Islamic Terrorism and Islamic Immigration: Fifth Column within Fortress America

Chronicles Magazine ^ | 28 November 2001 | Srdja Trifkovic

[MegaSilver]

It is a matter of amply documented record that the policy makers in Washington had not treated Islamic fundamentalist ideology in adversarial terms until it started attacking America. Quite the contrary: their refusal to accept that Islam as such is a threat to national security went hand in hand with the policy of effectively supporting Islamic fundamentalists in pursuit of short-term political or military objectives of the U.S. government. The underlying assumption was that militant Muslims could be propped up, used, and if need be eventually discarded like Diem, Noriega, the Shah, the Contras.

The Kaiser lived to regret giving passage to Lenin on that sealed train in 1917, but in Washington the lessons of that episode remained unknown for two decades. Quite the contrary: having enlisted militant Islam in the destruction of communism, the ruling establishment used it to erode the reliquiae reliquiarum of the Christian culture in the Western world through Muslim mass immigration. Leeds and Leicester have been turned into Peshawar and Rawalpindi; Marseilles and Toulon into Dakkar or Algiers; Berlin and Stuttgart into Istanbul or Adana. The underlying assumption all along has been that the Islamic genie released at the end of the Cold War in the hills of Afghanistan could be controlled through its eventual reduction to yet another humanistic project in self-celebration, through its adherents' immersion in the consumerist subculture, and through their children's multicultural indoctrination by state education.

How well it has worked we can see in the swelling ranks of British, French, and American-born jihadi volunteers for martyrdom.[i] This is shocking to many Westerners; but it is nothing new for eastern Christendom, which borders on the Muslim world and where the problem continues be as it has been since Islam first appeared in the 7th century that of direct, violent confrontation, which today stretches from the Balkans to the Caucasus and on through Central Asia.[ii] Compared to the yawning gap between Islam and the civilization of Europe and North America, the intra-European conflicts of the 20^th century (let alone the much older schism between eastern and western Christianity), however lethal, appear almost like a family feud. There was no difference, to the conquerors of Sicily a millennium ago, between Capulets and Montagues.

The Communists had secretly always suspected the validity of their own creed, and thus never trusted each other to face the temptations of the Western world unsupervised. The Muslims have no such problem: their would-be martyrs can spend years exposed to the charms of southern Florida, or the buzz of London, and never waver in their murderous intent.[iii] The blindness to the nature and ambitions of Islam was partly due to the elites' stupidity and ignorance, partly to their desire to give Islam its quid for half a century of the pro-Israel quo, but also more importantly to their bias against nations and cultures based on Christianity, and to their hatred of tradition, normality, and natural hierarchy.

Already at the time of the first WTC attack in 1993 it was obvious that belligerent Islam had a firm foothold within the Muslim diaspora in the United States. Nevertheless, in the ensuing eight years the U.S. government had been incomprehensibly liberal in allowing entry to supporters and propagators of radical Islam or agents of terrorist regimes and organizations. It allowed many terrorists and their supporters to enter the United States on fraudulently obtained student visas that camouflaged their true purpose. Worse still, some really come for education so that they develop their countries' nuclear, chemical or biological weapons programs. Others enter for shorter periods, including clerics and leaders of radical Islamic groups who come to attend conferences organized by militant groups in the U.S. but whose real purpose is to recruit new members, raise funds, coordinate strategies with other militant leaders, indoctrinate new ëfoot soldiers' and even participate in training sessions.

The policy was developed during the first Bush administration in a statement by then Assistant Secretary of State for Near East and North African Affairs, Edward Djerejian, who emphasized that the United States did not regard Islam or Islamic movements as the enemy. It recognized the right of Islamic movements to participate in the political process.[iv] The spirit of the statement was reiterated and expanded upon by his successor, Robert Pelletreau, during the Clinton Administration. Pelletreau observed in 1996 that the image of Islam in the minds of the average newspaper reader is often one of an undifferentiated movement hostile to the West and ready to use violence and terrorism to achieve its ends. [v] He distinguished the many legitimate, socially responsible Muslim groups with political goals from Islamists who operate outside the bounds of law. The standard establishmentarian view in this case summarized by John Esposito, director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University—was distinctly rose-tinted:

