The problem with those descriptions is that they obscure who we’re fighting and what victory might look like. There’s no question that evil does exist. But it has a name: Islamism. Saying that Islamism has nothing to do with Islam is like saying that a particular cut of beef has nothing to do with a cow. They are inexorably linked; one grows inside the other. There are plenty of ways to practice Islam—and plenty of choices in cuts of steak—but they all come from the same place.
President Obama himself said in a CNN interview in February 2015 that there is “an element growing out of Muslim communities in certain parts of the world that have . . . embraced a nihilistic, violent, almost Medieval interpretation of Islam.” But, he then added, “It is absolutely true that I reject a notion that somehow that creates a religious war because the overwhelming majority of Muslims reject that interpretation of Islam. They don’t even recognize it as being Islam.”
In reality, tens of millions of Muslims do recognize it as being Islam. It does no good to sugarcoat the truth. Our leaders may say we’re not fighting a religious war, but the jihadists most certainly are.
This book is a start at arming you with the truth. But it’s just a start. We have to do more. An educated citizenry needs to fight back. And here’s how to do it.
1. WE MUST UNDERSTAND THE ENEMY
We cannot be afraid to understand our opponents—domestically or internationally—on their own terms, defined by the rules and teachings that motivate them and organize their philosophy.
Yet our inability, or perhaps our unwillingness, to come to terms with an enemy that openly declares its philosophy, the laws under which it operates, and its goals is a reflection of what our society has become.
Our willful blindness—whether due to political correctness or outright fear—is killing us.
Too many Americans still take at face value the lies of our nation’s leaders that Islam is fundamentally “a religion of peace” and that the likes of ISIS, Boko Haram, and al-Qaeda have distorted it and are therefore “not Islamic.” We also take for granted the separation of church and state in America. But there is no separation of mosque and state in orthodox Islam. The only true law is the law of Allah.
As we’ve seen throughout this book, Islamic rules of war and for the proper subjugation of pagans, Christians, and Jews have been spelled out clearly for Muslims from the very beginning, more than 1,400 years ago. Their teachings about war, conquest, and submission remain central to orthodox Islam today. Those messages are heard every Friday in mosques from Ann Arbor and Boston to London and Cairo, and all the way to Islamabad and Jakarta.
ISIS is literally razing the birthplace of human civilization in Iraq and Syria to build a new Caliphate. In early 2015, the Islamic State pillaged and smashed priceless artifacts in Iraq’s Mosul Museum. A masked ISIS spokesman explained in a video that the ancient Assyrians and Akkadians were “polytheists,” so it was right to destroy what remained of their civilization: “These statues and idols, these artifacts, if God has ordered its removal, they became worthless to us even if they are worth billions of dollars.”
Soon afterward, ISIS vandals demolished the ruins of Hatra, a key stronghold and trade center of the Parthian Empire, which had been a major power in ancient Persia some two thousand years ago. They also pillaged and demolished hundreds of artifacts in the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud, where the Tower of Babel once stood, before leveling the entire place with explosives. In some cases, ISIS’s religious objections to supposed “idols” are secondary to making a profit off them. The group has smuggled and sold millions of dollars’ worth of ancient artifacts. “They steal everything that they can sell, and what they can’t sell, they destroy,” said Iraq’s deputy minister for antiquities and heritage.
Boko Haram—a group whose name translates roughly to “Western education is forbidden”—has slaughtered thousands of Christians in Nigeria. The group, which formally pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in March 2015, takes Christian girls as young as nine or ten years old as sexual slaves. Boko Haram’s leader, Abubakar Shekau, is completely unapologetic about the practice. “There are slaves in Islam,” he said in 2014, “you should know this. Prophet Muhammad took slaves himself during [the] Badr war.”
The Badr “war” was the decisive battle in A.D. 624 that led to Muhammad’s conquest of his home city of Mecca and, eventually, the entire Arabian Peninsula. Twenty-first-century jihadists would like nothing more than to repeat that history.
