Christian Science Monitor, 21 Jan 10: House Republicans were keen Wednesday to find out why a report titled “Protecting the Force: Lessons from Fort Hood” fails to discuss Islamic extremism as a possible motive for Maj. Nidal Hasan’s attack in November, which killed 13 and wounded 43. Frustrated by the Department of Defense’s description of the Fort Hood rampage as an “incident” by an “alleged perpetrator,” several members of the House Armed Services Committee wondered if political correctness is besting common sense as the US tries to understand the nature and strategy of its enemies.
. . . . Rep. Buck McKeon (R) of California on Wednesday called the report’s failure to mention Islamic extremism a “strange silence.” To 9/11 commission member John Lehman, the administration’s position “shows you how deeply entrenched the values of political correctness have become,” he told Time magazine earlier this week.
Republican members of the House Armed Services Committee suggested that Americans are increasingly concerned that political correctness is undermining national security.
“The American people recognize that the 9/11 Commission was correct when it said we have an enemy and it’s Islamist extremists – their words – and the concern is that we may not be paying attention to the fact that the alleged perpetrator was in fact an Islamist extremist,” said Rep. John Kline (R) of Minnesota. “There’s frustration that we seem to be overlooking the 800 pound gorilla and that this is something more than just a random act of violence with an alleged perpetrator, and that it’s certainly more than just an incident.”
. . . But some lawmakers on Wednesday said they believe politics, not security concerns, played into the investigation – including the reasons given for why the public shouldn’t know that Hasan was promoted even after an alleged statement to colleagues that Sharia law trumps the US Constitution.
“This is another incident in a long pattern of information withheld from the public that is neither germane to national security interests or impinging on legal processes,” said Rep. Mike Coffman (R) of Colorado. “A lot of information that has come before this committee has been classified merely because it’s politically embarrassing.”
West would not answer whether the attack was, in fact, terrorism. “I’m going to pass on whether it was an act of terrorism,” West said. “But I know people who died there were terrified and the people who were wounded were, too.”
Human Events/Thomas Paine, 21 Jan 10: Thomas Paine is the nom de plume of an active-duty Army officer with two combat deployments to the Middle East and almost two decades of service.
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. – Sun Tzu, The Art of War
In his recent article, Pat Buchanan purports to define why al Qaeda is at war with us. Instead, he recites enemy propaganda serving only to reinforce their talking points while continuing to convolute the real motivation behind their actions. Over eight years since 9/11, it is amazing that a prominent conservative would not understand the fundamental motivation and doctrine driving those who have and continue to attack us. This is not rocket science.
Raymond Ibraham’s analysis in his invaluable book, The Al Qaeda Reader
Pat mentions only half of al Qaeda’s binary worldview in his article, the dar al-Islam (the land of Islam). By failing to even mention the dar al-Harb (the land of warfare), he fails to acknowledge that Islam, by doctrine (Koran 9:29), views the entire non-Muslim world as a land that must be subdued under Islamic rule (read sharia law). This is explained in the primary text of Islamic Law, Reliance of the Traveller: The Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law Umdat Al-Salik
What Buchanan also fails to mention, is taqiyya – the Islamic doctrine of deception, the understanding of which is fundamental to understanding the threat. Muhammad himself said war is deceit. (See “Summarized Sahih Al-Bukhari (Arabic-English)
As we learn from Reliance of the Traveller: The Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law Umdat Al-Salik
As a result of their binary world view, al Qaeda has two main audiences: the Muslim world (the ummah) and the non-Muslim world (consisting of the United States and the rest of the Western world). As such, it uses markedly different approaches to address each group.
When speaking to America and the Western world, al Qaeda turns statements made by what Lenin called the “useful idiots” into popular propaganda. They frequently cite Michael Moore, William Blum and other liberal commentators.
In contrast, when speaking to their constituents — the Muslim World — bin Laden and Zawahiri instead use formal Islamic theology and sharia law as levers to enforce Muslim compliance. Those who don’t comply are labeled apostates, who, by sharia, must be killed and will inhabit hell. (See “Reliance of the Traveller: The Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law Umdat Al-Salik
Written for Muslim audiences, they [al Qaeda’s Islamic theological treatises] are rarely translated into English or disseminated to a non-Muslim public. This is unfortunate since they reveal much more about al Qaeda’s ideology than the more famous political [propaganda] speeches. In these theological tracts, al Qaeda gives Muslims reasons why they should hate and fight the West that differ from those they give in their political speeches. (“Al Queda Reader,” p. 2)
There’s a difference between reciting the enemy and knowing the enemy. Buchanan confuses the two concepts. Which is why his cry for appeasement is misguided. He implies that if we packed up and came home (from Iraq, Afghanistan and all other Muslim countries), and adopted an isolationist foreign policy, then they would stop attacking us. Wrong.
