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by Raymond Ibrahim

American Middle East analysts often claim that Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood is a moderate organization, nothing like the more radical Salafis. If true, what do we make of the fact that the most intolerant, anti-American, hate-filled Salafis and jihadis also happen to be the greatest and staunchest supporters of Morsi? Doesn’t such unequivocal support indicate shared ideologies and goals?

Consider: A few weeks ago, while discussing the ongoing protests against Egypt’s President Muhammad Morsi—himself a leader of the Brotherhood—Sheikh Abdullah Badr, an Al Azhar trained scholar and professor of Islamic exegesis, made the following assertion on live TV:

“I swear to Allah, the day those who went out [to protest], and at their head, the [Coptic] Christians—I say this at the top of my voice—the day they think to come near Dr. Morsi, I—we—will pop their eyes out, and the eyes of all those who support them, even America; and America will burn, and all its inhabitants. Be assured, the day Dr. Morsi is touched by any hand whichever, and connected to whomever, by Allah it will be the last day for us. We will neither leave them, nor show them any mercy.”

Badr’s “radicalism” is well documented. On various occasions he has openly declared on live TV that he hates and is disgusted by Christians, that he will “cut the tongue” of anyone who offends Islam (adding “Let the whole world burn, but Islam not be mocked”), and that those Egyptians protesting against Morsi are “mischief makers” who should be “hung on trees” (a distinct allusion to Islamic crucifixion as prescribed in Koran 5:33). Interestingly, he was recently arrested again, but not for the aforementioned hate-mongering and incitements to kill those against Morsi, but rather for insulting an Egyptian actress on live TV, calling her, among other things, a “whore.”

At any rate, under Hosni Mubarak, Badr and other intolerant Islamic supremacists were imprisoned. Under Mohammed Morsi, Badr—as well as numerous jihadis who were on death-row for their acts of terror—have been freed.

This alone speaks volumes concerning the behind-the-scenes relationship between the Brotherhood and jihadis.

Then there is radical cleric Wagdi Ghoneim, who was sentenced to five years under Mubarak and banished from Egypt for his anti-infidel hate-mongering—again, only reportedly to return under Morsi. He, too, is as radical as they come. For example, after cursing the late Coptic pope to hell and damnation during his funeral, he openly threatened Egypt’s Christian minority with genocide. Among other “pledges of loyalty” to Morsi, he has incited Muslims to wage jihad on and even kill anyone protesting against the Muslim Brotherhood president, portraying such Muslims as apostates who want to see Islam wiped out of Egypt.

Salafi sheikhs Badr and Ghoneim are in good company. Months back, any number of radical clerics went out of their way to show their support for Morsi—including by issuing fatwas calling for the deaths of any and all Egyptians who protest against his rule.

Thus Islam’s most radical Salafis and jihadis see themselves as defenders of the Muslim Brotherhood, even as Western analysts and policy makers insist there is a deep divide between the “moderate” Brotherhood on the one hand, and the “radical” Salafis on the other.

Yet the question remains: If Morsi and the Brotherhood are “moderates”—or, as U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper once described them, “largely secular“—why do the most vile “radicals” fully support them? Could it be that the dividing line between them—a line which hopeful or naïve Western policymakers are heavily banking on—is not so stark after all, is not so black and white?

In fact, radical Salafi support for “moderate” Morsi is simply a reflection of the fact that the radicals, the Salafis and jihadis—as opposed to many Western leaders and analysts—understand and fully support the Muslim Brotherhood president’s agenda: The establishment of full Sharia law in Egypt.

And, once empowered, Sharia has no black and whites—this they all know.

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Raymond Ibrahim, a Middle East and Islam specialist, is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum. A widely published author, he is best known for his book,  The Al Qaeda Reader .  Mr. Ibrahim's dual-background—born and raised in the U.S. by Egyptian parents —has provided him with unique advantages to understanding of the Western and Middle Eastern mindsets.

by Dr. Zuhdi Jasser

When it became clear that the suspects in the Boston terror attacks were the Tsarnaev brothers, two young Muslim men, media calls poured in for my thoughts into the motivations of these radicalized men. My life’s work has been dedicated to countering the narrative these brothers got swept into.

But even in the wake of Islamist terror, media wanted to focus on “fears” of a so-called backlash against American Muslims that could ensue following such attacks. In a free society, violence may certainly breed further violence. But, thought leaders in media, government and academe play a major role in shaping what are the dominant narratives.

In the end it’s all about the narrative, and for too long the narrative in the Muslim community has been one-sided.

In the U.S., the Muslim Brotherhood legacy groups, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, have dominated the American Muslim narrative. Their strategy and constituency demand an obsession on “Muslims as victims” or “Muslims as misunderstood” especially when attacks like those in Boston occur. Almost universally, the current predominant narrative is: “Muslims are victimized by American hate at home and abroad.” Nowhere to be found is the counter-narrative that “Muslims love American liberty and law more than that of ‘Muslim nations.’ ”

These groups may not preach violence but they have developed the Islamist grievance narrative into a monopoly on the Muslim consciousness. They ignore the fact that our best protection against anti-Muslim bigotry would be for the public to see us Muslims actually take ownership beyond the denial. America would then see us as assets rather than as liabilities.

This victim narrative played a profound role in creating these monsters. Recently, Boston saw two high-profile convictions of American Muslims for aiding al-Qaida: Aafia Siddiqui from Brandeis in 2010 and Tarek Mehanna from MIT in 2011. In response, far too many local Muslim leaders decried them as victims and portrayed them as such in area mosques and the community.

The first story in The Arizona Republic about local American Muslims after the bombing gave leading Islamist apologists like CAIR-AZ’s Imraan Siddiqi a venue to selfishly admonish Americans not to victimize innocent Muslims by seeking “retribution.” That seems hardly an appropriate talking point in the wake of terror committed by Islamist radicals on our watch. America needs to see us own the problem.

Attacks like those in Boston need to be a unifying point for us to address the underlying root of Islamist extremism — political Islam. We must start by looking at what starts them down the path to radicalization, not what ends that path. The bombing is not just about the brothers Tsarnaev. They are the tip of the iceberg of a global battle between narratives.

The battle of narratives needs to give Muslim youth an alternative that helps them fall in love with their American identity while also staying strong in their faith and fully rejecting the intoxicant that is political Islam.

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Muslims need to take ownership of this fight and not allow the Islamist grievance narrative to monopolize the identity of our youth. True non-Islamist Muslims need to present a louder voice that says we are proud of the totality which is America, our nation, and would rather live nowhere else or in no other way.

Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser is the president of the Phoenix-based American Islamic Forum for Democracy,  founded in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on the United States as an effort to provide an American Muslim voice advocating for the preservation of the founding principles of the United States Constitution, liberty and freedom, through the separation of mosque and state. He is the author of Battle for the Soul of Islam. Dr. Jasser served 11 years as a medical officer in the U. S. Navy and was Staff Internist for the Office of the Attending Physician to the U.S. Congress.

Editor's Note:  As reported by ClarionProject.org, Toronto, Canada Police Inspector Ricky Veerppan recently threatened that if Rabbi Mendel Kaplan allowed anti-Islamist activist Pamela Geller,  to speak at his synagogue, Kaplan would lose his job as a chaplain with the police department. The following is a letter written by Salim Mansur, member of the Board of Directors of the Center for Islamic Pluralism, to Police Chief Eirc Jolliffe of the York Regional Police.

I am writing to you this letter on hearing pressure applied to Rabbi Mendel Kaplan of the Chabad Flamingo Synagogue in Thornhill to cancel an event with Ms. Pamela Geller.

I am a Muslim, a tenured professor in a prestigious Canadian university, the University of Western Ontario in London. I am appalled that in this day and age we continue to hear regularly how the liberal democratic tradition of Canada and the West is being systematically shredded by institutions sworn to protect it.

Free speech is the most fundamental right of a free society; constrain it, strip it, shred it, and then let us not be surprised our society will be turned into a society such as one from where I fled as a young man to find freedom in the West, and I remain ever grateful that Canada took me in and gave me the opportunity to pursue my own dreams.

I pray you consider any decision you make that ends up taking another step in undermining the tradition of free speech that made the West, and Canada as a part of it, the most flourishing, open, and free culture in the entire history of mankind. Each one of us are responsible that this tradition is preserved, protected, and passed on to the unborn generations what we inherited.

