After some of
its quarter of a million Muslims headed to join ISIS, Quebec decided the answer
was a $2 million anti-radicalization center headed by a specialist in cultural
sensitivity. But if you’re about to be beheaded by a masked ISIS Jihadist, a
specialist in cultural sensitivity isn’t going to help you much.
Western governments
nevertheless keep rolling out their culturally sensitive approaches to fighting
ISIS.
The key element
in Obama’s strategy for fighting ISIS isn’t the F-15E Strike Eagle, it’s a
Twitter account run by a Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer which claims to
“Counter Violent Extremism” by presenting moderate Islamists like Al Qaeda as
positive role models for the Islamic State’s social media supporters.
So far 75% of
planes flown on combat missions against ISIS return without engaging the enemy,
but the culturally sensitive State Department Twitter account has racked up
over 5,000 tweets and zero kills.
Cultural
sensitivity hasn’t exactly set Iraq on fire in fighting ISIS and de-radicalization
programs here start from the false premise that there is a wide gap between a
moderate and extremist Islam. Smiling news anchors daily recite new stories
about a teenager from Kentucky, Boston or Manchester getting “radicalized” and
joining ISIS to the bafflement of his parents, mosque and community.
And who is to
blame for all this mysterious radicalization? It’s not the parents. It
certainly can’t be the moderate local mosque with its stock of Jihadist CDs and
DVDs being dispensed from under the table.
The attorney
for the family of Usaama Rahim, the Muslim terrorist who plotted to behead
Pamela Geller, claims that his radicalization came as a “complete shock” to
them.
It must have
come as a truly great shock to his brother Imam Ibrahim Rahim who claimed that
his brother was shot in the back and that the Garland cartoon attack had been
staged by the government.
It must have
come as an even bigger shock to Imam Abdullah Faaruuq, the Imam linked to
Usaama Rahim and his fellow terrorist conspirators, as well as the Tsarnaev
brothers, who had urged Muslims to “grab onto the gun and the sword.” The
culturally insensitive truth about Islamic ‘radicalization’ is that it is
incremental.
There is no
peaceful Islam. Instead of two sharply divided groups, peaceful Islam and
extremist Islam, there is a spectrum of acceptable terrorism.
Muslim
institutions have different places on that spectrum depending on their
allegiances and tactics, but the process of radicalization is rarely a sharp
break from the past for any except converts to Islam.
The latest
tragic victim of radicalization is Munther Omar Saleh; a Muslim man living in
New York City who allegedly plotted to use a Tsarnaev-style pressure cooker
bomb in a major landmark such as the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State
Building. Saleh claimed to be following orders from ISIS.
Media coverage
of the Saleh arrest drags out the old clichés about how unexpected this sudden
radicalization was, but what appears to be his father’s social media account
shows support for Hamas.
Likewise one of
Usaama Rahim’s fellow mosque attendees said that Rahim and another conspirator
had initially followed the “teachings of the Muslim Brotherhood” but that he
had been forced to cut ties with them when they moved past the Brotherhood and
became “extreme”.
Despite the
media’s insistence on describing the Muslim Brotherhood as a moderate
organization, it has multiple terrorist arms, including Hamas, and its views on
non-Muslims run the gamut from the violent to the genocidal.
A year after
Obama’s Cairo speech and his outreach to the Muslim Brotherhood, its Supreme
Guide announced that the United States will soon be destroyed, urged violent
terrorist attacks against the United States and “raising a jihadi generation
that pursues death just as the enemies pursue life.” Despite this, Obama
continued backing the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power across the region.
There are
distinctions between the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, but the latter is a
splinter group of the former. Al Qaeda’s current leader came out of the Muslim
Brotherhood. A move from one to the other is a minor transition between two
groups that have far more in common than their differences.
And since the
Brotherhood controls much of the Islamic infrastructure in the United States,
the idea that Munther Omar Saleh or Usaama Rahim became radicalized because
they went from a Jihadist group that takes the long view in the struggle
against the infidel, putting political structures into place to make a violent
struggle tactically feasible, to a Jihadist group that focuses more on short
term violence, is silly.
Radicalization
isn’t transformational; it’s incremental. It’s the Pakistani kid down the block
deciding that instead of joining the Muslim Students Association and then CAIR
to build Islamist political structures in America, he should just cut to the
chase and kill a few cops to begin taking over America now. Radicalization is
the moderate Imam who stops putting on an act for PBS and the local politicians
and moves to Yemen where he openly recruits terrorists to attack America
instead of doing it covertly at his mosque in Virginia.
Radicalization
is the teenage Muslim girl who forgets about marrying her Egyptian third cousin
and bringing him and his fifty relatives to America and goes to join ISIS as a
Caliphate brood mare instead.
It’s not pacifism
giving way to violence. Instead it’s an impatient shift from tactical actions
meant to eventually make Islam supreme in America over many generations to
immediate bloody gratification. ISIS is promising the apocalypse now. No more
waiting. No more lying. You can have it tomorrow.
Radicalization
does not go from zero to sixty. It speeds up from sixty to seventy-five. It
builds on elements that are already there in the mosque and the household. The
term “extremism” implicitly admits that what we are talking about is not a
complete transformation, but the logical extension of existing Islamic beliefs.
Omar Saleh
seemed cheerful enough about Hamas dropping Kassam rockets on Israeli towns and
cities. Would he have supported his son setting off a bomb in the Statue of
Liberty? Who knows, but his son was already starting from a family position
that Muslim terrorism against non-Muslims was acceptable.
Everything else
is the fine print.
When Usaama
Rahim followed the way of the Muslim Brotherhood, he was with a moderate group
whose spiritual guide, the genocidal Qaradawi was the godfather of cartoon
outrage and had endorsed the murderous Iranian fatwa against Salman Rushdie.
The slope that
leads from Qaradawi’s cartoon rage to trying to behead Pamela Geller isn’t a
slippery one; it’s a vertical waterfall. And this is what radicalization really
looks like. It doesn’t mean moderates turning extreme. It means extremists becoming
more extreme. And there’s always room for extremists to become more extreme
which turns old extremists into moderates while mainstreaming their beliefs.
In the UK,
Baroness Warsi, Cameron’s biggest mistake, blamed Muslim radicalization on the
government’s refusal to engage with… radicals. Or as she put it, “It is
incredibly odd and incredibly worrying that over time more and more individuals,
more and more organizations are considered by the government to be beyond the
pale and therefore not to be engaged with.”
The reason why
the government is refusing to “engage” with these organizations is that they
support terrorism in one form or another. Warsi is proposing that the UK fight
radicalization by mainstreaming it.
Mainstreaming
extremism is also Obama’s policy. It’s the logic behind nearly every Western
diplomatic move in the Middle East from the Israel-PLO peace process to the
Brotherhood’s Arab Spring. And these disasters only created more Islamic
terrorism.
The Muslim
teenagers headed to join ISIS did not come out of a vacuum. They came from
mosques and families that normalized some degree of Islamic Supremacism and
viewed some Muslim terrorists as heroes and role models. It’s time for Western
governments to admit that the ISIS Jihadist is more the product of his parents
and his teachers than of social media Jihadis on YouTube and Twitter.
Radicalization
doesn’t begin with a sheikh on social media. It begins at home. It begins in
the mosque. It just ends with ISIS.
First published at Sultanknish Blog
http://barbwire.com/2015/06/21/0625-the-myth-of-muslim-radicalization/
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