KEEPING OUR HEADS IN THE SAND AFTER BOSTON

by STEVEN EMERSON

The Obama administration’s policy banning references to “Islamic extremism” and “jihad” in discussions about terrorism drew criticism during last Thursday’s House Homeland Security Committee hearing on the Boston Marathon bombings.

The bombings “should again teach us that the enemy we face is violent Islamist extremism, not just al Qaida,” said former U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman. “Osama bin Laden is dead. And the remaining leadership of al Qaida is on the run, but the ideology of violent Islamist extremism is rapidly spreading.”

The Boston investigation already has shown that Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev “adopted the outrageously false narrative of violent Islamist extremism, that Islam and America are involved in a struggle to the death with each other,” Lieberman said.

It has been more than five years since the Department of Homeland Security, under the Bush administration, issued a directive about “the difficult terrain of terminology” as recommended by unidentified academics and Muslim American activists. “Jihadist” and “Islamist terrorist” were identified as terms to be avoided. Jihad “glamorizes terrorism, imbues terrorists with religious authority they do not have, and damages relations with Muslims around the globe,” the memo said.

By identifying them as mere extremists or criminals, they lose some of the luster that attracts recruits, the argument goes.

Is it working? How can you tell?

Anecdotally, this strategy did nothing to dissuade the Tsarnaevs, or any of the other homegrown terrorist plotters in recent years. The policy’s effectiveness is difficult, if not impossible, to quantify. But skeptics, such as Monterey Terrorism Research and Education Program Director Jeffrey M. Bale, say the language policy is illogical.

“Why, after all, would Muslims look to non-Muslims to interpret their religion for them, or for guidance about how to identify and label Islamists?” Bale said in response to an email from the Investigative Project on Terrorism. “Indeed, if we call jihadists ‘criminals,’ it may actually have the counterproductive effect of garnering more sympathy for them given the levels of anti-U.S. and anti-Western hostility throughout the Muslim world.”

Jihadists routinely make it plain that – while religion may not be the sole factor driving them to violence – their Islamic beliefs and identities dominate their thinking. “We in the West just don’t seem to want to believe what they constantly say,” Bale wrote. (Read his full response here.)

Faisal Shahzad failed to set off the car bomb he built and parked near Times Square in 2010. But he said he tried to kill Americans because he saw himself as part of “the war against people who believe in the book of Allah and follow the commandments, so this is a war against Allah. So let’s see how you can defeat your Creator, which you can never do. Therefore, the defeat of U.S. is imminent and will happen in the near future, inshallah [God willing], which will only give rise to much awaited Muslim caliphate, which is the only true world order.”

Farooque Ahmed similarly thought he was acting to defend Muslims when he plotted to attack subway stops along Washington’s Metro.

FBI agents were drawn to Ahmed after he tried to make contact with terrorist groups so he could wage jihad against Americans. At Ahmed’s sentencing, public defender Kenneth Troccoli explained that Ahmed’s extreme religious beliefs helped land him in front of the court….

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The Art of Death

By Andrew C. McCarthy

….Even as Boston buries its dead, just as they must do from Cairo to Thailand, Americans are instructed not to notice the inevitable progression from Islamic-supremacist ideology to aggression and murder. The See No Islam campaign entails such inanities as portrayal of the Brotherhood as a “largely secular” outfit. Thus, few of us have heard of Banna’s odes to “the art of death.” To know them is to see the farce in President Obama’s sudden angst over hunger-striking jihadists, and in the renewed vigor of his quest to close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

About 166 detainees remain at Gitmo. Around 100 of them have joined in a hunger strike that began four months ago when some of the jihadists accused their military guards of mishandling Korans — sorry, I mean Holy Korans — during searches of their cells.