I submit your intentions might very well be of some merit as a guardian of law and order. But those pushing for preventing Ms. Pamela Geller from speaking by putting pressure on Rabbi Mendel to deny the use of his synagogue for holding her event are people I know very well.

[ad] These are people, Muslims as I am, who come from cultures that have no respect for individual rights and freedoms enshrined in our constitution, and while making home here in Canada have no respect for the culture of this country. They need to learn the culture of a free society, of a society that is open to debates and discussions however painful this might be to someone else's sensibilities.

But if you concede to their demands, all that you would be doing is indulging them, heeding their wishes and threats, and slowly, intentionally or not, bending Canada's tradition in the direction of the ruined cultures of these people which they have brought with them and want to push into our society.

I hope you will think hard and think clearly given your responsibility and defend the tradition of liberal democracy based on rule of law, individual freedom and free speech. I might just remind you that it was in defending this tradition that time and time again your compatriots went across oceans to distant places and were prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice so that freedom there might take root by defeating the forces of tyranny.

It often takes immense courage to do what is right, whether to refuse going to the back of a bus in a segregated society or protecting the right of someone to speak, especially when one disagrees with what might be spoken.

I pray God gives you the courage to do what is right in this instance.

Sincerely,

Salim Mansur, PhD
Associate Professor
Department of Political Science
University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario

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See ClarionProject.org's interview with Salim Mansur:

Moderation Is Anathema to Islamists

By Barry Rubin

The current conventional wisdom about terrorism, Islamism, and the Middle East is being bent, but not broken, by two events. On one hand, there is the Boston bombing; on the other hand, developments in Syria and to a lesser extent Egypt. What’s happening?

In the Middle East, the misbehavior of Islamist movements is becoming more apparent. In Egypt, there is the repression of the Muslim Brotherhood regime, which may actually intend to create a non-democratic Sharia state! Parallel behavior in the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Tunisia, and Turkey is under-reported but occasionally surfaces.

The most important single story at the moment, though, is Syria. Basically, the Obama Administration has woken up and recognized what was easily apparent two years ago: They are helping to put radical, anti-American Islamists into power! They are helping to provide them with advanced weapons which might be used for activities other than what is intended!

When the government wakes up it nudges the media to get up also. What is quite startling is the extent to which the mass media is responsive to government policy, at least this government’s policy. I want to explain this carefully in order to be fair.

Take this article in the New York Times, which can be summarized as saying that Islamist rebels’ gains in Syria create a dilemma for the United States.  Now this is an article about U.S. policy so naturally it describes how that policy is changing.

Yet at the same time, one wants to ask: Why haven’t the policy consequences of this situation been described continuously in the past? If a big truck is headed straight at you on the highway, might not the media sitting in the front passenger seat shout out a warning? Does it have to wait for the driver to notice and then it can say something?

And even so the diffidence is astonishing. It is good that the newspaper notices that the rebels are largely comprised of, "Political Islamists inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood and others who want an Islamic-influenced legal code." But why even now one can say “Islamic-influenced?”

For many years they have made it clear that they seek a total Islamic (in their interpretation) state. It is the precise equivalent of describing Chinese Communists more than sixty years ago, as they approached victory in their country’s civil war, as “agrarian reformers.”

This story also parallels the much larger-scale debate about the Boston bombings. There’s a long piece in the New York Times about the Boston bombers. The lead gives the flavor of its argument:

“It was a blow the immigrant boxer could not withstand: after capturing his second consecutive title as the Golden Gloves heavyweight champion of New England in 2010, Tamerlan Anzorovich Tsarnaev, 23, was barred from the national Tournament of Champions because he was not a United States citizen.”

The title of the piece is, “A Battered Dream, Then a Violent Path.” In other words, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was not allowed to win a boxing championship because he wasn’t a U.S. citizen. Blocked by bad treatment from America, he became more Islamic and turned to terrorism.

Of course, it is vital to develop an accurate picture of the terrorists’ background and explain the factors providing a personal motivation. On the other hand, it is something quite different to suggest that if the United States was nicer to Muslims and perhaps gave people citizenship more easily, there would not have been terrorism in Boston.

Why is this fundamentally dishonest in the way it is being presented in most of the public debate? Because the voices enhanced by control over the most powerful microphones focus in on the political theme they want to push, excluding other factors in the context of their topic.

Where to begin? The article includes a photo of the future terrorist as a baby in Dagestan with his parents and his uncle. His uncle is wearing a Russian army uniform. Now again in the photo he is a baby but the point might be raised: Isn’t Tamerlan Tsarnaev more a product of Russian than of U.S. conditions? After all, his family was involved in a conflict against the Russian state; he and his brother were largely shaped by that environment. He went back and forth to Russia and took instruction from terrorist groups which had arrived at al-Qaida from that basis.

But the authors cannot focus on this issue. Why not? Well, obviously they want to blame America first but also there is a big land mine there. Pointing out that immigrants—legal or otherwise—may bring with them hatred, grievances, and cultural formations inimical to America that makes a point in the immigration debate which would be the exact opposite of what they want.

Of course, different people bring different attitudes. It is the job of the immigration system to profile the immigrants to decide who is going to be a good citizen or even who should be let in. Was it a mistake that Tamerlan’s brother did become a U.S. citizen pretty easily? No, it was neither a mistake nor a conspiracy. It was the way profiling was defined that made it possible. 

To have a serious discussion about why some immigrants become loyal, productive citizens and others become terrorists would be an important discussion. But it cannot happen at present because it would have to include factoring in such things as personal responsibility, gratitude to one's adopted country, and even--totally unthinkable--the need to keep in mind the  immigrant's original home. The latter point is not to make it a focus to block people from the Middle East.

On the contrary, those who wanted to flee or had to do so were often motivated because they wanted to live in a democratic, free country and not under revolutionary Islamism. If you are in the United States, you will be meeting a lot more such people, especially from Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria very soon.

A second point would be to stress the benefits that the Tsarnaev brothers and their family were given. Among them were welfare payments, a scholarship, acceptance without bias into American society, permissiveness even when they violated its tenets and laws (beating up his girlfriend),  not doing anything to them despite suspicion of being potential terrorists (unlike what would have happened in Russia), and so on. Against that long list of things, the article had to focus on the one setback as they key to everything.

Here, too, however, the articles of the New York Times article cannot go. For to step into this territory would require considering the failure of a historic policy to assimilate immigrants that has been replaced by Multiculturalism; the abandonment of patriotism and the distaste for America and its society daily expressed by the citizens of Boston met by the Tsarnaevs; and the idea of entitlement and the welfare state that pervaded their concept of America.

Yes, there is ample material for biographical and psychological writing. But what about, for example, this potential lead for the article:

Tamerlan Tsarnaev found in America a society that did not require him to become loyal to the country, to understand how well it treated his family, and how he could actually spend his time reading terrorist sites on the Internet while his beaten wife worked 80 hours a week and his family collected welfare. Spoiled by good treatment from America he became more Islamic and turned to terrorism.

Why is such a theme inconceivable? Because of the reporters’ politics and ideology. Deborah Sontag has won lots of awards. But in my neighborhood she’s best known as the reporter who covered Israel at a time when it was beset by the worst Palestinian terrorism. And then, after the Palestinian leaders had rejected peace and a two state solution, when they were fostering the deliberate murder of civilians she concluded that they, “blocked by bad treatment from [Israel]…turned to terrorism.”

The journalist Joan Walsh explained this ruling ideology from a different angle. All this stuff about Islam and Chechens “In the end, it’s not important.” She added:

“I really do think that this whole discussion…proves once again that race is entirely a political and social construct….We really don’t want to acknowledge these boys have as much in common with Timothy McVeigh and – actually, more to the point, with school shooters. The Columbine killers, James Holmes then really they do with hardened jihadis….They are a product of America as well as a product of alienation.”

One wonders why Walsh didn’t say: They are a product of America as well as a product of alienation, Islam, and a radical revolutionary Islamist movement.”

She couldn’t say that as that would transcend her ideology and make her unpopular in her milieu. Her internal cultural-intellectual censor wouldn’t let her do that.

Reducing the motives for terrorism into psychobabble is to disarm one’s society from being able to combat terrorism. It is amazing to see a democratic society’s intellectual assets turn to the task of systematic obfuscation as even the most ridiculous arguments flourish.

