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Jihad Will Not Be Wished Away: But willful blindness remains the order of the day
National Review ^ | 04/21/2013 | Andrew McCarthy

Posted on 04/21/2013 6:45:39 AM PDT by SeekAndFind

‘Outlook: Islam.” So reads the personal webpage of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who ravaged Boston this week, along with his now-deceased brother and fellow jihadist, Tamerlan — namesake of a 14th-century Muslim warrior whose campaigns through Asia Minor are legendary for their brutalization of non-Muslims.

Brutalizing our own non-Muslim country has been the principal objective of jihadists for the last 20 years. This week marks a new and chilling chapter: the introduction on our shores of the tactics the self-styled mujahideen have used to great, gory effect for the past decade in Afghanistan and Iraq.

At a point in the race timed to achieve maximum carnage, the Tsarnaev brothers bombed the Boston Marathon with improvised explosive devices. IEDs are small but potent homemade bombs — crude explosives and unforgiving shrapnel encased in easily portable pressure cookers. The bombs are simple to make. They won’t kill thousands or even hundreds of people like hijacked planes or heavy chemical explosives will. But that’s not the objective. The goal is to instill terror into the flow of everyday life. IEDs are made for “soft” targets. They are easily camouflaged amid the traffic, the everyday debris, and the eight-year-old boys frolicking as they wait for Dad to cross the finish line. Willful blindness remains the order of the day, as it has since the World Trade Center was bombed in 1993. It is freely conceded that, when the identities and thus the motivation of the Marathon terrorists were not known, it would have been irresponsible to dismiss any radical ideology as, potentially, the instigator. But in our politically correct, up-is-down culture, to suggest “Outlook: Islam” was unthinkable. So the most likely scenario — namely, that jihadists who have been at war with us for two decades had, yet again, attacked innocent civilians — became the least likely scenario in the minds of media pundits. Instead, they brazenly prayed (to Gaia, I’m sure) for white conservative culprits with Tea Party hats and Rush 24/7 subscriptions. As our Kevin D. Williamson quipped, the “literal Caucasians” they got were not quite what they had in mind.

To listen to the commentary was to assume that the jihad’s nimble post-9/11 shift from heavy bombs and airliner missiles to IEDs had never happened. Prior to 2009, much agitprop was made over the thousands of American troops killed and maimed by IEDs in Iraq — they signified, the Left told us, that George Bush had brought al-Qaeda to previously jihad-free Baghdad. So did IEDs at the Marathon mean the same jihad had now come to Boston? Perish the thought. Surely the Marathon bombing was the work of either the right-wing extremists Janet Napolitano has been warning us about since 2009, or those notoriously violent Catholics and Evangelicals that today’s Army equates with Hamas and Hezbollah.

But no: It was in fact the jihad that stubbornly refuses to be wished away. It will have to be defeated. It was never a molehill we were exaggerating into Mohammed’s mountain. After 1,400 years of aggression, we can safely say it is not anytime soon going to evolve into the ballyhooed “internal struggle for personal betterment” — not for the tens of millions of Muslims for whom Islamic supremacism is, quite simply, Islam.

So will we be roused to meet the challenge? Doesn’t seem like it. On Friday morning, the damning and utterly predictable details began pouring in the second the jihadists were identified — “Outlook: Islam”; a YouTube playlist called “Terrorists” that included the ditty, “I will dedicate my life to jihad”; a wife who abruptly converted to Islam and began dressing in what a neighbor called “the Islamic style”; an apparent reverence for the notorious sharia jurist Sheikh Feiz Mohammed. Yet the media commentary, even if it grudgingly mentions these things, internalizes none of them. “How shocking it is,” we’ve repeatedly heard, “that the brothers Tsarnaev want to mass-murder Americans. After all, they’re Chechen Muslims, and the Chechens’ beef is with the Russians, not us.”

Good grief. It is the Uighurs all over again. You’ll recall the Uighurs — they were a group of Turkic-speaking jihadists from the Xinjiang region of China, detained at Guantanamo Bay because they trained in Afghanistan with an al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist organization (the East Turkistan Islamic Movement). At least some of them fought against American forces. Nevertheless, we released them. Stroking its bloated chin, our government rationalized that they could not be enemy combatants because they weren’t our enemies — their beef was really with China, right? After all, Islam is a Religion of Peace and we’re very nice people, so why should we assume they might have a problem with us?

