Cameron is winning praise for daring to suggest that the foe we face has anything to do with Islam. At the same time, however, he continues to maintain that the jihadis are “perverting” their peaceful religion. That is an unproven assertion and not a harmless one: it forces law enforcement and intelligence officials to waste time and resources on a fruitless search for what motivates young Muslims to join jihad groups — since the officials are bound as a matter of policy to ignore the fact that the jihad groups appeal to Islamic texts and teachings to recruit peaceful Muslims. And this leads to policy errors such as the endless flow of jizya to Pakistan and Afghanistan, predicated on the false assumption that poverty causes terrorism and wealth will end it.

Ultimately, neither Cameron nor Obama is facing the jihad threat squarely or realistically. And so the jihad fire will continue to rage, despite their best efforts to contain it.

“Obama vs. Cameron: British PM takes hard line on ‘Islamist’ extremists, Obama avoids I-word,”FoxNews.com, January 16, 2015:

…Obama:

“We both recognize that intelligence and military force alone is not going to solve this problem, so we’re also going to keep working together on strategies to counter violent extremism that radicalizes recruits and mobilizes people, especially young people, to engage in terrorism.”

“We also look forward to welcoming our British friends to our summit next month on countering violent terrorism, because whether in Europe or in America, a critical weapon against terrorism is our adherence to our freedoms and values at home, including the pluralism and the respect and tolerance that defines us as diverse and democratic societies.”

“This phenomenon of violent extremism, the ideology, the networks, the capacity to recruit young people, this has metastasized and it is widespread, and it has penetrated communities around the world.”

“I do not consider it an existential threat. As David said, this is one that we will solve. We are stronger. We are representing values that the vast majority of Muslims believe in — in tolerance and in working together to build, rather than to destroy.”

“And so, you know, this is a problem that causes great heartache and tragedy and destruction, but it is one that ultimately we’re going to defeat. But we can’t just defeat it through weapons. One of the things that we spoke about is how do we lift up those voices that represent the vast majority of the Muslim world, so that that counter-narrative against this nihilism is put out there as aggressively and as nimbly as the messages coming out from these — these fanatics.”

Cameron:

“We know what we’re up against. And we know how we will win. We face a poisonous and fanatical ideology that wants to pervert one of the world’s major religions, Islam, and create conflict, terror and death. With our allies, we will confront it wherever it appears.”

“We will deploy additional intelligence and surveillance assets to help Iraqi forces on the ground, and we will ensure they are better trained and equipped to counter explosive devices. But most important of all, we must also fight this poisonous ideology starting at home.”

“We do face a very serious Islamist extremist terrorist threat in Europe, in America, across the world. And we have to be incredibly vigilant in terms of that threat.”

“It means countering this poisonous, fanatical death cult of a narrative that is perverting the religion of Islam.”

“But here’s, I think, the really determining point: You can have, tragically, people who have had all the advantages of integration, who’ve had all the economic opportunities that our countries can offer, who still get seduced by this poisonous, radical, death cult of a narrative.”

“So, let’s never lose sight of the real enemy here, which is the poisonous narrative that’s perverting Islam. That is what we have to focus on, recognizing that, of course, we help ourselves in this struggle if we create societies of genuine opportunity, if we create genuine integration between our communities.”

No more sanctions! They could upset the process of making disastrous and irreversible concessions to a bloodthirsty regime with genocidal aspirations!

“Obama warns U.S. Congress against more sanctions on Iran,” by Jeff Mason and Roberta Rampton, Reuters, January 16, 2015 (thanks to Lookmann):

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Barack Obama warned lawmakers on Friday not to trigger new sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program, saying such a move would upset diplomatic talks and increase the likelihood of a military conflict with Tehran.

In a joint news conference at the White House, Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron urged members of Congress to be patient and hold off on legislation calling for further sanctions.

“There is no good argument for us to try to undercut, undermine the negotiations until they’ve played themselves out,” Obama told reporters.

“Congress needs to show patience,” he added. “My main message to Congress is: ‘Just hold your fire.'”

Obama said he told Democratic lawmakers he would veto a bill calling for new sanctions if it landed on his desk….

Angela Merkel has condemned Pegida, Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident, as “racist.” What race is Islamization? This and other mainstream news stories on the movement calls it “far right.” Why is it “far right” to defend the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, and the equality of rights of all people before the law? Why is it “racist” and “far right” to oppose exactly this kind of violent intimidation and thuggery?

Imagine that the German government crushes Pegida and criminalizes resistance to Islamization. What does Angela Merkel think would happen then? Would Muslim and non-Muslim Germans march forward together into a peaceful, tolerant, multicultural future? Or might Islamization proceed apace and steadily erode German freedoms?

