(updated) 9/1/11 WAR ON TERROR INFORMATION PAGE (regularly updated here & at
Also See
HERE ARE SOME PERTINENT LINKS re the WAR on TERRORISM. If you've been here before you've already seen the YouTube links, but now I've added some articles by Raymond Ibrahim who writes some insightful articles re the Islam world and American interaction & involvement. He apparently is fluent in Arabic but has a western perspective and is willing to be critical of the Muslim world, which makes his criticism more pertinent. Many in the western world are hesitant to be too critical because of all the “political correctness” we have been bombarded with…& so when “one of their own” so to speak makes a stand we should listen. I'm still finding out more about him and his articles, all of which you can see on his website, but I only listed a few here. Also, always check the following for updates:
"Muslim Radicalization": In the Eyes of the Beholder
by Raymond Ibrahim
Jihad Watch
September 1, 2011
http://www.raymondibrahim.com/10217/muslim-radicalization-in-the-eyes-of-the-beholder
Because the phrase "Muslim radicalization" has become increasingly popular in American discourse, it behooves us to establish once and for all what it means. Without an agreed upon definition, it may be that we are each talking about different things—or worse and more likely, nothing at all.
Most dictionaries define "radicalization" and "radicalize" as "to make radical." The word "radical"—especially in a socio-political context—means "extreme," "fundamental"; as a noun it means "a person who holds or follows strong convictions or extreme principles; extremist."
For our purposes, then, a "Muslim radical" is someone "who holds or follows strong [Muslim] convictions or extreme principles."
This definition, which is likely what most people mean by "Muslim radicalization," is fraught with problems and loaded assumptions. For example, who decides which Muslim convictions or principles are "extreme" or "radical," and which are not?
Yet some Westerners talk about "Muslim radicalization" as if there was a base of normalcy that all people are agreed to—that there is a line that, once crossed, both Muslims and non-Muslims agree is "radicalized" behavior.
But is that the case? Is there a universal standard that all people—Muslim and non-Muslim, Westerner and non-Westerner—adhere to? In fact, while there are certain commonalities, so too are there extreme—that is, "radical"—variations inherent to each culture or civilization. The notion that "radicalization" refers to something universally agreed to fails to take into account that much of what people believe is good or bad, right or wrong—and, yes, moderate or extreme—is a product of their culturally-induced worldview, a product of their epistemology.
As any anthropologist can attest, there are entire cultures and societies that engage in what we would term "radical" behavior, even though to them such behavior is quite normal. Indeed, if we agree that "radicalization" refers to extreme views or practices, to many cultures, the West—from its gender neutrality to its secular humanism—is "radical."
Let us agree, then, that radical behavior—to a Muslim, Western normalization of homosexuality, to a Westerner, Muslim killing of apostates—is in the eye of the beholder. Once this view is adopted, the inevitable becomes clear: "Muslim radicalization" is simply another way of saying "distinctly Muslim principles."
Consider Saudi Arabia. Its entire worldview and culture—from totally veiled women to draconian punishments such as stoning—is "extreme" by Western standards. Yet, to the average Saudi, such behavior, built atop millennium-old Sharia principles, is not only normal but moderate (the late Osama bin Laden used to boast that Sharia is the most "moderate" system). Simultaneously, Saudis look to the Western life style and see it as corrupt, debauched, or, in a word—radical.
Many may argue that "Wahhabi" Saudi Arabia is an anomaly and not representative of the average Muslim's worldview or culture. But there are important rebuttals to this mainstream view.
First, buzz words such as "Wahhabism" (and "Salafism") are somewhat misleading: they imply a new aberration in Islam. Yet Wahhabism's message—that Muslims need to return to purely Islamic principles—has existed centuries before Ibn Wahhab walked the earth in the 18th century. One example: the classic and influential Muslim jurist Ibn Hanbal, who lived in the 8th century—one thousand years before Wahhab—insisted on the same exact "radical" teachings.
Moreover, the Wahhabi/Salafist worldview permeates Muslim thinking around the globe, if for no other reason than that Saudi-produced religious literature and programming—part and parcel of Saudi funding—saturates the Muslim market and media, including in Europe and in America. Such is the double-whammy: while Saudi literature "radicalizes" Muslims in America, Saudi "donations" help undermine America's knowledge of the threat.
