FrontPage/Robert Spencer, 5 May 2010: We know now that the car bomb in Times Square was an attempted Islamic jihad attack. But the mainstream media, following its usual pattern, is once again denying, minimizing, or obfuscating this fact.
Writing in The Nation on Monday, Robert Dreyfuss epitomized the mainstream media’s hope that the car bomber would turn out to be a right-wing extremist: “It may be that the Pakistan-based Taliban, the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), has quietly established a Connecticut franchise while we weren’t looking. That’s possible. But it seems far more likely to me that the perpetrator of the bungled Times Square bomb plot was either a lone wolf or a member of some squirrely branch of the Tea Party, anti-government far right. Which actually exists in Connecticut, where, it seems, the car’s licence plates were stolen.”
In reality, according to Pakistani authorities, Faisal Shahzad, the would-be car bomber, attended a jihad training camp in that country. He spent five months in Pakistan recently, including some time in Peshawar, a center of Al-Qaeda and Taliban activity. A Pakistani Taliban group claimed responsibility for the attack — a claim that American authorities immediately dismissed, but which gained a new claim to serious consideration when Shahzad’s Pakistani connections were revealed.
Shahzad parked his explosives-laden SUV outside the offices of Viacom, the parent company of Comedy Central, which presents South Park, the cartoon whose creators were just threatened with death by Islamic supremacists in New York for daring to lampoon Muhammad. The Muslim group that issued the threat, Revolution Muslim, was proselytizing in Times Square just hours before Shahzad’s car bomb was discovered.
Yet for all this, virtually no media reports are saying anything about Shahzad being a Muslim. Such a reference, however, would hardly be gratuitous: Islamic jihad theology and the death penalty enshrined in Islamic law for anyone who insults Allah or Muhammad are the most likely keys to Shahzad’s motivation. But the politically correct, multiculturalist imperative demands that Islam and Muslims, being (at least in this addled view) non-white and non-Western, must always be portrayed as victims, no matter how imaginative the lengths to which analysts must go in order to find something, anything, to blame for the carnage other than Islam’s doctrines of hatred of and violence against unbelievers.
Ezra Klein in the Washington Post led the way in the imaginative department. Observing that Shahzad defaulted on the mortgage on his home in Connecticut and that the property is now in foreclosure, Klein discovered a hitherto-unnoticed motivation for violent jihad: “foreclosures generate an enormous amount of misery and anxiety and depression that can tip people into all sorts of dangerous behaviors that don’t make headlines but do ruin lives. And for all that we’ve done to save the financial sector, we’ve not done nearly enough to help struggling homeowners.” Help struggling homeowners, or they’ll try to set off car bombs in Times Square!
MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer, meanwhile, may not have had to face the heartbreak of foreclosure, but she had her own reason to feel “an enormous amount of misery and anxiety and depression”: what got Brewer down was that Shahzad turned out to be a Muslim. “There was a part of me,” lamented Brewer once the perpetrator was identified, “that was hoping this was not going to be anybody with ties to any kind of Islamic country.”
Brewer explained that she hoped that Shahzad’s action would not give rise to a resurgence of what she called “outdated bigotry” – voicing the common mainstream media preoccupation with a “backlash” against innocent Muslims. This preoccupation manifests itself in a flood of articles about Muslims fears of this “backlash” every time there is an attempted or successful jihad terror attack in America or Europe; the only thing that never appears is the backlash itself, which remains more a figment of the Leftist media’s imagination than an actual threat against innocent Muslims.
Nonetheless, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was likewise preoccupied with this phantom threat of a backlash, warning New Yorkers several times that any action against Muslims or Pakistanis. Bloomberg ought to be ashamed of himself. He should have been making statements about protecting Americans of all creeds, and calling the Muslim community in America to account for its tolerance of jihadists. There has never been a backlash against innocent Muslims in the U.S. It is a fiction that we only hear about when a Muslim plots mass murder of Americans. And then we hear about it endlessly, as if Muslims were the victims rather than the perpetrators.
Faisal Shahzad and his car bomb is yet another indication of the tenacity and persistence of the jihad against the United States – and of the continuing and even hardening resistance of American officials to the elementary step of even admitting that that jihad is being waged.
