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.
Agreed completely…. Islam does not and has never had anything to do with peace and it was a grave error on GW Bush’s part to take the PC road on this issue after 9/11. I also have to wonder about the role of every single Christian in North America who claims to follow Christ and how seriously they view the concept of reaching the lost. One can never know how history could have been changed but one has to wonder if the gospel of Christ was ever presented to this family and what a difference it would to the path of life that was chosen. These words are ringing….Mark 16:15 And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. Hebrews 4:12 For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.
On 9/11, once it became clear it was Muslims who had done it, I was posting on FR that we had been struck in a blind spot in our Political system, because we had NO WAY to deal with a religion as an opponent.
Sadly I certainly feel vindicated in that outlook more then a decade later...
Actually, it wasn't at the point in the race timed to achieve maximum carnage.
They were about two hours late for that. I've been wondering why they were delayed. If they had been much later, they might have had to call it off as the crowd was thinning more and more.
Did they build the bombs just before the attack, and it took longer than they thought to build them? Did someone else provide the bombs to them, and that person got the bombs to them later than planned? Did someone else drive them to the scene, and that person was late?
No it doesn't. If the author doesn't know what Dzhokhar meant by that after last week he'll never get it.
In 1786, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson met with Arab diplomats from Tunisia, who were conducting terror raids and piracy against American ships (Barbary Pirates). Writing to John Jay, Thomas Jefferson described what he saw as the main issue and the reason why they were attacking Americans who had done them no harm. The following quote is from Thomas Jefferson....
“We took the liberty to make some inquiries concerning the Grounds of their pretensions to make war upon a Nation who had done them no Injury, and observed that we considered all mankind as our Friends who had done us no wrong, nor had given us any provocation. THE AMBASSADOR ANSWERED US THAT IT WAS FOUNDED ON THE LAWS OF THEIR PROPHET, THAT IT WAS WRITTEN IN THEIR KORAN, THAT ALL NATIONS WHO SHOULD NOT HAVE ACKNOWLEDGED THEIR AUTHORITY WERE SINNERS, THAT IT WAS THEIR RIGHT AND DUTY TO MAKE WAR UPON THEM WHEREVER THEY COULD BE FOUND, AND TO MAKE SLAVES OF ALL THEY COULD TAKE AS PRISONERS, AND THAT EVERY MUSSELMAN (MUSLIM) WHO SHOULD BE SLAIN IN BATTLE WAS SURE TO GO TO PARADISE"
The Solution of Islamic Terrorism - Black Jack
Just before World War I, there were a number of terrorist attacks on the United States forces in the Philippines, by Muslim extremists. General Pershing captured 50 terrorists, and had them tied to posts for execution. He had his is men slaughter two pigs, in front of the horrified terrorists
The soldiers soaked their bullets in the pig’s blood, and proceeded to execute 49 of the terrorists by firing squad. The soldiers dug a big hole, dumped in the terrorist’s bodies, and covered them in pig blood, entrails, etc. They let the 50th man go.
And for the next 42 years, there was not a single Muslim extremist attack anywhere in the world.
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