For example, people who go on suicide terrorist missions don’t get to be hardened jihadis because they don’t live long enough. And the whole point is that they can behave that way because they don’t need to be “hardened.” They can already:

(1) Settle into an identity that fits with revolutionary activity and terrorism;

(2) Get huge encouragement from an existing movement that even rules entire countries;

(3) Receive direct training from terrorist forces that operate in safe havens;

(4) Don’t believe that their identities and grievances are mere constructs. One doesn’t fight and die for a construct.

I am strongly reminded of a discussion many years ago with a brilliant CIA psychiatrist who laid the foundation for understanding the thinking of modern terrorists. One of the things he did was to divide them into two categories. There were those whose parents would, at least generally, approve of their violent acts and those that wouldn’t.

He didn’t mean here that the individual parents would cheer them—though that was possible—but that they were approved of by their social-intellectual milieu.  That’s why Islamist terrorists are numbered in the tens of thousands and people like Holmes and McVeigh can be counted on the fingers of your two hands.

A few days ago I asked a first-rate, veteran journalist with much experience in this area whether she had ever interviewed parents who denounced their children’s actions. She replied, “No. And if they did they’d know enough to keep their mouths shut.” Of course, that would be because in Palestinian society they would be themselves isolated and renounced for opposing jihad or at least armed struggle.

In the Boston case, the Tsarnaev brother’s mother cheered them and blamed America. What is in play here is not alienation from America but hatred of it based on a pre-existing template, combined with a willingness to take its benefits as if they were owed to oneself.

Note: The title of this article is drawn from Oscar Wilde, "The Love that Dare Not Speak Its Name."  That's a phrase from his poem about homosexuality in Victorian England. Every society has such things forbidden to discuss. The problem for American society is that its official quarters act as if the country is still in its Victorian Age and that race, gender, religious bias, and homosexuality fall into that category. In fact, there are quite a different set of unspeakable truths, taboo concepts for American society, defined by a new version of intellectual repression called Political Correctness. 

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Barry Rubin is a professor at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel, the Director of the Global Research and International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, and a Senior Fellow at the International Policy Institute for Counterterrorism. Rubin has written and edited more than 40 books on the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy, with publishers including Harvard, Yale, Oxford, and Cambridge University Press.

By Barry Rubin

Now that the two (main at least) terrorists from the Boston Marathon attack have been killed or captured we enter a new phase, the phase in which the dominant Politically Correct (but Factually Incorrect) forces try to explain away the attack.

Can this be done? Will they really try? Well, yes. True, as one of my correspondents remarked it is much easier to obfuscate far distant Benghazi than the total shutdown and horror in the middle of a major American city. Yet the spin-masters are already at work.

The first step must be, in part, a stalling technique but it sets the pattern for what is to come.  As, in the words of a Reuters story, the “Boston Marathon bombing investigation turns to motive,” the motive must be obfuscated.

The Reuters piece is a good start. The article spends seven paragraphs discussing the parents' claim that the two brothers were framed. This suggests that the mass media and politicians will not shrink from suggesting—perhaps I should say, gives fair hearing—to bizarre conspiracy theories and doubts. People shouldn’t believe these completely, is the theme, but you just can’t be too sure that two young Muslims would have any reason to harm Americans.

Indeed, there are now witnesses who heard the two terrorists’ mother claiming that September 11 was a U.S. plot to make people hate Muslims. That's where playing with that kind of fire leads.

In the article, the word "Islam" is not mentioned, except to say that they once lived in one predominantly Muslim country and another place they lived, Dagestan, is "a southern Russian province that lies at the heart of a violent Islamist insurgency." Here, we have another technique, minimize Islam as a factor and turn it into background noise.

Obviously, this will not apply completely both because the elephant in the room is too big and there is still some journalistic integrity in places. Both the Washington Post and Mother Jones took a lead in exposing the You-Tube likes of one of the terrorists which showed a propensity for Al-Qaeda views to say the least.

There are a lot of other quivers, however, in the arsenal of denial.

On “Face the Nation” Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick said that he had no idea why the Tsarnaev brothers would target "innocent men, women and children in the way that these two fellows did."

The answer, of course, is that these people were not regarded as innocent at all but as soldiers in the alleged Christian-Jewish war on Islam, precisely the same thinking that has been produced by Islamists for decades. Might September 11, 2001, be a clue here?

Of course, for Patrick to say that at this point in the investigation is understandable on one level, a refusal by a government official to remark on an ongoing investigation and a relief from “the police are stupid” or “Trayvon looks like the son I didn’t have” remarks by someone else. Yet what if this claim is sustained week after week until the heat is off?

NBC News has just reported that Tamerlan Tsarnaev had visited an Islamist radical six times in a mosque in Dagestan. The Caucasian/Chechen angle, however, does offer some hope for obfuscation. A lot of media time can be spent talking about that conflict. ( See the Christian Science Monitor: It isn't Islam but a Chechen tribal code of honor.)

Of course, if the young men were acting as Chechens they would have attacked a Russian and not an American target. The United States has not, even by the usual stretch of radical Islamist imagination, had anything to do with the conflict in Chechnya.

Then there will a frantic search for the “blame ourselves” theme. If the issue wasn’t such a tragic one, this would be humorous. Could America have acted more kindly toward these two brothers? Actually, the brotherly duo and their family was treated extraordinarily well by the country they betrayed.

They were allowed in (rather questionably) as permanent residents and suddenly large numbers of relatives were in the United States as well (so much for draconian immigration laws); one of the brothers became a citizen. They went to the best schools. One of them even got a scholarship. What did they learn there about the greatness of America? Was the seed of rage fertilized by the demonization of America as historically evil, greedy, racist and imperialist?

It is vital to understand the profound difference between these two and the September 11 hijackers, men who came on a mission of sabotage and murder. They reached the U.S. shore as enemies, reliable agents of revolutionary retribution.

These two young men, however, had a free choice. They had to actively close their minds to everything good they experienced and to adopt an ideology of hate. Only a very powerful force could move them in that direction. We have seen this frequently in the United Kingdom and France.

If such comparisons were to be made it would have to be acknowledged that there is a second-generation (though strictly speaking these two were first generation) time bomb implanted. That means one can expect many more attacks like this. But will anyone make that point?

Their normality will be used to make them seem … normal, their motive inexplicable. But on the contrary it is their very apparent normality, their seeming assimilation into American life, which makes the situation so scary.

Of course, a key argument is that Islam has nothing to do with this and that Islamism isn't directly behind it. A new theme that is being used by a lot of people in conversation is this one: “Muslims view ‘Islamic’ terrorists the same way Christians view the Westboro Baptist Church.”  

In other words, the terrorists in Boston and everywhere else don't represent much of anything but themselves. As I recall, the Westboro Baptist Church doesn't govern 10 countries.

But guess what? American Muslims do not agree that support for terrorism is minimal in their community. In 2011, 21 percent of all American Muslims and a higher number, 32 percent, of U.S.-born Muslims think there is a great deal or fair amount of support for terrorism among them. Why is the number of U.S.-born Muslims who believe this so much higher? Because they tend to be  younger people who are more in contact with social media and people like the two young Boston bombers. 

What about the Boston terrorists' mosque and other contacts in the Muslim community? Why didn’t they get an anti-extremist indoctrination there, an explanation of what Islam is all about?  They attended a Muslim Brotherhood sponsored mosque (but that won’t be said) and the Boston Muslim religious leadership is full of extremists (the evidence of which has long been available). The mosque even received a subsidy from Boston even as it hosted anti-American speakers who made the precise arguments used to rationalize terrorism.

We won’t be hearing much about these issues though.  Well, except for two aspects: The story is now circulating that one of the brothers was thrown out of his mosque for being too radical.

Then, there are all the denunciations of the terror attack by Islamist front groups. The New York Times article on motive cited these statements three times. I believe that groups like CAIR do not support the Boston attack or al-Qaeda. But they support many other terrorist attacks, and they support the ideology and set of beliefs on which the Boston attack is based. That's why so many associated with CAIR, even on a senior level, have become involved in anti-American terrorism.

Having followed this issue for many years, I have never heard of a single anti-radicalization program conducted by any mosque or “mainstream” Islamic group. Real moderates are isolated, vilified, denied media attention and even forced out of local mosques.

