Recognizing Radical Islam as Our Enemy: Lessons From the Cold War

By Ron Radosh

Let us no longer speculate about the motive for the actions of the Tsarnaev brothers: despite growing up in the United States, both became adherents of radical Islam. This truth, in our politically correct age, we are not supposed to mention. To do so in liberal circles is to be accused of Islamophobia. Ignoring the truth, however, is no protection against the consequences of an extremist radical ideology.

The most interesting tidbit on Sunday’s 60 Minutes was an interview with the late Tamerlan’s neighbor, who revealed a conversation he had with him about Islam. Tamerlan told the young man that the Bible was nothing but a warmed-over Koran, and that the United States was an oppressor of not only Muslims, but of Africans and Third World peoples. America, he said, was a “colonizing power.” This point of view, as we all know, is not only held by Islamists, but is commonplace among many living in Cambridge, MA, affectionately known as “The People’s Republic of Cambridge.” Growing up in the most radical of American communities, that point of view was an accepted shibboleth among many of the Tsarnaev brothers’ friends and associates. Combined with a growing attachment to Islamic tenets, it became a lethal one.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, former Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey (2007-2009) warns that our FBI, now in charge of the interrogation of the surviving younger brother Dzhokhar, “has blowdlerized its training materials to exclude references to militant Islamism.” Mukasey wonders whether this “delicacy” has also infected the FBI’s top-level interrogation group.

Let us not forget that when radical Islamist Major Nidal Hasan went on his rampage at Fort Hood in November of 2009, the government report called his action “workplace violence,” refusing to even term it a terrorist action. With the Tsarnaev brothers, it will be much harder to repeat this error. Due to diligent reporting, the world now knows about their social media sites, their visiting of jihadist websites, and their growing radicalization at home in our country….

…Time is growing short.

We may, if we are lucky, get good intelligence from the interrogation of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. If he cooperates, we may learn whom his brother was in touch with when he returned to Russia for six months, or whom else they may have been in contact with in this country. But even so, we should remain vigilant. There will be others recently radicalized who will seek to emulate their action. There might also be actual sleeper cells of radical Islamists waiting for the call to spring into action.

The Boston Marathon bombing was a harbinger of what may come. Like Spain and Britain, we too are no longer immune to the actions of those who engage in jihad. To prevent such future attacks, the first step is to acknowledge that radical Islam — not “terrorism” — is our enemy, and jihad is the way the Islamists put their beliefs into practice.

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Jihad is Cool: Jihadist Magazines Recruit Young Terrorists

by STEVE EMERSON

Jihad recruitment has evolved into using a mainstream format, it is now cool. Print and online magazines provide practical detailed instruction on how to commit terrorist acts. The latest offering, Lone Mujahid Pocketbook, Spring 2013, is published courtesy of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula’s Inspire magazine, and is available on multiple websites.

It bills itself as “A Step to (sic) Step Guide on How to Become a Successful Lone Mujahid” and already has enthusiasts. Using hip, modern language conventions and rap lingo, the cover asks “R U dreamin’ of wagin’ jihadi attacks against kuffar? … Well, there’s no need to travel abroad, coz the frontline has come to you. Wanna know how? Just read ‘n’ apply the contents of this guide which has practical ‘n’ creative ways to please Allah by killing his enemies ‘n’ healing the believers’ chests.” Creepily akin to a teen magazine, the Pocketbook specifically targets prospective American jihadis with tips, tactics and incitements to carry out terror attacks.

It offers Inspire‘s glossy, high quality graphics and a professional finish to pages methodically detailing the types of bombs; the best locations for attacks and other ways to generally reap mayhem….

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Rottener and Rottener in Denmark

By Bruce Bawer

If the February 5 murder attempt on Lars Hedegaard in Copenhagen didn’t make it clear what Europe’s Islam critics are up against, the aftermath of this monstrous crime has certainly done so. I’ve already written here about the morally challenged Ekstra Bladet journalists who, when Lars felt compelled to find a new place to live after the attempt on his life, followed his moving van in an obvious effort to be able to report his new address. Then there was Danish TV host Martin Krasnik, who in a March 17 interviewwith Lars played prosecutor, comparing Lars’s book on Islam, In the House of War, to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and trying to paint him as a man whose purported extremism had isolated him even from his fellow Islam critics.

Krasnik got a lot of heat for that sleazy display. Now comes another Danish journalist, Klaus Wivel, who has chosen to take this occasion not only to get in a few kicks at Lars but to smack around several of those (myself included) who have responded to Lars’s close shave with shows of solidarity. To be sure, Wivel, writing in Weekendavisen, admits that Islam is not a thoroughly innocuous phenomenon and that Krasnik acted like a thug. But the thrust of his article is that Lars and his friends and defenders have gone too far. After the Krasnik interview, Wivel notes, some of the thousands of reader comments at the Free Press Society’s website were anti-Semitic. (Krasnik is Jewish.) While acknowledging that Lars and company despise anti-Semitism, Wivel finds it “significant that these weeds are growing in their backyards.” Meaning what? That Lars is responsible for the prejudices of every commenter on the Free Press Society’s site?