Not only would this hand them a strategic victory, but they’d simply find another reason to continue to attack us. Islam cannot be appeased. (Koran 9:29). Not to mention the moral bankruptcy of abandoning the Afghan people and leaving them under the repressive rule of the Taliban.
Buchanan writes as if the Taliban were a legitimate government. The Afghanis know we are not the Russians or some other malicious occupier. But they are realists in a hostile land with a legitimate concern about our staying power and what will happen after we leave. Pat’s argument doesn’t help our cause.
Buchanan states that this is their war (the Muslim world’s war) and suggests that if we stayed out of it they would leave us alone. Even if this were true — and it is not — it wouldn’t be the right thing to do.
Americans are not being killed, as Buchanan retorts, for the propaganda reasons he repeats, but rather for who we are and what we believe. Not one American died in Iraq in December because the Iraqis finally saw the bankrupt ideology al Qaeda was selling and they helped us eradicate them.
To bin Laden and his ilk, we are the Great Satan. They hate us more than they hate Israel.
As for Hamas and Hizballah — which Pat paints as if they have benignly left us alone — they are here in the United States — actively pursuing a strategy of non-violent jihad that is arguably a more dangerous threat than the challenges in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen or Somalia.
I can understand his sentiment and aversion to war. As a career soldier, I know too many Gold Star parents to be cavalier about war.
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. – John Stuart Mill
As a parent, you’ll not hear me utter the unfatherly expression, Give me peace in my day. Rather, I will always say — as the real Thomas Paine said in 1776 — If there must be trouble, let it be in my day that my child may have peace.
It’s time we start to know our enemy.
As for Mr. Buchanan, it’s encouraging that he’s started to learn the enemy’s vocabulary. I hope he’ll stop repeating the enemy’s talking points and blaming us for the enemy simply executing their own offensive, totalitarian doctrine. It takes many hours to read and study books such as the ones I have mentioned here. But unless more Americans do — especially opinion leaders such as Mr. Buchanan — we cannot understand the true nature of the enemy.
American Thinker, 21 Jan 10: Forty years ago, violent radical groups wanted to destroy America, but they ended up destroying themselves…with a little help from the FBI.
We have faced down zealots before. Think of the passionate uprisings now consigned to the history books. Where are the Boxers, who numbered in the hundreds of thousands? Where are the Thuggees? Why is “terrorist bomber” no longer synonymous with “Italian” for the New York Police Department? But, you might reply, the Western world has more scruples than it did back in the days when the British lashed sepoys and blew them to kingdom come. And the modern jihadist movement has a much larger pool from which to recruit. Forty percent of British Muslim students favor introducing sharia law, for example. But the jihadist movement, like any organization that is authoritarian, paranoid, and nihilistic, carries the seeds of its own destruction.
No doubt there are bitter battles within al-Qaeda over tactics and strategy, as well as clashes of ego disguised as ideological differences. One al-Qaeda foot soldier now in Yemen had a “falling-out with other al-Qaeda members” in Afghanistan, and he fears it would be “risky” to return where his old comrades regard him as a “traitor.” Hmmm…a “falling out.” Did he borrow somebody’s second-best AK-47 without asking? Whatever the cause, he now fears for his life.
. . . .The Yemeni branch of al-Qaeda, just like in Mesopotamia and the rest of frail humanity, is subject to the same jealousies, rivalries, and misunderstandings that arise in any large, far-flung organization. And somehow, the rise of Anwar al Awlaki has got me thinking about Huey P. Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, and how the alliance between the two radical celebrities became a deadly feud in a matter of months.
. . . .The FBI’s counterintelligence program deliberately inflamed the divisions within the Panther party by playing on their tactical disagreements and fear of government infiltration, as well as encouraging the friction between the Panthers and other black groups through planting false rumors and sending anonymous letters. COINTELPRO’s mission was to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of the Black nationalists.” The FBI also spied on the SDS, the Weathermen, and other radical groups, including far-right ones. . . .