In a 2011 Pew poll fully half of American Muslims say their leaders aren’t doing enough to fight extremism. That last point can safely be used as a certified non-“Islamophobic” argument about where much of the problem lies. But it won’t be.

And of course there is the troubled youth angle to be played to the fullest. Yes, the tribulations of young adulthood and adolescence are factors. But only inasmuch as it makes them vulnerable to systematic indoctrination. In other words, their specific psychology and even personal experiences are not the motive any more than the childhood of a professional hit-man for the Mafia is.

It is also possible to fall back on the idea that the motive is impossible or irrelevant. Or in the words of Brian Levin, director of the center for the study of hate and extremism at California State University, "The individual, particular motivations of the perpetrators have little significance since there are multiple grievances out there and, in the Islamic world, there is free-floating angst." This was too much for even Bill Maher.

Another angle will be the growing story of governmental incompetence in using intelligence to stop terrorists. In part, this is unfair since there have also been many successes. A more important issue is why government officials, politicians, army officers, academics and journalists fear to point out the truth.

Look at the Nidal Hassan/Fort Hood case. Doing so is bad for their careers and reputation, as well as being sometimes counter to their ideology.

Then there is the partisan argument, as made most memorably by a journalist who openly hoped the terrorists would be white right-wingers. The question isn’t "Does this attack tell us something important about the real world," but "How can we explain it away so we don’t suffer losses in the effort to fundamentally transform America into a just, non-racist society?" There is an unnoticed dimension here. If the attack is seen as a political defeat it cannot be a learning experience.

And so it can be claimed that, in a sense, white right-wingers, or at least the kind of policies they would endorse, did cause the Boston attack. America was mean to these kids; it is aggressive in other countries, counter-terrorist protection was reduced by budget cuts.

Finally, there is a “full admission” fallback argument on which U.S. foreign policy is based. Sure it was those evil SOBs at al-Qaeda. That’s why other Islamists are relatively good. That’s why we have to promote them into power since only they can counter the “bad” Islamists. That’s why Islamist governments in Egypt, the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Syria, Tunisia and Turkey are good for you.

Indeed, Secretary of State John Kerry in Turkey compared Americans’ feelings about the Boston attack to Turkish feelings about the killing of jihadis engaged in supporting a terrorist group (Hamas) who attacked Israeli soldiers during the Gaza flotilla incident. This should not be seen merely as a clumsy statement but as dangerous and revealing stupidity.

[ad] It is dangerous because it tells Muslims that they are equally the victims of “our” terrorism; and it is revealing because the context shows the equation of all violence, no matter what the cause, that reinforces such thinking. A U.S. attack on terrorists in Yemen, Afghanistan or elsewhere then becomes anti-Muslim violence that justifies the next terror attack in an American city.

Former NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw explained that American drones were killing innocent people and this led to rage against the “presumptuousness of the United States.”

In an honest discussion it must be considered what U.S. policy factors lead to terrorism. But now there is the transfer to America of the old “cycle of violence” argument about the Middle East. Terrorists murder Israeli civilians or fire rockets at Israel; Israel defends itself and the two events are treated as indistinguishable.

Defending yourself offends people.

The proper response is to denounce the terrorists, the ideology of terrorism and proclaim the right of focused self-defense, which means doing everything possible to retaliate against those responsible and not citizens of another country chosen at random.

The American secretary of state, a leading Canadian politician, journalists and others are thus rationalizing in advance more such attacks. They will get their “wish” and then explain away the next event as more proof for their worldview.

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Barry Rubin is a professor at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel, the Director of the Global Research and International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, and a Senior Fellow at the International Policy Institute for Counterterrorism. Rubin has written and edited more than 40 books on the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy, with publishers including Harvard, Yale, Oxford, and Cambridge University Press.

by Diana West

Moving right along from soiled place setting (Libya...) to setting (Syria), the Western powers continue to muck up the Islamic world royally, powering the engine of Sunni jihad in a Grand Effort to isolate Iran and its ally Syria, or so it might appear.

It's easy to imagine NATO leaders patting themselves on the backs over their clever little wars on the "cheap" which require "only" Western arms and training and secret operations and money (but they can touch the Saudis and Qataris for much of the money, illegal/schmillegal), all of which, they maybe think, will ultimately vanquish Iran. When one setting is soiled, move on the next.

What they seem to miss -- unless, that is, they are al$o party to it -- is that they are leaving in their wake an equally if not far more dangerous monster: an oil-rich, strategic expanse of virulently metastisizing Sunni Shariadom.

Such a policy echoes what, I argue, was Soviet-subverted Allied policy in WWII, which, in vanquishing the Nazi monster, created the even greater Soviet monster, a subject discussed in my forthcoming book, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character.

Call it the Bandar-Bush-Rice-Obama-Clinton-Kerry-Bandar-Qatari-Turkish Grand Alliance. Maybe some day we will realize it was subverted, too.

Do these American officials running amok with US foreign policy realize the impact of what they are doing? Then again, does anyone? Do the media? The equanimity/ignorance that greets such events is remarkable. Take a look at this recent London Telegraph story about Saudi backing for a rebel-"liberated" enclave in south Syria.

Many are chosen by local opposition military councils established in southern Syria.

And no doubt they are moderate, West-friendly "tribesmen," too.

"They are asking us to take part in a 15-day training programme," said one Syrian fighter in Jordan speaking on the condition of anonymity.

...

The story concludes:

"We are using the road to Jordan as a route to take out our wounded fighters," said Captain Islam Aloush, a spokesperson for Liwa al-Islam, one of the largest rebel fighting groups in Damascus.

Liwa al-Islam? Wait a minute. How did "Brigade of Islam," which even the Telegraph has described as a "hardline Islamist group" slip into a piece about West-friendliness and "moderate Sunni tribesmen"? It's quite a mystery. After all, in the earlier piece, we were hearing about Liwa al Islam's participation in a sharia court in Aleppo:

But in rebel-held Aleppo a new sharia court is fast becoming a central power in the city. It is shared with the three other hardline Islamist groups operating in rebel territory: Ahrar al-Sham, Fijr al-Islam and Liwa Tawhid, though Jabhat al-Nusra takes the lead. It refuses to employ judges who worked under the regime, choosing religious leaders to pass judgments.

Some sharia rulings, such as cutting off a hand for theft, are not operational in wartime. But locals complain of other rigid strictures being enforced.

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Maybe Captain Islam asked to be i.d.'d as a "spokesperson," which the female reporter took as incontrovertible evidence of bona fide moderate, if not humanitarian (after all, he's talking about evacuating the wounded) outreach....

And readers turned the page, complacently.

by Dr. Daniel Pipes

Over three years after Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s massacre at Fort Hood, Texas, in November 2009, the classification of his crime remains in dispute. In its wisdom, the Department of Defense, supported by law enforcement, politicians, journalists, and academics, deems the killing of thirteen and wounding of forty-three to be “workplace violence.” For example, the 86-page study on preventing a repeat episode, Protecting the Force: Lessons from Fort Hood, mentions “workplace violence” sixteen times.[1]

Indeed, were the subject not morbid, one could be amused by the disagreement over what exactly caused the major to erupt. Speculations included “racism” against him, “harassment he had received as a Muslim,” his “sense of not belonging,” “mental problems,” “emotional problems,” “an inordinate amount of stress,” the “worst nightmare” of his being deployed to Afghanistan, or something fancifully called “pre-traumatic stress disorder.” One newspaper headline, “Mindset of Rogue Major a Mystery,” sums up this bogus state of confusion.[2]

In contrast, members of Congress ridiculed the “workplace violence” characterization and a coalition of 160 victims and family members recently released a video, “The Truth about Fort Hood,” criticizing the administration. On the third anniversary of the massacre, 148 victims and family members sued the U.S. government for avoiding legal and financial responsibility by not acknowledging the incident as terrorism.[3]

The military leadership willfully ignores what stares them in the face, namely Hasan’s clear and evident Islamist inspiration; Protecting the Force mentions “Muslim” and “jihad” not a single time, and “Islam” only once, in a footnote.[4] The massacre officially still remains unconnected to terrorism or Islam.