Yet we continue to hear Western politicians casually talking about "de-radicalizing" Muslims. This is no different than, say, Chinese politicians casually talking about "de-radicalizing"—de-Westernizing—Western peoples, so that they can stop thinking and acting in a distinctly Western way.
Therefore, rather than arrogantly brushing aside Islam's centuries-old worldview—which at root is behind any talk of "de-radicalizing" Muslims—Western leaders would do well to take the time to learn the particulars of the religion.
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Reading Between the Lines
by Raymond Ibrahim
Jihad Watch
August 25, 2011
http://www.raymondibrahim.com/10186/reading-between-the-lines
When reading Western reports dealing with Islam, one must learn to read between the lines. Many of these reports do state the actual facts; but without providing proper context, Western readers are often left to interpret the information according to their own understandings.
One example: the ubiquitous term "sectarian strife" to describe Muslim-Christian clashes in the Middle East is factually correct; yet "sectarian strife" connotes comparable forces fighting one another, when in reality it is often nothing less than a vastly outnumbered Christian minority being grossly oppressed by Muslim majorities, as has happened for centuries.
Sometimes it is easy to fathom the true significance of a report (usually non-MSM). For example, a recent report titled "CAIR Wants Muslim-Turned-Christian Minister to Stop Training Immigration Officials" provides all the necessary data to reach an objective conclusion:
CAIR claims "We believe training by a person with such obvious bias against Islam and Muslims would only serve to heighten concerns American Muslims have about allegations of mistreatment at our nation's borders." Conversely, the apostate minister's supporters argue that "they're [CAIR] discriminating against him. They're saying only our kind of Muslim, only someone who has not converted from Islam ... only people we approve can work for the U.S. government in the immigration service. That's not the way it works in the U.S."
Accordingly, only a bit of contextualizing is necessary to understand what this is all about: CAIR does not want an ex-Muslim—someone well acquainted with Islam—to impart his knowledge to U.S. officials.
Other times, reading a report requires more cogitation to get to its ultimate significance. For insistence, MEMRI recently reported that
The Coptic Church in Egypt has expressed its objection to the U.S. Congress's appointment of a special envoy for minority affairs in the Middle East and Asia, who would be dealing with the Coptic minority in Egypt. They called on foreign Copts, who supported the appointment, to refrain from dealing with this subject. The Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party and the Al-Nahda Party also objected to the appointment, claiming that it constitutes interference in Egypt's internal affairs.
This seems natural enough: Egypt's religious leadership rejects foreign interference. However, when one realizes why a special envoy was created in the first place—because of the nonstop, documented incidences of persecution of Copts in Egypt—one is left asking: why would the Coptic Church, which knows better than anyone else the persecution of its flock, reject help? Knowledge of the dynamics of Islam and dhimmitude leads to the conclusion that the Church is being pressured to say that all is well for Christians in Egypt—or else.
Finally, when dealing with the MSM, the significance of an Islam-related story must usually be dug out. Consider the following excerpt from a recent New York Times piece titled "Behold the Mighty Beard, a Badge of Piety and Religious Belonging":
[A]ll over the Muslim world, the full beard has come to connote piety and spiritual fervor. It is such a powerful cultural signifier, in fact, that it inspires non-Muslims, too…. Of course, the beard is only a sign of righteousness. It is no guarantor, as Mr. Zulfiqar [a Muslim interviewee] reminds us: "I recall one gentleman who came back from a trip to Pakistan and remarked to me, 'I learned one thing: the longer the beard, the bigger the crook.' His anticipation was people with big beards would be really honest, but he kept meeting people lying to him" [italics mine].
This comports especially well for Western readers who naturally agree that outer signs of piety certainly do not signify inner piety. Yet they overlook the inadvertent significance of this quote: in Islam, outer signs of piety on the one hand, and corruption and deceit on the other, are perfectly compatible. After all, the same source—Muhammad as recorded in the hadith—that commands Muslims to grow a beard also advocates deception and all sorts of other things hardly associated with Western notions of piety.
Readers must therefore become sensitive to the gradations of clarity in Western reports on Islam. Whereas many of those produced by the non-MSM make an effort to spell things out, the true significance of MSM reports—which are consumed by the majority—must be read between the lines.