Wivel says that in Lars’s view, the argument about Islam isn’t a “parish-council debate”: it’s “war.” This mentality, Wivel insists, can only lead to defeat. About which I can only ask: is Wivel serious? Let me get this straight: when people are coming to the door of your home and trying to kill you, and the media, in the aftermath, treat you like the perpetrator, you shouldn’t feel that you’re at war? Does Wivel sincerely expect that Islam critics who have been subject to murder attempts and death threats, all the while being systematically, heartlessly, and mendaciously vilified in the media – people like Robert Redeker and Geert Wilders, who have to live with round-the-clock bodyguards because of would-be assassins, and people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Fiamma Nirenstein, who lived with bodyguards and ended up leaving Europe entirely – should treat the whole matter like a parish-council debate?

Wivel talks about Jews. What about all the Jews who are fleeing France and other European countries because Islam has made their lives unlivable? Is it excessive, in Wivel’s view, for them to think or speak of themselves as being at war? “If one is in the House of War,” Wivel warns, apropos of the anti-Semitism of those commenters at the Free Press Society site, “one takes on the attributes of the enemy.” But Wivel’s solution, it would appear, is to pretend that we’re not at war. He mocks Lars for believing that “we’re standing…at the gates of Vienna.” Wivel seems already to have forgotten that a few weeks ago Lars was almost standing at the Pearly Gates. Which of these two men is more out of touch with reality?…

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Turkey’s Erdoğan and the Zenith of Hypocrisy

By Steven Simpson

….Probably the most well-known war crime that Turkey engaged in was the slaughter – if not genocide  - perpetrated against the Armenians in the first two decades of the 20^th century.  In fact, the Turks were already slaughtering Armenians in the late 19^th century in what has come to be known as “the Hamidian massacres.”  Estimates of the slaughter range from hundreds of thousands to millions.  In any event, Turkey has consistently and constantly denied that such crimes against the Armenians took place.  Turkey is so sensitive to the charge of genocide that when the U.S. Congress in 2010 finally passed a resolution condemning this crime, Turkey threatened “serious consequences” to the “partnership” between America and Turkey.  Ironically, Barack Obama, who had the audacity to say back in 2007 that “nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people,” sought to stop the congressional resolution on the Armenian genocide.

 

Continuing with Turkish war crimes, and the hypocrisy of the neo-Ottoman crypto-Sultan Erdoğan, there were the massacres and expulsions of the Greeks from their ancestral homelands.  This is another Turkish crime against humanity that is little-known, and even less spoken or written about.  ”The Pontian Genocide” took place between the years of 1916 and 1922.  Again, estimates vary in the casualty rate, but the slaughter could have been as close to 1,000,000 Greeks killed.  This doesn’t even take into account the surviving 1.5 million Greeks who lived in Asia Minor (Anatolia) for millennia before being expelled by the Turks to European Greece during this era.

 

Finally, there are the Kurds.  If there was ever an authentic Middle Eastern minority of Muslims that deserves a nation-state, it is the Kurds.  While Islamist governments in Iran and Turkey (as well as the Arab world) talk about “Islamic solidarity” when it comes to the so-called “Palestinians,” there is not even a syllable of talk regarding the plight of the Kurds.  The Kurds have been killed and suppressed by Arab, Persian, and Turk for centuries, all of whom see the legitimate aim of the Kurds to establish their own state as a threat to the status quo of continuous Arab, Persian, and Turkish imperialism.

 

While the Kurds are spread out over Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey, it has been in the last country that the Kurds have basically been written out of history by the Turks.  The Turkish quest to deny any semblance of a Kurdish existence has been so bizarre that Turkey even banned the Kurdish language during the years 1983-1999 and routinely referred to them as “mountain Turks.”  To this day, Turkey routinely crosses the Syrian and Iraqi borders to fight against “Kurdish terrorists.”

 

This background on Turkish war crimes is just a brief sketch of the brutal actions that Turkey has committed over the decades (if not centuries).  The next time the arrogant, bellicose, and venomous Erdoğan along with his fellow Islamists lectures Israel about “crimes against humanity,” they should look in the mirror and admit to true war crimes.

 

Indeed, Israel – and America, for that matter – would do history a great justice if they reminded Turkey in the strongest language possible, of the Turks’ bloody crimes against their own minorities, instead of sitting back and allowing Turkey to pontificate about Israel’s nonexistent “crimes against humanity.”  Continued silence will only strengthen bullies and thugs like Erdoğan, lend credence to his outlandish slander, and allow Turkey to continue to rewrite history in its own image.

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National Defense: Andrew Wilkow: Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin and Dr. John Parnell