This example fits in a larger pattern: The establishment denies that Islamism—a form of Islam that seeks to make Muslims dominant through an extreme, totalistic, and rigid application of Islamic law, the Shari’a—represents the leading global cause of terrorism when it so clearly does. Islamism reverts to medieval norms in its aspiration to create a caliphate that rules humanity. “Islam is the solution” summarizes its doctrine. Islam’s public law can be summarized as elevating Muslim over non-Muslim, male over female, and endorsing the use of force to spread Muslim rule. In recent decades, Islamists (the adherents of this vision of Islam) have established an unparalleled record of terrorism. To cite one tabulation: TheReligionOfPeace.com counts 20,000 assaults in the name of Islam since 9/11,[5] or about five a day. In the West, terrorist acts inspired by motives other than Islam hardly register.

It is important to document and explain this denial and explore its implications. The examples come predominantly from the United States, though they could come from virtually any Western country—except Israel.

Documenting Denial

The government, press, and academy routinely deny that Islamist motives play a role in two ways, specific and general. Specific acts of violence perpetrated by Muslims lead the authorities publicly, willfully, and defiantly to close their eyes to Islamist motivations and goals. Instead, they point to a range of trivial, one-time, and individualistic motives, often casting the perpetrator as victim. Examples from the years before and after 9/11 include:

• 1990 assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane in New York: “A prescription drug for … depression.”[6]
• 1991 murder of Makin Morcos in Sydney: “A robbery gone wrong.”
• 1993 murder of Reverend Doug Good in Western Australia: An “unintentional killing.”
• 1993 attack on foreigners at a hotel in Cairo, killing ten: Insanity.[7]
• 1994 killing of a Hasidic Jew on the Brooklyn Bridge: “Road rage.”[8]
• 1997 shooting murder atop the Empire State Building: “Many, many enemies in his mind.”[9]
• 2000 attack on a bus of Jewish schoolchildren near Paris: A traffic incident.
• 2002 plane crash into a Tampa high-rise by an Osama bin Laden-admiring Arab-American (but non-Muslim): The acne drug Accutane.[10]
• 2002 double murder at LAX: “A work dispute.”[11]
• 2002 Beltway snipers: A “stormy [family] relationship.”[12]
• 2003 Hasan Karim Akbar‘s attack on fellow soldiers, killing two: An “attitude problem.”[13]
• 2003 mutilation murder of Sebastian Sellam: Mental illness.[14]
• 2004 explosion in Brescia, Italy, outside a McDonald’s restaurant: “Loneliness and depression.”[15]
• 2005 rampage at a retirement center in Virginia: “A disagreement between the suspect and another staff member.”[16]
• 2006 murderous rampage at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle: “An animus toward women.”[17]
• 2006 killing by a man in an SUV in northern California: “His recent, arranged marriage may have made him stressed.”[18]

This pattern of denial is all the more striking because it concerns distinctly Islamic forms of violence such as suicide operations, beheadings, honor killings and the disfiguring of women’s faces. For example, when it comes to honor killings, Phyllis Chesler has established that this phenomenon differs from domestic violence and, in Western countries, is almost always perpetrated by Muslims.[19] Such proofs, however, do not convince the establishment, which tends to filter Islam out of the equation.

The generalized threat inspires more denial. Politicians and others avoid mention of Islam, Islamism, Muslims, Islamists, mujahideen, or jihadists. Instead, they blame evildoers, militants, radical extremists, terrorists, and al-Qaeda. Just one day after 9/11, U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell set the tone by asserting that the just-committed atrocities “should not be seen as something done by Arabs or Islamics; it is something that was done by terrorists.”[20]

Another tactic is to obscure Islamist realities under the fog of verbiage. George W. Bush referred once to “the great struggle against extremism that is now playing out across the broader Middle East”[21] and another time to “the struggle against ideological extremists who do not believe in free societies and who happen to use terror as a weapon to try to shake the conscience of the free world.”[22] He went so far as to dismiss any Islamic element by asserting that “Islam is a great religion that preaches peace.”[23]

In like spirit, Barack Obama observed that “it is very important for us to recognize that we have a battle or a war against some terrorist organizations, but that those organizations aren’t representative of a broader Arab community, Muslim community.”[24] Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, engaged in the following exchange with Lamar Smith (Republican, Tex.) during congressional testimony in May 2010, repeatedly resisting a connection between Islamist motives and a spate of terrorist attacks:

Smith: In the case of all three [terrorist] attempts in the last year, … one of which was successful, those individuals have had ties to radical Islam. Do you feel that these individuals might have been incited to take the actions that they did because of radical Islam?

Holder: Because of?

Smith: Radical Islam.

Holder: There are a variety of reasons why I think people have taken these actions. It’s one, I think you have to look at each individual case. I mean, we are in the process now of talking to Mr. [Feisal] Shahzad to try to understand what it is that drove him to take the action.

Smith: Yes, but radical Islam could have been one of the reasons?

Holder: There are a variety of reasons why people …

Smith: But was radical Islam one of them?

Holder: There are a variety of reasons why people do things. Some of them are potentially religious…[25]

And on and on Holder persisted, until Smith eventually gave up. And this was not exceptional: An almost identical denial took place in December 2011 by a senior official from the Department of Defense.[26]

Or one can simply ignore the Islamist element; a study issued by the Department of Homeland Security, “Evolution of the Terrorist Threat to the United States,” mentions Islam just one time. In September 2010, Obama spoke at the United Nations and, using a passive construction, avoided all mention of Islam in reference to 9/11: “Nine years ago, the destruction of the World Trade Center signaled a threat that respected no boundary of dignity or decency.”[27] About the same time, Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, stated that the profiles of Americans engaged in terrorism indicate that “there is no ‘typical’ profile of a homegrown terrorist.”[28]

Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, rightly condemns this mentality as “two plus two must equal something other than four.”[29]

Exceptions to Denial

Exceptions to this pattern do exist; establishment figures on occasion drop their guard and acknowledge the Islamist threat to the civilized world. Gingrich himself delivered a uniquely well-informed speech on Shari’a in 2010, noting, “This is not a war on terrorism. Terrorism is an activity. This is a struggle with radical Islamists in both their militant and their stealth form.”[30]

British prime minister Tony Blair offered a stirring and eloquent analysis in 2006:

This is war, but of a completely unconventional kind. … What are the values that govern the future of the world? Are they those of tolerance, freedom, respect for difference and diversity or those of reaction, division and hatred? … It is in part a struggle between what I will call Reactionary Islam and Moderate, Mainstream Islam. But its implications go far wider. We are fighting a war, but not just against terrorism but about how the world should govern itself in the early 21^st century, about global values.[31]

The current British prime minister, David Cameron, gave a fine analysis in 2005, long before he reached his current office:

The driving force behind today’s terrorist threat is Islamist fundamentalism. The struggle we are engaged in is, at root, ideological. During the last century a strain of Islamist thinking has developed which, like other totalitarianisms, such as Nazism and Communism, offers its followers a form of redemption through violence.[32]

In 2011, as prime minister, Cameron returned to this theme when he warned that “we need to be absolutely clear on where the origins of these terrorist attacks lie. That is the existence of an ideology, Islamist extremism.”[33]

The former foreign minister of the Czech Republic, Alexandr Vondra, spoke his mind with remarkable frankness:

Radical Islamists challenge practically everything that our society claims to stand for, no matter what the Western policies were or are. These challenges include the concept of universal human rights and freedom of speech.[34]

George W. Bush spoke in the period after October 2005 about “Islamo-fascism” and “Islamic fascists.” Joseph Lieberman, the U.S. senator from Connecticut, criticized those who refuse “to identify our enemy in this war as what it is: violent Islamist extremism”[35] and sponsored an excellent Senate study on Maj. Hasan. Rick Santorum, then a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, gave a notable analysis:

In World War II, we fought Naziism and Japanese imperialism. Today, we are fighting against Islamic fascists. They attacked us on September 11 because we are the greatest obstacle to their openly declared mission of subjecting the entire world to their fanatical rule. I believe that the threat of Islamic fascism is just as menacing as the threat from Nazism and Soviet Communism. Now, as then, we face fanatics who will stop at nothing to dominate us. Now, as then, there is no way out; we will either win or lose.[36]

Antonin Scalia, an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, observed in an opinion that “America is at war with radical Islamists.”[37] A New York Police Department study, Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat, discusses “Islamic-based terrorism” in its first line and never lets up. It contains explicit references to Islamism; it states, “Ultimately, the jihadist envisions a world in which jihadi-Salafi Islam is dominant and is the basis of government.”[38]

So, reality does on occasion poke through the fog of denial and verbiage.