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The Lone Wolf Jihad
by Raymond Ibrahim
Jihad Watch
August 18, 2011
http://www.raymondibrahim.com/10142/the-lone-wolf-jihad
As we near the ten-year anniversary of the September 11, 2001 strikes, the Obama administration is stressing that the threat remains, but in a different form. In a speech at a Chamber of Commerce event yesterday, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said:
[T]he U.S. has a "layered system of security that would give us multiple ways to deter" an attack like the one a decade ago in which airplanes were weaponized. "What we see now is smaller plots," she said. "We are also seeing a rise of activities by individuals who are actually in the country, and they are acting by themselves and that kind of attack is the most difficult to prevent because there is nothing to intercept." Napolitano's comments echoed what President Obama said in an interview Tuesday in discussing the 10-year anniversary of Sept. 11…. With the nation preparing to observe the 10th anniversary of hijacked airliners crashing in New York and Washington and in the Pennsylvania countryside, Obama said the government is in a state of heightened awareness. "The biggest concern we have right now is not the launching of a major terrorist operation, although that risk is always there," the president said. "The risk that we're especially concerned over right now is the lone wolf terrorist, somebody with a single weapon being able to carry out wide-scale massacres of the sort that we saw in Norway recently," he said. "You know, when you've got one person who is deranged or driven by a hateful ideology, they can do a lot of damage, and it's a lot harder to trace those lone wolf operators."
While it is nice that the administration is able to acknowledge that jihadis are going lone wolf—that the jihad has metastasized—this report is a reminder of the administration's failed policies, policies which in many ways led to the current situation, where it is no surprise that, a decade after the strikes of 9/11, "the government is [still] in a state of heightened awareness."
For starters, rather than once attempting to understand the ideology of jihad itself and its place in Islamic history and tradition—not to malign, but for proper context, to understand what one is up against—the administration, like the one before it, preferred to take the easy, politically-correct, way out: focus on formal organizations and people—al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, as the root source of the problem—while ignoring the jihadi elephant in the room.
Indeed, all evidence indicates that the focus remains on the tangible, the quantifiable—al-Qaeda—without wanting to look at the surrounding context which produces groups like it and even jihadi lone wolfs. In the CNN interview, "Obama said the government continues to monitor and gather information about potential terror plots, even though Al Qaeda's capabilities have been degraded." Note the ingrained "even though," as if the very demise of al-Qaeda, its total eradication, is naturally supposed to equate the demise of jihad, which is some 1400 years older than al-Qaeda.
And if ever there was talk on the context that fuels the jihad, it was always the idea that U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East was to blame (regurgitating what the jihadis themselves were saying). Likewise, it was believed that terrorism was a "foreign" problem that could never infect American Muslims, as it has nothing to do with Islam.
Yet here is Napolitano saying that "We are also seeing a rise of activities by individuals who are actually in the country." More to the point, months earlier, Attorney General Eric Holder said that "the threat has changed … to worrying about people in the United States, American citizens — raised here, born here, and who for whatever reason, have decided that they are going to become radicalized and take up arms against the nation in which they were born."
None of this is surprising, considering that the Obama administration went out of its way to ban the use of accurate words—such as jihad and Islam from national security documents—thereby epistemologically undermining American discourse on the nature of the threat.
In short, Fort Hood style attacks—both the successful one of 2009 and the unsuccessful one from weeks ago—should have been expected. Expect more to come as the lone wolf jihad runs loose.
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Mubarak Deceived Israel as Muhammad Deceived Infidels?
by Raymond Ibrahim
Hudson New York
August 17, 2011
http://www.raymondibrahim.com/10134/mubarak-deceived-israel-as-muhammad-deceived
In light of ousted president Hosni Mubarak's ongoing trial, Western readers may be surprised to learn who some of Mubarak's staunchest defenders are: Salafi Muslims, that is, those Muslims who practice the 7th century Islam of Muhammad, often referred to as "radicals."