FrontPage/Robert Spencer, 3 May 2010: Like the Fort Hood jihad massacre and virtually all such attacks and attempted attacks these days, the car bomb discovered in Times Square Saturday was initially dismissed as having nothing to do with terrorism. The New York Times reported: “A federal official said it was not considered a terrorist threat and that the New York Police Department had told the Department of Homeland Security to stand down.”
Soon, however, the weight of evidence became too great for officials to sustain this wishful thinking. New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said: “I think the intent was to cause a significant ball of fire.”’ New York Governor David Paterson declared the incident an “act of terrorism.” Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano revealed on Meet the Press that the car bomb was being treated as a “potential terrorist attack.”
Napolitano offered no hint as to which terrorists might have done it: “It’s too soon to tell who was responsible.” New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was just as puzzled: “We have no idea who did this or why.”
Yet for all this official agnosticism, there were a number of clues – and even a group claiming credit. The explosives-laden car was found on 45th Street between 7th and 8th – not far from the offices of Viacom, which owns Comedy Central. Comedy Central, of course, presents South Park, the irreverent cartoon series that recently lampooned Islam’s prophet Muhammad. After the show aired, the jihadist website RevolutionMuslim.com posted this threat against the creators of South Park, Matt Stone and Trey Parker: “We have to warn Matt and Trey that what they are doing is stupid and they will probably wind up like Theo Van Gogh for airing this show. This is not a threat, but a warning of the reality of what will likely happen to them.”
Theo Van Gogh was brutally murdered by a Muslim on an Amsterdam street in the middle of the day in November 2004 after he made a film, Submission, about the oppression of Muslim women. Younus Abullah Muhammad of RevolutionMuslim.com told journalist Aaron Klein Sunday that the car bomb was “a retaliation for what your government is doing overseas. If you want to continue killing civilians, then you’re going to get many incidents that resemble what happened yesterday.” Not that RevolutionMuslim.com was claiming responsibility: “We do not condone nor condemn terrorism. There is no relation between our organization and these attacks.” However, “there will be a lot more terror attacks in the United States.”
Younus Abullah Muhammad’s denial of responsibility notwithstanding, have authorities questioned the owners of RevolutionMuslim.com about this attempt to explode a car bomb outside Viacom’s offices?
Meanwhile, the Pakistani Taliban rushed to claim responsibility, releasing a video calling the botched attack a “jaw-breaking blow to Satan’s USA.” Sounding much like Younus Abdullah Muhammad, a Taliban spokesman said that the attempted car bomb was revenge for American “interference and terrorism in Muslim countries, especially in Pakistan.” American officials, however, said there was no evidence to back up this claim, and Bloomberg added: “So far, there is no evidence that any of this has anything to do with one of the recognized terrorist organizations.”
Still, even if no Muslim group had anything to do with the car bomb, it was noteworthy that only Muslim groups went on record praising it as a good thing.
Recently I have received an increased number of emails and Facebook messages from Muslims telling me that I have completely misunderstood Islam and jihad, and that Islam is in fact the Religion of Peace of fable and fantasy. The only problem with all such messages, and with various windy pseudo-academic “refutations” of explanations by me and others of Islam’s doctrines of warfare against unbelievers and their subjugation under Sharia, is that however good they sound on paper, somehow the last people to be convinced seem to be Muslims themselves – Muslims like Younus Abdullah Muhammad and the Pakistani Taliban spokesman who claimed responsibility for the car bomb.
Somehow Muslims like those two – and there are untold numbers of others like them around the globe — seem to have missed the memo about Islam’s vaunted respect and tolerance for non-Muslims. And Younus Abdullah Muhammad and other Muslims like him can and do point to Qur’anic verses enjoining violence against unbelievers in order to justify bombings and all manner of murder and mayhem – for Muslims are to “fight those of the disbelievers who are near to you, and let them find harshness in you” (Qur’an 9:123).
Until such the ways in which jihad violence and supremacism is rooted in Islamic texts and teachings is studied openly by law enforcement and intelligence officials, we will see many more jihad attacks in the U.S. – and some will be successful. For the belief system that motivates them is being neither challenged nor even examined. While officials in this case had to revise their initial dismissal of terrorism as a factor, they have never reexamined or reevaluated their dismissal of any need to understand Islam in order to understand jihadis and how they can be stopped.
And so they are not being stopped, except when we get lucky, as we did Saturday night in Times Square. But our luck is unlikely to hold forever.
