Robert Spencer: Yes, It Really Is All About Islam
My latest in the Geller Report:
Two news items this week show us once again what the establishment media and almost all political authorities in the free world are determined to deny: jihad terrorism really is all about Islam.
The first was in Australia, from which the Daily Mail Australia reported Saturday that “about 40 heavily-armed police stormed a Surry Hills home at 4pm before raiding properties in Lakemba, Punchbowl and Wiley Park in Sydney’s west. An Islamist cell is accused of planning to bring down a domestic flight with an ‘explosive device’ discovered at the Cleveland Street home.”
Neighbors of the four Muslims who were arrested professed to be shocked. One told reporters that the arrested men were “perfectly nice and normal people. We knew them to say hello to and they seemed nice.”
They probably were nice and normal. They just believed in jihad against the Infidel. Nowhere are non-Muslim governments taking that possibility into account. Australian authorities, like authorities all over the West, are indefatigably committed to the idea that Islam is a Religion of Peace, and that every last Muslim in the West is a loyal citizen who is committed to a pluralistic society and abhors jihad terror.
And if the neighbors of these Muslims in the West express the slightest doubt as to these Muslims’ abhorrence of jihad terror, they will be brought up on “Islamophobia” and “hate speech” charges and fined or jailed. Non-Muslims better assume their Muslim neighbors are “nice and normal,” or else.
Meanwhile, these “nice and normal” Muslim neighbors were plotting to bomb a commercial airliner in the name of Islam and jihad, hoping to kill hundreds and destroy the lives of countless others.
Why? Because they believed in the Qur’an and Sunnah, and in the imperatives contained in both to wage jihad against unbelievers. Islam, and only Islam, explains what would transform “nice and normal” neighbors into mass murderers. From an Islamic standpoint, there is nothing that isn’t “nice and normal” about jihad mass murder.
The second news item comes from Germany, where, according to the Associated Press, “a Palestinian man who allegedly stabbed one person to death and wounded six others in Hamburg was known to authorities as a suspected Islamic radical but is also psychologically unstable.”
As is always the case with instances such as this one, we’re told that “the man’s motive remained unclear.” However, he was screaming “Allahu akbar” as he stabbed the shoppers, and according to AP, “a friend had tipped authorities off to changes in the man, telling them that he stopped drinking alcohol and started talking about the Quran, said Torsten Voss, head of the Hamburg branch of the domestic intelligence agency.”
He “stopped drinking alcohol and started talking about the Quran.”
Before Barack Obama in 2011 ordered the scrubbing of counter-terror training materials of all mention of Islam and jihad, this would have been taken as a possible sign that a Muslim could potentially become a jihad terrorist. On October 19, 2011, Farhana Khera of Muslim Advocates wrote a letter to John Brennan, who was then the Assistant to the President on National Security for Homeland Security and Counter Terrorism. The letter was signed not just by Khera, but by the leaders of virtually all the significant Islamic groups in the United States, including CAIR, ISNA, MAS, ICNA, and MPAC.
The letter denounced what it characterized as U.S. government agencies’ “use of biased, false and highly offensive training materials about Muslims and Islam.” Khera stated:
A 2006 FBI intelligence report stating that individuals who convert to Islam are on the path to becoming “Homegrown Islamic Extremists,” if they exhibit any of the following behavior:
“Wearing traditional Muslim attire”
“Growing facial hair”
“Frequent attendance at a mosque or a prayer group”
“Travel to a Muslim country”
“Increased activity in a pro-Muslim social group or political cause”
But the FBI intelligence report Khera purported to be describing didn’t actually say that converts to Islam were necessarily “on the path” to becoming “extremists” if they wore traditional Muslim attire, grew facial hair, and frequently attended a mosque; it simply included these behaviors among a list of fourteen indicators to “identify an individual going through the radicalization process.” Others included “travel without obvious source of funds’; “suspicious purchases of bomb making paraphernalia or weapons”; “large transfer of funds, from or to overseas”; and “formation of operational cells.” Khera selectively quoted and misrepresented the list to give the impression that the FBI was saying that devout observance of Islam led inevitably and in every case to “extremism.”
In any case, all that was swept away. It became “Islamophobic” to take a newfound interest in Islam as any indication that an individual was on a path to jihad. And so the Hamburg supermarket attacker was free to stab people at will, because German authorities wouldn’t have dreamed of doing something so “Islamophobic” as placing him under surveillance because he stopped drinking alcohol and started talking about the Qur’an (and was already known to them as an “Islamist”).
Yet the Hamburg attack and the Sydney plot both demonstrate yet again that all this really is all about Islam, and unless and until law enforcement officials begin to take that into account, a great many more people are going to die.
( Muslims do not assimilate! They infiltreate! )
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