The Mystery of Denial

These exceptions aside, what accounts for the persistent denial of Islamic motives? Why the pretense that no elephant fills the room? An unwillingness to face the truth invariably smacks of euphemism, cowardice, political correctness, and appeasement. In this spirit, Gingrich argues that “the Obama Administration is willfully blind to the nature of our enemies and the forces which threaten America. … it’s not ignorance; it’s determined effort to avoid [reality].”[39]

These problems definitely contribute to denial, but something more basic and more legitimate goes further to explain this reluctance. One hint comes from a 2007 Ph.D. dissertation in politics submitted by Gaetano Ilardi to Monash University in Melbourne. Titled “From the IRA to Al Qa’eda: Intelligence as a Measure of Rational Action in Terrorist Operations,” it refers frequently to Islam and related topics; Ilardi has also been quoted in the press on the topic of radicalization. Yet in 2009, as acting senior sergeant of the Victoria police, he was the most vociferous of his twenty law enforcement colleagues insisting to this author that the police not publicly mention Islam in any fashion when discussing terrorism. In other words, wanting not to refer to Islam can come from someone who knows full well the role of Islam.

Confirming this point, Daniel Benjamin, the Obama administration’s coordinator for counterterrorism in the U.S. State Department, explicitly refutes the idea that silence about Islam means being unaware of it:

Policymakers fully recognize how al Qaeda’s ideologues have appropriated Islamic texts and concepts and fashioned them into a mantle of religious legitimacy for their bloodshed. As someone who has written at length about how al Qaeda and the radical groups that preceded it have picked and chosen from sacred texts, often out of all context, I have no doubt my colleagues understand the nature of the threat.[40]

Ilardi and Benjamin know their stuff; they avoid discussing Islam in connection with terrorism for reasons deeper than political correctness, ignorance, or appeasement. What are those reasons? Two factors have key importance: wanting not to alienate Muslims or to reorder society.

Explaining Denial

Not wanting to offend Muslims, a sincere and reasonable goal, is the reason most often publicly cited. Muslims protest that focusing on Islam, Islamism, or jihad increases Muslim fears that the West is engaged in a “war against Islam.” Joseph Lieberman, for example, notes that the Obama administration prefers not to use the term “violent Islamist extremists” when referring to the enemy because using such explicit words “bolsters our enemy’s propaganda claim that the West is at war with Islam.”[41]

Questioned in an interview about his having only once used the term “war on terror,” Barack Obama confirmed this point, stating that “words matter in this situation because one of the ways we’re going to win this struggle is through the battle of hearts and minds.” Asked, “So that’s not a term you’re going to be using much in the future?” he replied:

You know, what I want to do is make sure that I’m constantly talking about al Qaeda and other affiliated organizations because we, I believe, can win over moderate Muslims to recognize that that kind of destruction and nihilism ultimately leads to a dead end, and that we should be working together to make sure that everybody has got a better life.[42]

Daniel Benjamin makes the same point more lucidly:

Putting the emphasis on “Islamist” instead of on “violent extremist” undercuts our efforts, since it falsely roots the core problem in the faith of more than one billion people who abhor violence. As one internal government study after another has shown, such statements invariably wind up being distorted in the global media, alienating Muslim moderates.[43]

This concern actually has two sub-parts for two types of Muslims: Those who would otherwise help fight terrorism feel insulted (“a true Muslim can never be a terrorist“) and so do not step forward while those who would not normally be involved become radicalized, some even becoming terrorists.

The second reason to inhibit one’s talk about Islam concerns the apprehension that this implies a large and undesirable shift away from how secular Western societies are ordered. Blaming terrorist attacks on drugs gone awry, road rage, an arranged marriage, mental cases going berserk, or freak industrial accidents permits Westerners to avoid confronting issues concerning Islam. If the jihad explanation is vastly more persuasive, it is also far more troubling.

When one notes that Islamist terrorism is almost exclusively the work of Muslims acting out of Islamic convictions, the implication follows that Muslims must be singled out for special scrutiny, perhaps along the lines this author suggested in 2003:

Muslim government employees in law enforcement, the military and the diplomatic corps need to be watched for connections to terrorism, as do Muslim chaplains in prisons and the armed forces. Muslim visitors and immigrants must undergo additional background checks. Mosques require a scrutiny beyond that applied to churches and temples.[44]

Implementing such a policy means focusing law enforcement attention on a community that is defined by its religion. This flies in the face of liberal, multicultural, and politically correct values; it also will be portrayed as illegal and perhaps unconstitutional. It means distinguishing on the basis of a person’s group characteristics. It involves profiling. These changes have unsettling implications that will be condemned as “racist” and “Islamophobic,” accusations that can ruin careers in today’s public environment.

Islam-related explanations may offer a more persuasive accounting than turning perpetrators into victims, but the imperative not to tamper with existing social mores trumps counterterrorism. This accounts for police, prosecutors, politicians, and professors avoiding the actual factors behind Islamist attacks and instead finding miscellaneous mundane motives. Those soothing and inaccurate bromides have the advantage of implying no changes other than vigilance against weapons. Dealing with unpleasant realities can be deferred.

Finally, denial appears to work. Just because law enforcement, the military, and intelligence agencies tiptoe around the twin topics of Islamic motivation and the disproportionate Islamist terrorism when addressing the public does not stop these same institutions in practice from focusing quietly on Islam and Muslims. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence that they do just this, and it has led to an effective counterterrorism effort since 9/11 with close scrutiny on everything from mosques to hawalas (informal Muslim financial exchanges). As a result, with rare exceptions (such as the Fort Hood shooter), Islamist terrorist networks tend to be stymied and successful assaults tend to come out of nowhere from perpetrators characterized by sudden jihad syndrome.

Arguing against Denial

While respecting the urge not to aggravate Muslim sensibilities and acknowledging that the frank discussion of Islam can have major consequences for ordering society, this author insists on the need to mention Islam. First, it is not clear how much harm talking about Islam actually does. Genuine anti-Islamist Muslims insist on Islam being discussed; Islamists posing as moderates tend to be those who feign upset about a “war on Islam” and the like.

Second, little evidence points to Muslims being radicalized by mere discussion of Islamism. Quite the contrary, it is usually something specific that turns a Muslim in that direction, from the way American women dress to drone attacks in Somalia, Yemen, and Pakistan.

Third, while conceding that discussion of Islam has costs, ignoring it costs more. The need to define the enemy, not just within the counsels of war but for the public, trumps all other considerations. As the ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu observed, “Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles.” Karl von Clausewitz’s entire theory of war assumes an accurate assessment of the enemy. Just as a medical doctor must identify and name a disease before treating it, so must politicians and generals identify and name the enemy to defeat it.

To censor oneself limits one’s ability to wage war. Avoiding mention of the enemy’s identity sows confusion, harms morale, and squanders strengths. In brief, it offers a recipe for defeat. Indeed, the annals of history record no war won when the enemy’s very name and identity may not be uttered; this is all the more so in modern times when defining the enemy must precede and undergird military victory. If you cannot name the enemy, you cannot defeat him.

Fourth, even though law enforcement et al. find that saying one thing in public while doing another in private works, this dishonesty comes at the high price of creating a disconnect between the high-flying words of politicians and the sometimes sordid realities of counterterrorism:

• Government employees at risk: On the one hand, out of fear of being exposed, public servants must hide or lie about their activities. On the other, to do their work effectively, they must run afoul of studiously impartial government regulations, or even break the law.
• A confused public: Policy statements piously reject any link between Islam and terrorism even as counterterrorism implicitly makes just such a connection.
• Advantage Islamists: They (1) point out that government declarations are mere puffery hiding what is really a war against Islam; and (2) win Muslim recruits by asking them whom they believe, straight-talking Islamists or insincere politicians.
• “Security theater” and other pantomimes: To convince observers that Muslims are not specifically targeted, others are hauled in for show purposes, wasting finite time and resources.[45]
• An increase in resentments and prejudices: People keep their mouths shut but their minds are working. An open public discussion, in which one could condemn Islamists while supporting moderate Muslims, would lead to a better understanding of the problem.
• Vigilance discouraged: The campaign of “If You See Something, Say Something” is fine but what are the costs of reporting dubious behavior by a neighbor or a passenger who turns out to be innocent? Although vigilant neighbors have been an important source of counterterrorism leads, anyone who reports his worries opens himself up to vilification as a racist or “Islamophobe,” damage to one’s career, or even a law suit.[46]

Thus does the unwillingness to acknowledge the Islamist motives behind most terrorism obstruct effective counterterrorism and render further atrocities more likely.