Human Events/Robert Spencer, 27 April 2010: Four incidents recently showed anew how keenly Islamic supremacists want to shut down the freedom of speech—and how eager many Americans are to accommodate them.
The most notorious incident was Comedy Central’s censorship of a “South Park” episode lampooning Islam’s prophet Muhammad. Even Bill O’Reilly faltered when presented with an opportunity to defend free speech, telling “South Park’s” creators: “I would’ve advised them not to do it. If somebody came to me and said, ‘Look, O’Reilly, I want to do a little satire of Muhammad on “The Factor,”’ I would say I don’t think so, because the risk is higher than the reward.”
The risk of defending free speech against violent threats and intimidation is higher than the reward? If the Founding Fathers had thought that way, we wouldn’t be having this conversation now. If the enemies of free speech, such as those who threatened “South Park’s” Matt Stone and Trey Parker over their Muhammad episode, see that death threats will frighten their victims into silence, they will only issue more death threats. Unless free people stand up and defend the right of free discourse no matter what the risk, we will surely lose that right—and any ability to stand up against the tyranny of a powerful group whose word and status cannot be questioned.
And that chastened silence before a privileged class is certainly the goal of Islamic supremacists in the United States. Besides threatening “South Park,” they also compelled the Pentagon to withdraw an invitation to evangelist Franklin Graham to participate in its National Day of Prayer event on May 6. Graham’s crime? Calling Islam “evil,” a comment he explained in this way: “If you look at what the religion does just to women, women alone, it is just horrid. And so yes, I speak out for women.”
The plight of women in the Islamic world is real. The Army should have given Franklin Graham’s explanation of his remarks thoughtful consideration—just as they should have considered the implications of the fact that the chief group complaining about Graham’s appearance at the event was the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas jihad terror funding case.
Instead, now the Army is abetting the whitewashing and cover-up of the institutionalized mistreatment of women in Islamic law. The Graham invitation could have been, as Barack Obama might say, a “teaching moment,” and an opportunity to stand up for the human rights of those women and other groups oppressed by Sharia. Instead, it is just an occasion for more submission to Islamic supremacists.
Also last week, a man named Sidney Elyea was given a hearing date of June 1 in his civil case concerning what were reported to be obscene and “anti-Islam” drawings he posted around St. Cloud, Minn. Before the civil charges were brought against Elyea, prosecutors in two counties declined to file criminal charges against him, saying that he was clearly within his 1st Amendment rights. Regarding the civil case, Elyea’s lawyer remarked: “Given what our Supreme Court has done to protect the right to free speech, it baffles me that the government has not dismissed this case.”
Ah, but Muslims are offended, and so heads must roll—figuratively, in this case.
Meanwhile, the Miami-Dade Transit authority likewise demonstrated a willingness last week to bow to Islamic law—although in this case the 1st Amendment won out. The Freedom Defense Initiative, a new organization I have begun with Pamela Geller, placed ads on Miami buses supporting religious liberty, offering help to Muslims wishing to leave Islam but threatened by their families in accord with Islam’s death penalty for apostates. Miami-Dade Transit quickly removed the ads, explaining that they were “offensive to Islam.” After our lawyer reminded Transit officials about the 1st Amendment, the ads are going back up, with more added.
Islamic supremacists continue their assault on free speech in America, and they are mostly winning. It’s time to hand them a few losses on this most crucial of fronts.
FrontPage/Robert Spencer, 15 April 2010: Barack Obama has removed all mention of Islam from the National Security Strategy document, which during the Bush Administration said: “The struggle against militant Islamic radicalism is the great ideological conflict of the early years of the 21st century.” Obama apparently agrees with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who said Monday: “Islam and terrorism cannot be mentioned together, because they are contradictory to each other.”
Erdogan, incidentally, also famously said this about “moderate Islam”: “These descriptions are very ugly, it is offensive and an insult to our religion. There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that’s it.” And that statement itself demonstrates one of the key fallacies of the Obama Administration’s stance that Islam has nothing to do with, uh, Islamic terrorism.
Now that the idea that Islam and terrorism have anything to do with one another has been relegated to the dustbin of history, it’s worth asking why anyone got this idea in the first place. Was it sheer bigotry? Racism? Let’s see. Could it have been from Osama bin Laden, who once praised Allah for the Qur’an’s “Verse of the Sword” (9:5), which instructs Muslims to “slay the unbelievers wherever you find them”?