Jihad’s depredations aren’t limited to the Middle East, Africa, or South Asia. Al-Qaeda made its intentions—and its total rejection of Western norms—known to the United States and the world long before Osama bin Laden became a household name. A document discovered in Manchester, England, called “The Al Qaeda Manual,” in fact, transparently lays out the organization’s mission:
The confrontation that we are calling for with the apostate regimes does not know Socratic debates . . . Platonic ideals . . . nor Aristotelian diplomacy. But it knows the dialogue of bullets, the ideals of assassination, bombing and destruction, and the diplomacy of the cannon and the machine gun.
. . . Islamic governments have never and will never be established through peaceful solutions and cooperative councils. They are established as they have [always] been:
“by pen and gun;
“by word and bullet; and
“by tongue and teeth.”
Never before in our history has the United States had to account for the personal and private beliefs of its enemies. When the United States fought Nazism and fascism, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New York Times didn’t say, “Not all Germans . . .” or “Not all Italians . . .” Most Americans understood that “not all Russians” wanted to eradicate the United States during the Cold War. Nevertheless, the regimes of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and Soviet Russia were implacable foes and existential threats to our way of life. They needed to be defeated militarily and ideologically.
The same must be said of Muslims who rally under the black flag of jihad. In February 2015, the left-leaning Atlantic magazine published a blockbuster story by Graeme Wood titled “What ISIS Really Wants.” I talked about it at length on my radio program. The article is a must-read for anyone who seeks genuine understanding about the Islamic State’s goals.
Wood begins by assuring his readers that “nearly all” Muslims reject ISIS. “But,” he writes, “pretending that [the Islamic State] isn’t actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combatted, has already led the United States to underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it.”
Wood points out that many Americans “tend to see jihadism as monolithic, and to apply the logic of al-Qaeda to an organization that has decisively eclipsed it.” That’s a mistake, he argues. I agree with him that while there are different shades of jihad, all of those factions rely on the same holy book, traditions, and religious laws.
More important, Wood argues, the Islamic State’s jihadists are “not modern secular people, with modern political concerns, wearing medieval religious disguise. . . . In fact, much of what the group does looks nonsensical except in light of a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringing about the apocalypse.”
As we’ve seen, the voices of jihad have made their purpose plain again and again. They are bent on a new Holocaust, one that engulfs Christians and Jews in the Middle East and around the world. So how many more innocent Christians need to be crucified or beheaded until we start taking ISIS at its word? How many Jews have to die before we understand that Hezbollah and Hamas, along with their patrons in Iran, really mean what they say about wiping Israel off the map?
It’s true that many Muslims in the United States and abroad reject and condemn violent jihad. But it doesn’t follow that the violent jihadists of ISIS, al-Qaeda, and their confederates are not truly Islamic. And it certainly doesn’t mean that Muslim
s reject everything that ISIS, al-Qaeda, and the others espouse.
A 2013 Pew poll found sizable minorities of Muslims in eleven countries—including nominal U.S. allies—held favorable views of al-Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah. One in five Egyptians approve of al-Qaeda’s work, while 23 percent of Indonesians—a nation with a “moderate” Muslim population of more than 202 million, the largest on earth—say they support the terrorist group’s goals. Overall, about one-third of Muslims approve of Hamas, and one in four think highly of Hezbollah.
If that isn’t worrisome enough, 15 percent of Muslims in Turkey support suicide bombing and a little over half of all Turks whom Pew surveyed say they aren’t the least bit worried about Islamic extremism. Don’t forget, Turkey is a NATO ally that has long aspired to join the European Union. Islamism’s resurgence in the former seat of the Ottoman Empire appeared to suffer a setback in June 2015, when President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s “Justice and Development Party” lost its parliamentary majority for the first time since 2002. It’s a hopeful sign, but whether extremism begins to lose its appeal in Turkey remains to be seen.