We are in a war driven by ideology. “Violent extremism,” which is the label the government and the commentariat prefer to put on our enemies, is not an ideology — it is the brutality that radical ideologies yield. Our enemies’ ideology is Islamic supremacism. To challenge and defeat an ideological movement, you have to understand and confront their vision of the world. Imposing your own assumptions and biases will not do. Islamic supremacists do not see a world of Westphalian nation-states. They do not distinguish between Russia and America the way they distinguish between Muslims and non-Muslims. Their ideology frames matters as Dar al-Islam versus Dar al-Harb: the realm of Islam in a fight to the death against the realm of war — which is everyone and everyplace else.

The fact that you think this is nuts, or that I’m nuts for saying it out loud, has nothing to do with whether they believe it. They do — and they don’t care, even a little, what you think. You do not defeat an ideology by hoping it will change or disappear. You have to challenge it, to make it defend its baleful tenets in the light of day. You cannot protect yourself from its violent outbursts absent understanding its teaching, reluctantly accepting that its teaching will inevitably lead some Muslims to strike out savagely, and committing to a pro-active, intelligence-based counterterrorism strategy — one that scraps political correctness and ferrets out the jihadists before they strike.

Asked about his “outlook,” Dzhokhar Tsarnaev offered a pregnant response, “Islam,” that raises more questions than it answers. There are all kinds of Islam, including the supremacist kind that is far more widely held than we’re comfortable acknowledging. Until we get beyond that discomfort, until we are prepared to ask, “What Islam?” — and until we are prepared to treat Islamic supremacism as the pariah it should be — Boston’s hellish week will remain our recurring nightmare.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the executive director of the Philadelphia Freedom Center. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy.


TOPICS: Front Page News; War on Terror
KEYWORDS: andrewmccarthy; bostonjihad; bostonmarathon; jihad; jihadinamerica; terrorism; willfulblindness; willfullyblind
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1 posted on 04/21/2013 6:45:39 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
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To: SeekAndFind

Stop Jihad Now!


2 posted on 04/21/2013 6:47:16 AM PDT by Paladin2
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To: SeekAndFind

Someone posted a pic recently that sums this all up.

It was a women in a burqua with only her eyes visible, beside a women wearing a black blindfold.

One labeled east and other labeled west and the caption, “Islam and the West in one picture” or something like that...


3 posted on 04/21/2013 6:59:49 AM PDT by GraceG
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To: SeekAndFind

Andrew McCarthy makes some excellent points in this article. I think he should have also made the point that Islamic supremacists are fundamentalists. Muslims who don’t believe in jihad are heretics, and jihad means war waged against unbelievers until the prophetic end, a world ruled by Islam.


4 posted on 04/21/2013 7:00:10 AM PDT by CitizenUSA (Why celebrate evil? Evil is easy. Good is the goal worth striving for.)
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To: SeekAndFind; TigersEye; Marine_Uncle; justa-hairyape; onyx; NormsRevenge; SunkenCiv; blam; ...
Thanks for posting this.

Maybe if we print up flyers and drop them on doorsteps, people will start to wake up.

5 posted on 04/21/2013 7:03:23 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach ((The Global Warming Hoax was a Criminal Act....where is Al Gore?))
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To: GraceG
Found it:

Sums it up nicely...

6 posted on 04/21/2013 7:03:44 AM PDT by GraceG
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To: SeekAndFind

Jehad is a political partnership with our current administration.


7 posted on 04/21/2013 7:04:45 AM PDT by mountainlion (Live well for those that did not make it back.)
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To: SeekAndFind

If only George Bush would simply read this out loud at a press conference, and lay it at the feet of the American people. Alas, he also is a politically corrected coward.

Islam must indeed be treated as the pariah it is, and made responsible for the actions of its adherents. The war is, was, and ever shall be against the totalitarian political ideology known as Islam.

It must not be treated as a religion until it cleanses itself of all thoughts of violent, coercive supremacism.