Or maybe it was from Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, who once thundered: “Islam says: Kill in the service of Allah those who may want to kill you!…There are hundreds of other [Koranic] psalms and hadiths [sayings of the prophet] urging Muslims to value war and to fight. Does all that mean that Islam is a religion that prevents men from waging war? I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim.”
Maybe it was from the British Muslim Omar Brooks, who said in 2005 that it was imperative for Muslims to “instill terror into the hearts of the kuffar” and added: “I am a terrorist. As a Muslim of course I am a terrorist.” Or maybe it was from the Qur’an itself, which tells Muslims to “strike terror into the hearts of the enemies of Allah” (8:60). Maybe it was from the perpetrators of the 15,000-plus terror attacks committed in the name of Islam since 9/11. . . . .
Human Events/Robert Spencer, 10 March 2010: Al-Qaeda spokesman Adam Gadahn in a new videotape released Sunday declared:
“I am calling on every honest and vigilant Muslim in the countries of the Zionist-Crusader alliance in general and America, Britain and Israel in particular to prepare to play his due role in responding to and repelling the aggression of the enemies of Islam.”
He called upon Muslims to be imaginative in their choice of jihad targets:
“You shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that military bases are the only high-value targets in America and the West. On the contrary, there are countless other strategic places, institutions and installations which, by striking, the Muslim can do major damage.”
Gadahn, who is known in jihadist circles as “Azzam the American,” is the first U.S. citizen to be indicted for treason since World War II. His new video shows that the charge is entirely justified.
In it, he held up 9/11 as a model for jihad attacks: “As the blessed operations of September 11th showed, a little imagination and planning and a limited budget can turn almost anything into a deadly, effective and convenient weapon.” He exhorted Muslims to sow mayhem in the U.S. and elsewhere in the West “by killing or capturing people in government, industry and the media.”
As surprising as it may be to hear an American fantasizing about mass murders in his native land, it is no surprise coming from Gadahn, who in a September 11, 2006 message called America “enemy soil.” And in his new communiqué, the pudgy Al-Qaeda operative even praised Nidal Hasan, the Islamic jihadist who murdered thirteen people at Fort Hood in November 2009, as
“the ideal role-model for every repentant Muslim in the armies of the unbelievers and apostate regimes,” and as a “pioneer, a trailblazer and a role-model who has opened a door, lit a path and shown the way forward for every Muslim who finds himself among the unbelievers.”
Earlier videotapes show that mass murders on American military bases, such as the one eventually committed by Hasan, were long the stuff of Gadahn’s dreams. In July 2006, while engaging in an extended exercise in grievance theatre over alleged murders of children by American troops in Iraq, he said: “It’s hard to imagine that any compassionate person could see pictures, just pictures, of what the Crusaders did to those children, and not want to go on a shooting spree at the Marines’ housing facilities at Camp Pendleton.” He was anxious to demonstrate his own bloodlust, declaring: “We love nothing better than the heat of battle, the echo of explosions, and slitting the throats of the infidels.”
And therein lies the core of the problem. Gadahn has become a traitor who plots violence against Americans because of his allegiance to Islam, and his concomitant belief that he has a responsibility before the supreme deity to kill Infidels whom he believes to be at war with Islam. Yet aside from vague and loophole-laden condemnations of terrorism, Muslim groups in America have done nothing to counter the appeal of jihad recruiters to young men like Gadahn. We know from the recent flow of Somali immigrants in Minneapolis back to their homeland to wage jihad that jihad recruitment is continuing on American soil; and the people who converted Adam Gadahn to Islam and convinced him that Allah was pleased when he murdered people are still active, still spreading Islam among unsuspecting and alienated young Americans.
Reports Sunday that Gadahn had been captured just as his videotape was released turned out to be false. In fact, another American convert to Islam who is active in Al-Qaeda was the one who was captured – which shows anew that officials have ignored the conversion of rootless young Americans and their recruitment for the jihad to our great detriment. Gadahn himself, in any case, is still at large — and while American forces should continue to hunt for him in Pakistan and Afghanistan, law enforcement officials stateside should be on the lookout for an even greater threat emanating from those Muslims in this country who have taken his words, and the words of those who inspired and influenced him, to heart.
♦ CI CENTRE COURSE: 362–Informant Development for Law Enforcement to Fight Terrorism
♦ CI CENTRE COURSE: 361–The Global Jihadist Threat Doctrine