Contemporary Islam is more a challenge than a threat. It challenges the West to know and understand the diversity of the Muslim experience. It challenges Muslim governments to be more responsive to popular demands for political liberalization and greater popular participation, to tolerate rather than repress nonviolent opposition movements, and to build viable democratic institutions, while containing extremism and terrorism. Contrary to what some have advised, the United States should not, in principle, object to the implementation of Islamic law or involvement of Islamic activists in government.^[130] Islamically oriented political actors and groups should be evaluated by the same criteria that are applied to any other potential leaders or opposition party.[vi]

The consequences of this flexible definition were disastrous. By early 2000 a leading expert on Islamic subversion in North America, Steven Emerson, testified before a Congressional committee that the United States and Canada had become the home for a wide spectrum of international Islamic terrorist groups as well as indigenous groups:

The primary threat of international terrorism on American soil stems from Middle Eastern terrorist organizations, a fact that FBI and CIA officials have repeatedly testified to. These organizations have set up fundraising operations, political headquarters, military recruitment and sometimes even command and control centers. [vii]

The entire spectrum of Islamic terrorist groups now operates on American soil, including Hamas, Hezbollah, the Algerian Armed Islamic Group, the Egyptian Al Gamat Al Islamiya, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Islamic Liberation Party, the PKK and Al-Qaeda, the organization of Osama bin Laden. The pattern was set over a decade earlier:

• Ismail Al-Faruqi, the first theorist of the U.S.-made jihad, said in 1983 that nothing could be greater than this youthful, vigorous, and rich continent [North America] turning away from its past evil and marching forward under the banner of Allahu Akbar.
• In December 1989 several fundamentalist leaders attended a rally at Chicago, including Bashir Nafi, the funding member of Islamic Jihad, and Abdul Aziz Odeh, its spiritual leader.
• Omar Abdel Rahman the blind sheikh later convicted of planning a ëday of rage' by blowing up New York buildings in 1991 called on Muslims to conquer the land of the infidels. He was a legal resident alien in the U.S. at that time.
• Siraj Wahaj, the first imam to deliver a Muslim prayer for the U.S. House of Representatives, declared that Muslims will eventually elect the president: Take my word, if 6-8 million Muslims unite in America, the country will come to us.
• Zaid Shakir, formerly the Muslim chaplain at Yale University, believes the Koran "pushes us in the exact opposite direction as the forces at work in the American political spectrum" and from this argues that Muslims cannot accept the legitimacy of the existing order.
• Ahmad Nawfal, a Jordanian who spoke often at American rallies in the 1990s, says that if Muslims stand up, "it will be very easy for us to preside over this world once again."
• In June 1991 the innocuously named United Association for Studies and Research (UASR), based in Virginia, co-sponsored one of the largest gatherings of Islamist militants ever held in the US. It included Kamal Hilbawi, the leader of the Muslim brotherhood of Egypt, who openly advocated terrorist attacks.[viii]
• Bassam Al-Amoush, a top pan-Islamist leader and MP from Jordan, who used similar rhetoric in Chicago in 1994, subsequently had meetings at the State department and on Capitol Hill courtesy of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
• Two fanatics working the U.S. lecture circuit are Sheikh Ghuniem from Egypt and Yusuf Qaradawi, a militant cleric living in Qatar and ideologue of Hamas who openly preaches violence on his website. On his U.S. tours Qaradawi praises Sudan as a model for the Muslim world. Ghuniem was the star speaker at a conference in Brooklyn organized by pan-Islamist groups on May 24, 1998.
• At a benefit dinner organized by the Muslim American Society and CAIR, just two days before the WTC attacks, an American convert to Islam, Sheikh Hamza Yusuf Hanson, told the crowd: This country [America] unfortunately has a great, great tribulation coming to it. And much of it is already here, yet people are too illiterate to read the writing on the wall.