8 posted on 04/21/2013 7:04:53 AM PDT by ecomcon
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To: dennisw; Cachelot; Nix 2; veronica; Catspaw; knighthawk; Alouette; Optimist; weikel; Lent; GregB; ..
Middle East and terrorism, occasional political and Jewish issues Ping List. High Volume

If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.

..................

9 posted on 04/21/2013 7:06:24 AM PDT by SJackson (The Pilgrims—Doing the jobs Native Americans wouldn’t do !)
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To: SeekAndFind
Just a few more of Obama's "Undocumented Explosives Hobbyists".

Dear Leader says "Don't Be An Islamophobe."


10 posted on 04/21/2013 7:11:39 AM PDT by Iron Munro (Welcome to Obama-Land - EVERYTHING NOT FORBIDDEN IS COMPULSORY)
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To: Paladin2

It’s open season on these bastards. Time to put away the PC bullsh!t and get down to bidness.


11 posted on 04/21/2013 7:14:31 AM PDT by unixfox (Abolish Slavery, Repeal The 16th Amendment!)
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To: CitizenUSA

RE: Andrew McCarthy makes some excellent points in this article.

The man has taken it upon himself to understand the Jihadist mindset ever since he successfully prosecuted the Blind Sheik - the Inspiration behind the First World Trade center bombing.


12 posted on 04/21/2013 7:16:00 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
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To: ecomcon

I prefer Dick Cheney or Rudy to deliver the reading.


13 posted on 04/21/2013 7:17:55 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach ((The Global Warming Hoax was a Criminal Act....where is Al Gore?))
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To: SeekAndFind
Tamerlan= tamerlane, late14th early 15th century turkic muslim king known as "the sword of Islam". Glad to know I'm not the only one who noticed.

CC

14 posted on 04/21/2013 7:18:51 AM PDT by Celtic Conservative (Tease not the dragon, for thou art crunchy when roasted and taste good with ketchup)
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To: GraceG; LucyT; onyx; Brad's Gramma; Cindy

Thanks had not seen that before.


15 posted on 04/21/2013 7:19:22 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach ((The Global Warming Hoax was a Criminal Act....where is Al Gore?))
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To: SeekAndFind
Willful blindness ... I heard a good example of it expounded yesterday by the Boston Globe's columnist plagiarist, Mike Barnicle.

Barnicle was asked if he feared that Bostonians would now change their attitudes toward Muslims. He answered that he only feared a "fringe element" who would use the event to be "anti-immigrant" -- but reassured the audience that Boston had always been so tolerant, so open, so loving to ALL immigrants, that gosh, they welcomed everybody! And that they would continue to do so.

16 posted on 04/21/2013 7:23:45 AM PDT by shhrubbery! (NIH!)
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To: GraceG
Google has this lengthy list of pictures,....not including the one you posted.:

Google search on Images for " the state of the world in just one Picture"

-

17 posted on 04/21/2013 7:29:08 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach ((The Global Warming Hoax was a Criminal Act....where is Al Gore?))
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To: SeekAndFind

It’s a willful and deliberate decision to forgive radical terrorists, because they share the terrorists’ hatred for this country.


18 posted on 04/21/2013 7:36:09 AM PDT by I want the USA back (Pi$$ed off yet?)
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To: ecomcon
The problem with the U.S. when it comes to this sort of thing -- and this goes back decades through multiple administrations, folks -- is that we can't possibly pursue any kind of initiative against radical Islam when our Middle Eastern policy for more than 20 years has been predicated on the need to protect Islamic royal families in places like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

Let's be honest and acknowledge our own political bias while we're at it. If a Democratic president had stood up after 9/11 and publicly proclaimed that "Islam is a religion of peace," we would have rightly laughed it off as the idiotic rantings of a retarded baboon.

19 posted on 04/21/2013 7:50:50 AM PDT by Alberta's Child ("I am the master of my fate ... I am the captain of my soul.")
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To: GGpaX4DumpedTea

Later


20 posted on 04/21/2013 7:56:37 AM PDT by GGpaX4DumpedTea (I am a Tea Party descendant...steeped in the Constitutional Republic given to us by the Founders.)
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