Mind you, cells are regularly searched in every prison. Gitmo is unusual only in the heightened necessity of this routine. Jihadists frequently attack the guards with weapons improvised and hidden in their cells. The Holy Koran, meanwhile, is not wholly Koran — jihadists often use it to pass each other messages. No surprise there: Islamic supremacists take the book to command war against infidels — under the crazy notion that scores of verses like Sura 8:12, Allah’s command to “strike off [the unbelievers’] heads and strike off every fingertip of them” in order to “cast terror into [their] hearts,” actually mean what they say.

Alas, as we’ve seen before, the Pentagon brass — the guys who see jihadist mass murder at a U.S. military base as “workplace violence” — would sooner repeal the First Amendment than abide any mishandling of the Holy Koran. Indeed, Gitmo protocols have long directed that, where possible, only white-gloved Muslim military personnel should touch the sacred text, even when cells are being tossed. The Defense Department has thus internalized the supremacist principle that infidels are not fit to touch things Islamic, the very principle by which our friends the Saudis forbid public professions of Christianity and ban non-Muslims from entering the cities of Mecca and Medina.

While we avert our eyes from the ugliness of our enemies’ ideology, they go to school on us. Guerilla training for jihadists prominently includes propaganda. Much of this, naturally, is geared to rally the Left’s assorted shock troops of Western self-loathing. In equal part, though, it is theater. A good hunger strike works wonders. Like all real jihad, it is what Banna famously called “the art of death.” The omnipresent specter of martyrdom, he knew, was a transformative agent of influence.

Relying on Muslim scripture in a book he called “Jihad,” Banna explained that Allah reserves the greatest “reward” for the “martyrs and fighters in His way.” Only those “who have modeled themselves upon the martyrs in their performance of jihad can join them in this reward.” Performance was not a word chosen idly….

 

….The hunger strike is on because the jihadists figure Obama is ripe for the taking. Though he has no compunction about quickie drone rub-outs thousands of miles out of sight, he is petrified by the prospect of performance-art jihad: The languishing martyrdom of self-starving death cultists, whose rapt audience of Obama favorites — Brotherhood front groups and the Lawyer Left — remind the administration every long day that he promised to shut this theater down almost five years ago.

This week, they drove the president to babbling incoherence. The hunger strike, he said, reaffirms the need to close Gitmo. But the jihadists are not starving themselves over Gitmo; they are starving themselves over being detained without trial — which they would be even if Obama got his way and Congress green-lighted his plan to stash them at a white-elephant prison near Chicago.

Well, there is one difference. Once the show moved stateside, the art of death would not only draw enhanced, sympathetic coverage from the Obamedia; the terrorists would also unquestionably be in the jurisdiction of the federal courts for all purposes — not just for the novel habeas corpus carve-out the Supreme Court manufactured so our enemies could challenge their designation as wartime enemy combatants. As long as a detainee is in Cuba, a judge may only tell the executive branch it has no authority to hold him under the law of war. If the detainees were in the United States, though, some judge would surely assume the power to order them released.

Have we mentioned that Obama, who still rails against indefinite detention without civilian trial despite having continued the practice since 2009, has already put over 200 like-minded lawyers on the federal bench? That he will seat a couple of hundred more by the time he’s through?

The vast majority of Americans mainly remember the art of death practiced on 9/11, not to mention in Boston just two weeks ago. Consequently, we couldn’t care less whether or not the Gitmo jihadists starve their way to the Great Orgy in the Sky. We say: Meet the art of death with the fruits of life. Instead of Holy Korans, let’s have our white-gloved guards deliver the prisoners a heaping halal turkey dinner every day — on videotape. If they choose not to eat it, that’s on them. Just send the leftovers to the school lunch program . . . after all, there’s a sequester on.

Unfortunately, we are being governed by the jihadists’ target audience.

More

Tsarnaev had three accomplices, or How Willful Blindness kills

The Boston Bombings and how Political Correctness Kills

Patrick Poole: Political Correctness & Willful Blindness Hinders FBI Terror Investigations