Such examples abound. These radical terrorist groups found that the United States, the freest country in the world, was the best place to organize and build up their terrorist movements, said Oliver Revell, former head of the FBI's counter-terrorist investigations:

In recent years, Hamas and other terrorist groups found they can manipulate the American public and politicians hiding under non-profit ëreligious charities,' self-defined religious umbrellas and the politically correct buzzword of human rights.[ix]

Their friends and allies have even managed to join the armed forces of the United States, and continue their subversive activities not only from within America but also from within its defense establishment.[x] Federal agencies had long known of the U.S. terrorist cells associated with Osama bin Laden, but they did nothing to break them up and deport the conspirators, or even to monitor them effectively enough to prevent the attacks.[xi]

ON COUNTERING INTERNAL THREAT

All of these people, and dozens others just like them (or even worse), are sponsored by mainstream Muslim organizations in the United States. They travel lecturing at mosques and Islamic centers filled to the capacity. They rely on quasi-legitimate civil rights Islamic groups that operate as fronts of the fundamentalist movement. Prior to September 11 they had grown confident, even cocky—so much so that CAIR had begun to organize street protests against news organizations that write about the history of militant Islam, going to the point of lambasting anyone who refers to fundamentalist Islam or to the concept of jihad in Islam as guilty of defaming Muslims. When Argenbright Security (infamous for letting through the Nepalese illegal immigrant with seven knives and a stun-gun at O'Hare) fired seven Muslim women a few years ago four from the Sudan, a terrorist state according to the U.S. government, the EEOC made the firm rehire the women and the EEOC complaint was drafted by a lawyer for CAIR. [xii]

Corruption attracts corruption: Muslim leaders are courted by politicians primarily those belinging to the Democrat camp who are every bit as squeamish about their client-base as Unocal executives. On at least two occasions Hillary Clinton hosted receptions organized by Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), a group that has promoted the activities of HAMAS, Turkey's fundamentalist Welfare Party, and the Muslim Brotherhood. Its officials have defended Hezbollah, while publicly insisting that they condemn terrorism.

The support base for radical Islam in the United States, its hundreds of activists and millions of contributors, raise tens of millions of dollars a yearÝ much of it through 501-c-3 tax-exempt charities, which makes them a legitimate target for close public scrutiny, especially in view of the factthat much of that money is then funneled to overseas radical Islamic groups. Ms. Clinton admittedly had to return $50,000 received from MPAC the Jewish vote in New York was at risk but she justified her contacts by claiming that she was trying to promote a framework for peace, that included lines of communication to many different groups and many different individuals.

Those lines of communication included the AMC chairman Alamoudi, who invites thousands of attendees at its events to chant their support for terrorists. We are all supporters of Hamas, he once declared. When the New York Daily News asked about these comments Alamoudi denied making them, telling the reporter: You better check your Arabic. When the reporter noted that he had given the speech in English, Mr. Alamoudi lost his cool: It was in English? Oh my God, I forgot! [xiii]

The courting of such people has continued even after September 11. Muzammil Siddiqui, the former president of Islamic Society of North America and Imam of the Islamic Society of Orange County in California, was invited to the Oval Office by George W. Bush on September 26 so that the President could thank him for his participation in the national day of mourning and remembrance. Imam Siddiqui had soothing and reassuring words for the President:

The Muslim community has unanimously condemned and deplored the crime committed on September 11, 2001. It was a most horrible crime against our [sic] nation and against humanity.

In reality Mr. Siddiqui recognizes only one nation that of Islam. Only a year earlier, at a Jerusalem Day rally in Washington, this same Imam Siddiqui had a rather different message for his formally adopted country:

We want to awaken the conscience of America: because if you remain on the side of injustice, the wrath of God will come, he told the crowd. Please all Americans, do remember that, that Allah is watching everyone. If you continue doing injustice, and tolerating injustice, the wrath of God will come.