“Jihadists plotting terror attacks on German far-right Pegida rallies say intelligence sources,” by Tom Porter, International Business Times, January 17, 2015 (thanks to Lookmann):

Islamist terrorists are plotting to attack rallies held by Germany’s far-right Pegida movement, according to intelligence sources.

Foreign intelligence services have intercepted communications by “known international jihadists” planning strikes against those taking part in the rallies of the group, which aims to halt what it describes as the ‘Islamification’ of Europe, according to AFP and Der Spiegel reports.

The intelligence was passed to German authorities, with an unnamed and high-ranking security official telling Der Spiegel “we take these leads very seriously”.

There was no specific intelligence on the time or location of an attack, according to the German magazine.

Numbers have swollen at rallies held by Pegida, or Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident, in recent months.

The group held its largest ever march in Dresden on Monday, in solidarity with the victims of the terrorist attacks in Paris, with 25,000 attending.

Critics of the group accuse it of being racist and, in her new year’s address, German chancellor Angela Merkel warned that the group’s leaders had “prejudice, coldness, even hatred in their hearts”.

Starting with only a few hundred marchers in September, numbers at the Pegida’s rallies have steadily grown.

Experts have warned that the Paris attacks could increase support for far-right organisations, and exacerbate tensions between locals and immigrant communities….

Valls also says, ““It is very important to make clear to people that Islam has nothing to do with ISIS.” How exactly he proposes to do that is unclear, at least if he intends to be honest, since what the Islamic State does all has foundation in the Qur’an and Sunnah. But he is absolutely right about this: “There is a prejudice in society about this, but on the other hand, I refuse to use this term ‘Islamophobia,’ because those who use this word are trying to invalidate any criticism at all of Islamist ideology. The charge of ‘Islamophobia’ is used to silence people. ”

“French Prime Minister: ‘I Refuse to Use This Term Islamophobia,’ by Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic, January 16, 2015:

The prime minister of France, Manuel Valls, has emerged over the past tumultuous week as one of the West’s most vocal foes of Islamism, though he’s actually been talking about the threat it poses for a long while. During the course of an interview conducted before the Charlie Hebdo attacks, he told me—he went out of his way to tell me, in fact—that he refuses to use the term ‘Islamophobia’ to describe the phenomenon of anti-Muslim prejudice, because, he says, the accusation of Islamophobia is often used as a weapon by Islamism’s apologists to silence their critics.

Most of my conversation with Valls was focused on the fragile state of French Jewry—here is my post on his comments, which included the now-widely circulated statement that, “if 100,000 Jews leave, France will no longer be France”—and I didn’t realize the importance of his comment about Islamophobia until I re-read the transcript of our interview.

“It is very important to make clear to people that Islam has nothing to do with ISIS,” Valls told me. “There is a prejudice in society about this, but on the other hand, I refuse to use this term ‘Islamophobia,’ because those who use this word are trying to invalidate any criticism at all of Islamist ideology. The charge of ‘Islamophobia’ is used to silence people. ”

Valls was not denying the existence of anti-Muslim sentiment, which is strong across much of France. In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack, miscreants have shot at Muslim community buildings, and various repulsive threats against individual Muslims have been cataloged. President Francois Hollande, who said Thursday that Muslims are the “first victims of fanaticism, fundamentalism, intolerance,” might be overstating the primacy of anti-Muslim prejudice in the current hierarchy of French bigotries—after all, Hollande just found it necessary to deploy his army to defend Jewish schools from Muslim terrorists, not Muslim schools from Jewish terrorists—but anti-Muslim bigotry is a salient and seemingly permanent feature of life in France. Or to contextualize it differently: Anti-Muslim feeling appears to be more widespread than anti-Jewish feeling across much of France, but anti-Jewish feeling has been expressed recently (and not-so-recently) with far more lethality, and mainly by Muslims.

It appears as if Valls came to his view on the illegitimacy of ‘Islamophobia’ after being influenced by a number of people, including and especially the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner and the writer (and fatwa target) Salman Rushdie. Rushdie, along with a group of mainly Muslim writers, attacked the use of the term ‘Islamophobia’ several years ago in an open letter: “We refuse to renounce our critical spirit out of fear of being accused of ‘Islamophobia’, a wretched concept that confuses criticism of Islam as a religion and stigmatization of those who believe in it.”

Bruckner argued that use of the word ‘Islamophobia’ was designed to deflect attention away from the goals of Islamists: “[I]t denies the reality of an Islamic offensive in Europe all the better to justify it; it attacks secularism by equating it with fundamentalism. Above all, however, it wants to silence all those Muslims who question the Koran, who demand equality of the sexes, who claim the right to renounce religion, and who want to practice their faith freely and without submitting to the dictates of the bearded and doctrinaire.”…