Buffalo News, 21 Jan 10: Jaber A. Elbaneh, who allegedly helped recruit the Lackawanna Six and is described by the FBI as one of the world’s most-wanted terrorists, is once again in custody in his home country of Yemen, The Buffalo News learned Wednesday. Federal prosecutors and FBI agents want him returned to Buffalo to face criminal charges in the Lackawanna Six case that have been pending against him since 2002. They charge that he was part of the group of Lackawanna men who trained at an al-Qaida terrorist camp in Afghanistan. . . .
Human Events/Robert Spencer, 21 Jan 10: The Defense Department released its report Friday on the jihad massacre at Fort Hood, and it is hard to imagine a document more full of denial and deception. Above all, the Pentagon seems intent on ignoring and obfuscating the reasons why Nidal Hasan murdered thirteen people at Fort Hood in November.
Although there were numerous signs that Nidal Hasan was an Islamic jihadist who believed it part of his religious responsibility as a Muslim to wage war against Infidels, the words “jihad,” “Muslim,” “Islam” and even “Islamist” never appear in the 86-page mélange of droning bureaucratese.
Echoing hapless Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s reaction to the Christmas Day attempted bombing of Northwest Flight 253, the report claims that, despite the thirteen murders, the system worked well at Fort Hood: “Leaders at Fort Hood had anticipated mass casualty events in their emergency response plans and exercises. Base personnel were prepared and trained to take appropriate and decisive action to secure the situation. The prompt and courageous acts of Soldiers, first responders, local law enforcement personnel, DoD civilians, and health care providers prevented greater losses.”
The only negative note in the report is the delicately stated idea that the military could be better prepared for the next jihad attack — uh, that is, the next “tragedy”: “The tragedy, however, raised questions about the degree to which the entire Department is prepared for similar incidents in the future — especially multiple, simultaneous incidents.”
And how does the report propose to make sure that the military is prepared for “similar incidents in the future”? By acting upon a series of empty, platitudinous recommendations: “identifying and monitoring potential threats;” “providing time-critical information to the right people;” “employing force protection measures;” and “planning for and responding to incidents.” That’s right: the Pentagon is recommending that the military could be more prepared for the next terror attack by “planning for” it.
And the irony is thick when the report recommends that the military improve its ability to identify and monitor “potential threats” — this from a report that steadfastly refuses even to acknowledge the existence of the Islamic jihad doctrine that motivated Nidal Hasan to murder in the first place.
Could belief in that doctrine be a “potential threat”? Of course not. At least not in a military which permits the Chief of Staff of the Army — Gen. George Casey — to say that as bad as the Fort Hood shootings were, it would be an even greater tragedy if the Army’s diversity were damaged.
A glimmer of reality threatens to break through when the report suggests that “DoD standards for denying requests for recognition as an ecclesiastical endorser of chaplains may be inadequate” — in other words, the Pentagon has no efficient way to screen the groups that endorse chaplains for the military. And that is certainly true: for a considerable period only two Islamic groups, both Saudi-funded, had the authority to train and approve Muslim chaplains for the military: the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences and the American Muslim Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs Council. Both of these were linked to the Islamic activist Abdurrahman Alamoudi, who is now serving a 23-year prison sentence for financing jihad terrorism. If the Pentagon increased scrutiny of such “moderate” organizations, well and good. But by what criteria will it do so, since it doesn’t seem to have noticed that there is any problem of supremacism or violence in Islam in the first place?
Political correctness was responsible for the murders of thirteen people at Fort Hood. If it had not held the political and military establishments in a stranglehold, Nidal Hasan would never have remained in the U.S. military, much less risen to the rank of major. He would have been removed from the ranks long before he had had a chance to murder anyone at Fort Hood. Political correctness was responsible for the fear among his superior officers — they knew that if they disciplined or removed Hasan, they would have faced charges of “discrimination” and “bigotry.” And such charges can ruin careers these days.
But that same political correctness is still very much in place, as the Fort Hood report abundantly indicates. And so for all its bluster about preventing the next attack, it will stand — after the next jihad attack, and the one after that — as a monument to the cowardice and myopia that held sway at the highest levels in Washington during the first year of the Obama Administration.