When Denial Will End

Denial is likely to continue until the price gets too steep. The 3,000 victims of 9/11, it turns out, did not suffice to shake Western complacency. 30,000 dead, in all likelihood, will also not suffice. Perhaps 300,000 will. For sure, three million will. At that point, worries about Muslim sensibilities and fear of being called an “Islamophobe” will fade into irrelevance, replaced by a single-minded determination to protect lives. Should the existing order someday be in evident danger, today’s relaxed approach will instantly go out the window. The popular support for such measures exists; as early as 2004, a Cornell University poll showed that 44 percent of Americans “believe that some curtailment of civil liberties is necessary for Muslim Americans.”[47]

Israel offers a control case. Because it faces so many threats, the body politic lacks patience with liberal pieties when it comes to security. While aspiring to treat everyone fairly, the government clearly targets the most violent-prone elements of society. Should other Western countries face a comparable danger, circumstances will likely compel them to adopt this same approach.

Conversely, should such mass dangers not arise, this shift will probably never take place. Until and unless disaster on a large scale strikes, denial will continue. Western tactics, in other words, depend entirely on the brutality and competence of the Islamist enemy. Ironically, the West permits terrorists to drive its approach to counterterrorism. No less ironically, it will take a huge terrorist atrocity to enable effective counterterrorism.

Addressing Denial

In the meantime, those who wish to strengthen counterterrorism by acknowledging the role of Islam have three tasks.

First, intellectually to prepare themselves and their arguments so when calamity occurs they possess a fully elaborated, careful, and just program that focuses on Muslims without doing injustice to them.

Second, continue to convince those averse to mentioning Islam that discussing it is worth the price; this means addressing their concerns, not bludgeoning them with insults. It means accepting the legitimacy of their hesitance, using sweet reason, and letting the barrage of Islamist attacks have their effect.

Third, prove that talking about Islamism does not lead to perdition by establishing the costs of not naming the enemy and of not identifying Islamism as a factor; noting that Muslim governments, including the Saudi one, acknowledge that Islamism leads to terrorism; stressing that moderate Muslims who oppose Islamism want Islamism openly discussed; addressing the fear that frank talk about Islam alienates Muslims and spurs violence; and demonstrating that profiling can be done in a constitutionally approved way.

In brief, even without an expectation of effecting a change in policy, there is much work to be done.

Daniel Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is president of the Middle East Forum. He initially delivered this paper at the Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya, Israel.

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[1] Protecting the Force: Lessons from Fort Hood, Department of Defense, Washington, D.C., Jan. 2010.
[2] The Australian (Sydney), Nov.7, 2009.
[3] Associated Press, Nov. 5, 2012.
[4] Protecting the Force: Lessons from Fort Hood, p. 18, fn. 22.
[5] “List of Islamic Terror Attacks,” TheReligionOfPeace.com, accessed Dec. 19, 2012.
[6] The New York Times, Nov. 9. 1990.
[7] The Independent (London), Sept. 19, 1997.
[8] Uriel Heilman, “Murder on the Brooklyn Bridge,” Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2001, pp. 29-37.
[9] The Houston Chronicle, Feb. 26, 1997.
[10] Time Magazine, Jan. 21, 2002.
[11] “Terror in LA?” Honest Reporting (Toronto), July 8, 2002.
[12] Los Angeles Times, Oct. 26, 2002.
[13] Daniel Pipes, “Murder in the 101^st Airborne,” The New York Post, Mar. 25, 2003.
[14] Brett Kline, “Two Sons of France,” The Jerusalem Post Magazine, Jan. 21, 2010.
[15] “Italy: McDonald’s Jihad Foiled,” Jihad Watch, Mar. 30, 2004.
[16] The Washington Post, Jan. 11, 2005.
[17] Los Angeles Times, July 30, 2006.
[18] San Francisco Chronicle, Aug. 30, 2006.
[19] Phyllis Chesler, “Are Honor Killings Simply Domestic Violence?” Middle East Quarterly, Spring 2009, pp. 61-9.
[20] Dateline, NBC, Sept. 21, 2001.
[21] Remarks, The Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., June 27, 2007.
[22] Remarks, UNITY 2004 Conference, Washington D.C., Aug. 6, 2004.
[23] Al-Arabiya News Channel (Dubai), Oct. 5, 2007.
[24] Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees, Feb. 3, 2009.
[25] Testimony before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, Washington, D.C., May 13, 2010.
[26] Testimony before the U.S. House Committee for Homeland Security, Washington, D.C., Dec. 13, 2011.
[27] Remarks, U.N. General Assembly, New York, Sept. 23, 2010.
[28] “Nine Years after 9/11: Confronting the Terrorist Threat to the Homeland,” statement to the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Washington, D.C., Sept. 22, 2010.
[29] Newt Gingrich, “America Is at Risk,” American Enterprise Institute, Washington, D.C., July 29, 2010.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Speech to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, Aug. 1, 2006.
[32] Speech at the Foreign Policy Centre, London, Aug. 25, 2005.
[33] Munich Security Conference, Feb. 5, 2011.
[34] Alexandr Vondra, “Radical Islam Poses a Major Challenge to Europe,” Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2007, pp. 66-8.
[35] Joseph Lieberman, “Who’s the Enemy in the War on Terror?” The Wall Street Journal, June 15, 2010.
[36] “The Great Test of This Generation,” speech to the National Press Club, Washington, D.C., National Review Online, July 20, 2006.
[37] Scalia J., dissenting, Lakhdar Boumediene, et al., Petitioners, Supreme Court of the United States v. George W. Bush, President of the United States, et al.; Khaled A. F. Al Odah, next friend of Fawzikhalid Abdullah Fahad Al Odah, et al., Petitioners v. United States, et al., June 12, 2008.
[38] New York: 2007, p. 8.
[39] Gingrich, “America Is at Risk.”
[40] Daniel Benjamin, “Name It and Claim It, or Name It and Inflame It?” The Wall Street Journal, June 24, 2010.
[41] Lieberman, “Who’s the Enemy in the War on Terror?”
[42] Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees, Feb. 3, 2009.
[43] Benjamin, “Name It and Claim It, or Name It and Inflame It?”
[44] Daniel Pipes, “The Enemy Within and the Need for Profiling,” The New York Post, Jan. 24, 2003.
[45] Daniel Pipes, “Security Theater Now Playing at Your Airport,” The Jerusalem Post, Jan. 6, 2010.
[46] M. Zuhdi Jasser, “Exposing the ‘Flying Imams,’” Middle East Quarterly, Winter 2008, pp. 3-11.
[47] “Fear Factor,” Cornell News (Ithaca), Dec. 17, 2004.

by Diana West

The Hollywood Reporter ran a story on a $5 million lawsuit filed by a consultant who was cut out of a share of the Current TV/Al Jazeera deal. But what is even more interesting is the key role Richard Blum, Sen. Dianne Feinstein's husband and a Current TV boardmember, played in presenting the deal to the rest of the board.

The plaintiff, media consultant John Terenzio, seems to specialize in handling propaganda-disseminating organs of state dictatorships (China, Qatar) for US markets.

Terenzio says that in June, he identified Current TV as a potential acquisition target for Al Jazeera given its vast distribution network and well-publicized financial woes.

At Terenzio's direction, Nanula is said to have approached Richard Blum, a member of Current's board of directors (and the husband of U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein), who was interested because "he and other Current investors were concerned about the prospect of losing their shirts in the financially troubled Current."

Terenzio says he met Blum in July and presented "a step-by-step approach for making the sale of the liberal media outlet to Al Jazeera palatable to U.S. lawmakers, pro-Israel factions, cable operators and, most importantly, the American public."

The lawsuit claims that the structure proposed and the strategies developed were the same ones developed by Terenzio for CCTV and that there was a "mutual understanding that Terenzio would be compensated if Current TV utilized his idea to consummate a sale to Al Jazeera."