Apologists for jihad, whether it’s the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Islamic Society of North America, agenda-driven pseudo-academics such as Karen Armstrong and Juan Cole, or their stenographers in the mainstream press, insist against all evidence to the contrary that the ideology of ISIS and Boko Haram and al-Qaeda “comes from nowhere.”
Even our military’s top brass seemingly cannot grasp the enemy’s religious aims or theological appeal. The New York Times in 2014 highlighted the work of a special civilian task force assembled by Major General Michael K. Nagata, commander of U.S. Special Operations forces in the Middle East, to make sense of ISIS and its goals. “We do not understand the movement, and until we do, we are not going to defeat it,” Nagata said, according to confidential minutes of a conference call with several experts that the Times obtained. “We have not defeated the idea. We do not even understand the idea.”
The report relates how Nagata’s team consists of more than three dozen outside experts, including business professors and neuroscientists, to figure out the “intangible means” the Islamic State uses to control large populations, and the “magnetic, inspirational” way ISIS attracts so many young men and women from around the globe to fight. “I do not understand the intangible power of ISIL,” Nagata said. “This may sound like a bizarre excursion into the surreal, but for me it is about avoiding failure.”
General Nagata is right to worry about failure. We are failing. But with all due respect to the general, who has served his country with distinction for more than three decades in some of the worst places on earth, he won’t find the answer he’s looking for in cutting-edge neuroscience or marketing research. Our cultural and political elite may be steeped in secularism and liberalism, but our enemies are deadly serious about their faith and traditions.
When ISIS leader Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi says, “O Muslims, Islam was never for a day the religion of peace. Islam is the religion of war,” he means it. When al-Baghdadi says, “Your Prophet . . . was dispatched with the sword as a mercy to the creation. He was ordered with war until Allah is worshipped alone,” he isn’t being obtuse. When the self-proclaimed “Caliph” quotes Muhammad addressing the “polytheists” of Arabia and says, “ ‘I came to you with slaughter.’ . . . He never for a day grew tired of war,” that isn’t a mixed message in need of expert parsing.
Why is that so difficult to understand?
Stop and think about the madness of our nation’s cultural and political elite. They lack the moral and intellectual clarity to win this religious war. They cannot tell friend from foe. They’re ignorant of the lessons of history. They have no courage of their convictions, because their convictions are hollow.
If we rely on them to understand our enemy it will be too late. It’s up to us.
2. WE MUST BE UNAFRAID TO SPEAK
Do not be deceived. Our enemies understand better than our leaders do that jihad is expansive. And so is our enemies’ desire to change America. They would have us cower in fear and shame, censoring our thoughts and words in accordance with their standards.
Gradually, they expect, the United States through guilt and well-intended tolerance will submit to sharia law—and eventually to the Caliphate.
Given all that we’ve seen and learned in the years following the 9/11 attacks, it still comes as a shock to see how the highest levels of the United States government have pandered to Muslim radicals. As noted, the Obama administration has welcomed members of the Muslim Brotherhood to the White House and to meetings with representatives of the State Department.
This pattern is not unique to President Obama, however. The Bush administration made similar overtures to Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood. According to the Clarion Project, President Bush was due to meet personally with Muslim leaders—many with Brotherhood connections—in 2001. One of the invitees, Abdurahman Alamoudi, had also met with officials in the Clinton administration. Alamoudi would later be sentenced to twenty-three years in prison for plotting with Libyans to assassinate the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.
That meeting, which was to happen on September 11, was, of course, canceled. But President Bush—along with every other American—nonetheless became well acquainted with radical Islam that day.
These are the people our government apparently listens to. It has gone on for years. If we want those in power to instead listen to the American people, we have to make sure they cannot ignore our message. We must understand the truth, and once armed with that knowledge, we cannot be afraid to speak up.