It should not be surprising that he hypocrisy of mainstream Muslim leaders is universal, as it is condoned by the openly situational morality of their creed. According to a leading spokesman for Islam in the West, terrorism must be differentiated from the struggle of peoples for their acknowledged national causes and the liberation of their territories. [xiv]  The key is the intention of the perpetrator and the general acceptability of his act is Din with all its spirit, laws and concepts, not his act as such, and does not apply to acts of national resistance . . . resistance against racial discrimination :

It is indeed comical that the United States of America, the mother of international terrorism and the source of all the circumstances of oppression and subjection of peoples . . . should seek to convene symposia on combating terrorism, i.e. any act that conflicts with its imperialist interests . . . Islam does not omit to lay down a comprehensive, realistic and flexible code of sanctions that deals with facts according to their social effects. [emphasis added]

So much for the moderates the acceptable face of Islam presented to international forums and the media. You'd think the White House would know about the double-talk, says Emerson, but that does not seem to be the case: Imam Siddiqui, the leader of one of the largest Islamic groups in the United States, knows that the level of naivete and denial among Americans is nothing short of astonishing:

It's very difficult to get a sense of the dimension of what we're up against because of the level of deception. There isn't a moderate Islamic leadership. There isn't. And someone has got to say it. We deny it at our peril. When the President talks about Islam being hijacked, what's really happening is that the Muslim extremists have hijacked the leadership . . . The Islamic leaders now come crying under victimhood status and as being the subject of hate crimes. But no one has demanded that the price of coming to the table is that they thoroughly repudiate Islamic terrorism.

This nonsense cannot continue. It took the bureau more than ten years before it could infiltrate the Mafia, learn the language, recruit Sicilians, says Don Lavey, a former FBI man and former head of Interpol's counter-terrorism branch. But this time, the threat is much greater and the bureau's resources incredibly more limited. [xv] Emerson agrees:

The same mild-mannered people who pay their bills on time also end up becoming terrorists, so it's almost impossible to tell. One thing is clear: Wherever there is Islamic extremism there's a nexus to the potential of violence . . . Anybody who subscribes to the tenets of militant Islamic fundamentalism is capable of violence.[xvi]

They realize that the Muslim population is not like any other, for as Daniel Pipes put it recently it harbors a substantial segment of believers who share important goals with the suicide hijackers. Both despise the United States and all it stands for, and ultimately wish to transform it into a Muslim country—by whatever means, violent or otherwise, that will be retroactively justified by the supposed sanctity of the goal.

Exactly the same problem is present in each and every Western country that has carelessly opened the floodgates to mass immigration from the Muslim world. We will remodel this country in an Islamic image, says one Mr. Bakri, a foremost Islamic leader in Britain: We will replace the Bible with the Koran . . . Christians have to learn that they cannot do this to Islam. We will not allow our brothers to be colonialised. If they try it, Britain will turn into Bosnia. [xvii]

Remarkably, this same Mr. Bakri was expelled from Saudi Arabia as a dangerous agitator in the fundamentalist-revolutionary cause and has lived in London since 1986, drawing welfare and calling on young Muslims to take up arms against the opponents of Islam ultimately meaning everyone who is not Muslim, or who does not subscribe to his vision of Islam. His organization, taking its cue from its numerous and eminently successful U.S.-based counterparts, has offices across the developed world and regularly asks its members for donations to fund its work.

We can only guess how many thousands of Bakris operate freely in Boston, Michigan, or New Jersey. By allowing a vast and so far unsupervised subculture of non-Western immigrants to emerge within their societies, the nations of Western Europe and North America have permitted the emergence of an alternative social and political structure in their midst in which terrorists can operate virtually undetected.

CONCLUSION

Decades of covert and overt support for Islamic terrorism are a foreign policy disaster, detrimental to peace in all affected regions and to American security. Its beneficiaries are Osama bin Laden and his co-religionists. The Bush Administration should investigate the facts of these cases; name the instigators of such policy; and ensure that none of them remain in any positions of responsibility. Executors of excellent ideas should be replaced with responsible professionals who will accept that Islam as such not some allegedly aberrant form of it—is the main identifiable threat to our global security in the coming century, and who understand that the attacks of September 11 reflect Islam's inherent link with violence and intolerance.