The presentation was left with Blum to show other Current investors, according to the lawsuit. Blum is said to have opined that Gore might find a transaction with Al Jazeera "politically unappealing" but that he would present it to the former U.S. vice president.

In other words, it sounds as if a US senator's spouse assisted in enabling the propaganda arm of a repressive dictatorship to gain access to US audiences. Not only that, but the Senator's family coffers now slosh with new dictatorship monies. How can that possibly be in the best interest of the Constitution that the Senator has sworn to uphold?

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Diana West is a journalist and columnist. Her book, The Death of the Grown Up: How America's Arrested Development is Bringing Down Western Civilization was reviewed by Steven Emerson, who said it is "a must-read for anyone who wants to understand why ... many in the West are apologetic when confronted with the excesses of radical Islam and what we need to do to win the War on terror. "

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by Barry Rubin

One of my recent blogs, published here, shows how terrorists, including the murderers of four American officials in Benghazi, are literally laughing at the United States and its inability or unwillingness to do anything effective to defend its interests.

This item in a CBS News report particularly caught my eye:

“U.S. officials [in December 2012] lamented the lack of cooperation with the governments of Tunisia, Libya and Egypt in their ongoing investigation into the [Benghazi] attack, saying most of the suspects remain free.”

Let’s review:

--Tunisia, where the U.S. government supported not only the overthrow of a regime allied to the U.S. but also supported elections that led to a Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government. Helpful hint: The U.S. should have intervened behind the scenes to get the four non-Islamist (secular, if you wish) parties to work together, run their campaigns successfully and win. They got 60 percent of the vote but lost the election.

--Libya, where the U.S. government installed the current regime, which is basically an American client regime, by military (NATO, technically) force. The U.S. continued to pump in support yet feared to send in a rescue mission to Benghazi.

Obama should have called the Libyan leader on the evening of September 11, 2012, and said, “We’re on our way and expect your cooperation.” And the only reason for not doing that would have been knowing the Libyan government could rescue the Americans (which, as we know, it was unable to do or even try to do).

The Libyan government has now said it would not cooperate in any further investigation of the Lockerbie airplane bombing by Libyan intelligence under the previous regime.

--Egypt, where the U.S. government was cheerleading for the Muslim Brotherhood as early as Obama’s Cairo speech and backed it all through the revolution. There was the alternative of backing the military to get rid of Husni Mubarak and then make reforms. Or there was the alternative of backing the disorganized, under-financed moderates (and helping them to unite, get money and be effective). But Obama did neither and his administration for all practical purposes endorsed the Muslim Brotherhood. 

And now we see that these three governments won’t even cooperate in getting terrorists responsible for murdering Americans. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was booed by the moderates when she visited Egypt! And now the main, moderate coalition says it will boycott her successor, John Kerry's visit.

Remember that Tunisia and Egypt, even if they are Islamist-ruled, have no direct interest in helping these Libyan terrorists (the Muslim Brotherhood doesn’t even like al-Qaeda, which it correctly views as both a rival and a group willing to attack its own regimes). Even so, it won’t help the United States due to anti-Americanism, a generalized Islamic solidarity and knowledge that they can stick their finger in America’s eye and taunt, “What are you going to do about it?”

How the mighty have fallen! But what’s most amazing is that this isn’t a process of murder but of suicide -- and it's voluntary. Is it reversible? Nobody knows, but it isn’t going to be reversed in the next four years.

There has been -- for all practical purposes -- a profound, albeit possibly temporary, transformation in the governance of the United States. Regarding foreign policy, all the old rules don’t apply: Credibility, punishing enemies and rewarding friends, deterrence, don’t leave your men behind to die, don’t appoint a muddle-headed fool to be secretary of defense. In each case, there is a nicely crafted rationalization for going against centuries of diplomatic and security practices. But so what? It’s still wrong.

Obama is busy in apologizing for real or imagined past U.S. bullying, proving he only believes in multilateral action, showing his respect for local customs and trying to demonstrate to those who hate it that America is their buddy in order to win them over.

The language above is harsh but it is also true.

Once upon a time there were two superpowers, the United States and USSR, in the Cold War. Then there was one superpower, the United States. Now there are none.

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Barry Rubin is a professor at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel, the Director of the Global Research and International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, and a Senior Fellow at the International Policy Institute for Counterterrorism. Rubin has written and edited more than 40 books on the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy, with publishers including Harvard, Yale, Oxford, and Cambridge University Press.

Philadelphia, the city where I live, has quietly and unassumedly become the capital of the Western world as regards female Islamic garb as an accessory to crime.

First, a tutorial on Islamic coverings, all of which tend to be called veils in English but fall into three main categories. Some (the abaya, hijab, chador, jilbab, or khimar) cover parts of the body, especially the hair, neck, and shoulders, but reveal the face and identity of the woman; some cover the face (the yashmak) but show the body shape; and some hide the whole body, including the identity and gender of the wearer. The latter – our topic here – is better described as a full-body cover than a veil: it in turn has two types, those that cover the person entirely (the chadari or burqa) or those with a slit for the eyes (the haik or niqab).

By my count, the Philadelphia region has witnessed 14 robberies (or attempted robberies) of financial institutions in the past six years in which the thieves relied on an Islamic full-body cover. They took place in January 2007, June 2007, May 2008, November 2009, October 2010 (two), February 2011, June 2011, December 2011, January 2012, March 2012 (two), and April 2012 (two). The most violent attack took place on May 3, 2008, when Police Sergeant Stephen Liczbinski was killed with an AK-47 in a shoot-out following a successful robbery using burqas; the police then killed one of the criminals.

As the Middle East Forum's David J. Rusin points out in his detailed survey of Philadelphia burqa crimes, Muslim garb holds two great advantages over other forms of disguise: First, many full-body covered women walk the streets without criminal intent, thereby inadvertently providing cover for thieves; the more full-body coverings around, the more likely that these will facilitate criminal activity. Second, the very strangeness and aloofness of these garments affords their wearers, including criminals, an extraordinary degree of protection. As in other cases (three purchases of alcohol in Toronto state liquor stores by a 14-year-old boy in a burqa; Muslim women not checked at Canadian airports), clerks so fear being accused of racism or "Islamophobia" that they skip state-mandated procedures, such as requiring niqabis to show their faces and establish their identities.

To their credit, some banks no longer allow head coverings. For example, a PNC Bank office in Philadelphia boasts a front-door sign stating: "The safety of our employees and customers is our foremost concern. We request that you remove any hats, caps, sunglasses or hoods while inside this financial institution." Such policies should reduce burqa bank robberies.

But as banks become harder targets, Islamic garb presents a more general danger to soft targets. For example, in the Philadelphia area, assailants donned Islamic garb to rob a real estate office in 2008 and commit murder at a barber shop in 2012.

Not fatal but equally horrific, was the Jan. 14-15 abduction and rape of a 5-year-old child in Philadelphia. A niqabi signed Nailla Robinson out from the Bryant Elementary School pretending to be her mother taking her to breakfast. Investigators believe the two walked a few blocks to where a man awaited them. Nailla then disappeared for nearly a day and was only found the next morning shivering half-naked in a park by a passerby. Last week, the police arrested Christina Regusters, 19, an daycare center employee with prior contact with Nailla. The fourteen charges against her include kidnapping, rape, aggravated assault, recklessly endangering another person, and criminal conspiracy.

The usual two factors noted above were critical to this crime's commission: the spread of full-body gear (Nailla's mother, Latifah Rashid, wears Islamic garb, meaning the abductor could plausibly pretend to be her) and the Bryant school staff deferring to a niqabi (completely ignoring the many rules pertaining to the escorting of a child from school).

This survey of Philadelphia's crisis prompts several reflections: First, almost any Western city at any time could have Philadelphia's problems. Second, this is deadly serious issue, involving violent robberies, rapes, and murders. Third, as full-body Islamic covers spread, criminals increasingly depend on them. Fourth, government workers need to surmount their timidity and apply normal procedures even to those wearing full-body covers, even in liquor shops, airports, and elementary schools. Finally, this problem has an obvious solution: ban the niqab and burqa in public places, as the national governments in France and Belgium have recently done.

Dr. Daniel Pipes is president of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. This article originally appeared on DanielPipes.org

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