The most deadly thing the jihadists can do—short of detonating a nuclear weapon or electromagnetic pulse—is to get us to subvert our own precariously dangling Constitution to accommodate them.
That plan of attack is already well under way. We’ve already seen how criticism of Islam or Muslims is routinely denounced as “Islamophobia.” We’ve seen how intimidation, fear, and violence are directed against people who dare speak out. We witnessed the disgraceful media response to the thwarted terrorist attack on the “Draw Muhammad” contest in Garland, Texas, which laid the blame for a shoot-out that left two ISIS-inspired gunmen dead on the free speech event’s organizers. And we’ve seen how the Brotherhood’s “civilization jihad” is working in parallel to the more violent jihadist efforts in the Middle East.
You would think our press would recognize the threat. After all, aren’t they in the First Amendment business? Haven’t the New York Times and other newspapers insisted on publishing U.S. secrets in the fight against al-Qaeda in the name of the public’s right to know? Yet, at the same time, they’ve gone out of their way to deny, deflect, and deceive the public when it comes to the truth about jihad and radical Islam. They seem to be in total denial that Islamic extremists pose a bona fide threat, or that a Caliphate is something that anybody—let alone tens of millions of Muslims—actually wants.
Fourteen years after 9/11, the press, with few exceptions, still refuses to consider the possibility that a terrorist plot or attack may be the work of jihadists with global designs rather than a simple “lone wolf” or disgruntled individual who happens to be Muslim. They won’t call radical Islamists by their proper name. Either the media elite are afraid to tell the truth, or they’re afraid of what the American people will demand upon learning the truth.
For example, the media readily accepted the Defense Department’s line that Major Nidal Hasan’s November 5, 2009, shooting rampage at Fort Hood in Texas—which left thirteen people dead—amounted to a tragic case of “workplace violence.” At best, Hasan was a “lone wolf” who acted on his own initiative. Any relationship between his shouts of “Allahu Akbar” as he gunned down his victims with the same battle cry used by countless jihadists in Iraq and Afghanistan must have been purely coincidental.
Never mind the lengthy email correspondence Hasan carried on with Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born radical
Yemeni cleric who was a major influence among English-speaking jihadists before he was killed in 2011 by a U.S. drone strike. And never mind Hasan’s lengthy monologues to practically anyone who would listen about how he was “on the wrong side” in the U.S. Army, and how he considered himself a “Soldier of Allah.”
As Hasan awaited his court-martial in 2012, he wrote: “I, Nidal Malik Hasan, am compelled to renounce any oaths of allegiances that require me to support/defend [sic] man made constitution (like the constitution of the United States) over the commandments mandated in Islam. . . . I therefore formally renounce my oath of office . . . this includes my oath of U.S. citizenship” (emphasis added). That doesn’t sound like a man who simply had a problem with the army’s human resources department.
After seeing the government and media cognitive dissonance play out over and over again in their coverage of the latest jihadist atrocity, I probably shouldn’t be surprised about anything anymore. But even I was shocked at the media’s response to the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. ABC News wasted no time asking, “Could this be homegrown terror?” and was likely disappointed when the answer came back “no.” The bombing, it turns out, was carried out by brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who just happened to be Muslim émigrés from Chechnya who were radicalized in Boston.
Tamerlan died from injuries he sustained in a gun battle with the Boston police, during which his brother Dzhokhar ran him over with a stolen SUV. Dzhokhar was eventually captured after a standoff with police when a homeowner found him hiding in a boat behind his house in the Boston suburb of Watertown. Expecting he wouldn’t survive his confrontation with the authorities, Dzhokhar scrawled a note inside his hiding place. It read, in part: “[W]e Muslims are one body, you hurt one you hurt us all, well at least that’s how Muhammad (pbuh) wanted it to be . . . the ummah is beginning to rise . . . know you are fighting men who look into the barrel of your gun and see heaven, now how can you compete with that. We are promised victory and we will surely get it.”