Accordingly, a coherent counter-terrorist strategy must entail denying Islam the foothold inside the West. Like communism, Islam relies on a domestic fifth column the Allah-worshiping Rosenbergs, Philbys, Blunts, and Hisses to subvert the civilized world. It also relies on an army of fellow-travelers, the latter-day Sartres and Shaws in the ivory towers, on liberal academics and opinion-makers [who] sympathize with Islam partly because it is a leading historical rival of the Western civilization they hate and partly because they long for a romanticized and sanitized Muslim past that substitutes for the authentic Western and Christian roots they have rejected.[xviii]

Those roots must be defended before it is too late, before the world rooted in Christian traditions and institutions and values known as Western succumbs to the demographic deluge of Islam. As Sam Francis has rightly pointed out,

Islam, a great and in many respects admirable faith, simply is not part of it, and those who subscribe to Islam and its civilization are aliens, regardless of their clothes, their professions or their places of residence.[xix]

Perhaps only one in a hundred communists was an active Soviet spy; maybe not one in a hundred Muslim immigrants is an active bin Laden asset. Nevertheless, managing the communist risk fifty years ago entailed denying entry visas (let alone permanent residences or passports) to self-avowed Party members. Doing the same now with bin Laden's potential recruits is the key to any meaningful anti-terrorist strategy, in conjunction with a frank, rational, and humane system of ethno-cultural profiling. The alternative is a non-targeted, sweepingly general clampdown on civil liberties that will be as ineffective in curbing Islamic extremism as it will be undoubtedly successful in making life less pleasant and less dignified for all of us. It is a matter of balance based on clearly defined strategy: those infringements of civil rights that are essential to anti-terrorist strategy should be open to scrutiny, and considered a painful sacrifice, or a purely tactical retreat, not as the mere brushing aside of irritating legal technicalities.

Dr. Trifkovic is the director of The Rockford Institute Center for International Affairs and foreign-affairs editor for Chronicles.

[MegaSilver]

An oldie but still a MUST-read. Though I'm sure most of us agree with it already.

[unhyphenated-conservative]

But we've got to keep importing immigrants. Low wages and foreign students are far more important that national security.

[milford421]

It is an Excellent read. Thank you for providing it.

Steve Emerson, Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer...all have been vindicated by recent events.

www.danielpipes.org
www.jihadwatch.org

Spread the word.

[Siamese Princess]

Mr. Trifkovic has written a number of articles (even before 9-11) about Islam for Chronicles magazine and a excellent book called The Sword of the Prophet.

[backhoe]

-Islam, a Religion of Peace®? Some links...--

[American in Israel]

In reality Mr. Siddiqui recognizes only one nation that of Islam... Imam Siddiqui, the leader of one of the largest Islamic groups in the United States, knows that the level of naivete and denial among Americans is nothing short of astonishing

Pakistan developed nuclear weapons, and is our friend in the war on terror.

Right... If one Jihadi has a nuke, they all have them. Iran is developing plutonium enrichment, not uranium enrichment as they already have A bombs, now they want H bombs.

Islam forced the world into a complete economic collapse in its first Jihad, it seems they are determined to do it again. When you have a brush fire and are stomping out sparks as fast as you can, it is frustrating to have a large crowd of Euro-weenes on the sidelines not wanting to get their feet dirty. I would say the level of naivete and denial among Europeons is a hundred times that of Americans.

[Old Sarge Ski]

Why is everyone wringing their ands about this. We (i.e., Western/Judeo-Christian civilization) have been at war with these creatures for over 1400 years. When my umpteenth removed grandfathers helped beat back the Islamic hordes from the gates of Vienna there was no formal treaty ending the war...they just went away..and we just assumed we had won. Now, several centuries later, we are beginning to see the errors of our ways. They are, as Jerry Pournelle has so correctly said "to be cast out from all protection of law; declared to be among the enemies-general of human kind, to be dealt with as wolves are."

[Old Sarge Ski]

Why is everyone wringing their ands about this. We (i.e., Western/Judeo-Christian civilization) have been at war with these creatures for over 1400 years. When my umpteenth removed grandfathers helped beat back the Islamic hordes from the gates of Vienna there was no formal treaty ending the war...they just went away..and we just assumed we had won. Now, several centuries later, we are beginning to see the errors of our ways. They are, as Jerry Pournelle has so correctly said "to be cast out from all protection of law; declared to be among the enemies-general of human kind, to be dealt with as wolves are."