try to understand us. Your liberal and democratic principles are worth nothing here. You must consider again our reality in the Middle East, because you are welcoming in your countries an ever growing number of Muslims. Also you are in danger. You must take strong and courageous decisions, even at the cost of contradicting your principles.

You think all men are equal, but that is not true: Islam does not say that all men are equal. Your values are not their values. If you do not understand this soon enough, you will become the victims of the enemy you have welcomed in your home.

And Archbishop Nona’s warning has unfolded as reality in the U.K, America and in Europe, wherever followers of ‘The Prophet’ have migrated. Breitbart reports that school health services in the small Swedish city of Norrköping have found 60 cases of female genital mutilation (FGM) among schoolgirls since March, with evidence of mutilation found in all 30 girls in one class, 28 of the most severe form.

And in England, Muslim men have committed thousands of rapes of children which the public authorities have taken great pains to ignore and cover up. The courts have so made themselves instruments of permissiveness that the U.K.’s military is forbidden to even raise their voice to militants during questioning.

In a follow up report, we will examine how American foreign policy has made religious minorities, particularly in the Middle East, more vulnerable to the savagery of the ‘religion of peace’.