Sheikh Mahmoud Amer, leader of Ansar al-Sunna in Damanhur, recently appeared on the Egyptian news program Life Today arguing that, according to Sharia, it is illegal to try Mubarak, whose dealings with Israel—specifically the charge that he sold gas to it at cheap rates—were similar to prophet Muhammad's dealing with infidel enemies. I translate the most relevant excerpt:
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Mubarak:Taking lessons in diplomacy from the prophet? |
He [Hosni Mubarak] was the imam [Muslim leader]; all his actions have their circumstances. Regarding this gas issue you're talking about, whoever said that exporting gas to enemy combatants, Jews or otherwise, is impermissible? Who among the Muslim jurists [fuqaha] said this? The prophet himself died while his armor was held by a Jew [an infidel enemy] as collateral; and in the Battle of the Trench [627], the prophet negotiated with one of the polytheist tribes [enemies] to give them dates, Medina's main source of income, just so they would quit the war—because "war is deceit"; he negotiated for this purpose . Nor did divine inspiration [Allah] come down to censure him for his actions, had such actions violated Sharia. So, show me one jurist saying that it is impermissible to deal with enemy combatants—I do not say treaty-holders, as there is a treaty between us and the Jews, but I posit that between us and the Jews is war. So who among the classic jurists said that it is impermissible to deal with combatants, buying and selling? Here are the books of jurisprudence… I say the prophet negotiated with the polytheists to give them free dates just to keep their strength at bay at that time [as opposed to Mubarak, who only sold gas cheaply, Muhammad went one step further giving things for free]. So these are political and military matters, and the authority is free to pick whichever he deems most appropriate.
Along with stressing Muhammad's attempt to appease Islam's infidel enemies with gifts when the latter were stronger than the Muslims, the sheikh also stressed that Mubarak was the "sultan"—an Arabic-Islamic term of special significance, conveying a certain form of sovereign political and temporal authority in Islam, complete with dispensations unavailable to the average Muslim.
Nor are these arcane notions; al-Qaeda itself has stressed these exact points. When discussing the permissibility for Muslims to deceive infidels, the late Osama bin Laden often alluded to Muhammad's attempt to appease the infidel tribe; and Ayman Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's new leader, quotes Islam's jurists as "unanimously agreeing" that "it is forbidden to overthrow" Muslim rulers, even if they are "cruel and despotic" yet "it is obligatory to wage jihad against" Muslim rulers found to be "apostate infidels" (The Al Qaeda Reader, pgs. 26-27, 121-122, 129 ).
The non-hijabbed, Westernized looking female host, somewhat flustered, retorted: "Excuse me sheikh, but this issue of comparing the actions of our blessed prophet and a former president, I mean, forgive me, but maybe one can't speak on or judge between similar circumstances."
Then Montaser al-Zayyat, an Islamist lawyer who regularly represents jihadists—including, formerly, Zawahiri—chimed in saying he too "found it hard listening to the sheikh," insisting that Mubarak should be condemned for selling gas to "the Zionists, for this is a betrayal of the [Egyptian] people."
Eventually, the debate descended into the usual shouting and yelling, with the sheikh boasting that at least Mubarak was a hero in Egypt's 1973 war with Israel, and asking the hostess and Zayyat, "Where were you on October 6, 1973?... Did you ever shoot a single bullet at a Jew?!
This leads to the most telling aspect of this whole anecdote: while the two Muslim experts on Sharia argued over many things, there was no disagreement over two points—enmity for Israel and Jews, and the permissibility of using deceit to undermine them.
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This Month in Muslim Persecution of Christians: July
by Raymond Ibrahim
FrontPage Magazine
August 12, 2011
http://www.raymondibrahim.com/10107/this-month-in-muslim-persecution-of-christians
Because the persecution of Christians in the Islamic world is endemic, on its way to reaching epidemic proportions, I begin with this article a new series called "This Month in Muslim Persecution of Christians," wherein some—by no means all—of the foulest instances of persecution that surface each month will be collated and assessed.
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Intersection: the point where Christianity and Islam cross |
The purpose of this series is two-fold:
- Intrinsically, to document that which the MSM does not: Muslim persecution of Christians.
- Instrumentally, to show that such persecution is not "random," but systematic and interrelated—that it is ultimately rooted in a Sharia worldview.
As will become evident, whatever the anecdote of persecution, it typically fits under a specific theme, including hatred for churches and other Christian symbols; sexual abuse of Christian women and misogyny; apostasy
