Author: Robert Spencer
Publication: FrontPageMagazine.com
Date: February 10, 2003
URL: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=6059
As a new front on the War on Terror
edges ever closer to opening, most Americans don't seem to be much clearer
about what we're up against than they were on September 10, 2001. While
al-Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist groups, and even the relatively secular
Saddam Hussein, fulminate and plot against the United States in the name
of Islam, within the confines of the Great Satan it's virtually taboo to
ask any questions about the role that the Religion of Peace may be playing
in the motivation and recruiting of terrorists. Anyone who points out that
terrorists quote the Qur'an copiously without being troubled by the possibility
that they're taking its calls to violence against unbelievers "out of context"
is, to the establishment press, ipso facto a bigot, a hatemonger, a discredited
agent of evil.
A particularly piquant example of
this played out this week. The Washington Times, not hitherto known as
a mouthpiece of liberalism, on Tuesday ran a UPI story that took Serge
Trifkovic (author of a courageous and thought- provoking exploration of
Islam, Sword of the Prophet) to task for declaring at the Conservative
Political Action Conference that "We must have the guts to call a religion
of war by its proper name."
The story fretted that this exhortation
was "particularly disturbing to some in the audience." Unfortunately, those
disturbed weren't named in the article. If they had been, it would have
been interesting to get their reaction to a front- page article in Wednesday's
Wall Street Journal. In it, a New York-based convert to Islam named Warith
Deen Umar didn't seem at all uncomfortable with the idea that his might
be, in Trifkovic's words, a religion of war.
Umar stated that the terrorists
of September 11 were martyrs. "Without justice," he explained, "there will
be warfare, and it can come to this country, too." Umar claimed that "even
Muslims who say they are against terrorism secretly admire and applaud"
the September 11 terrorists.
If Serge Trikovic had said it during
his address at CPAC, it would have been more grist for the Washington Times's
mill. Had Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell said it, it might have been understood
as suggesting that Muslims widely endorsed thuggery and barbarism, setting
the stage for a fresh round of indignant editorials in the New York Times
and riots in the streets of Karachi.
Umar, of course, meant only that
the terrorists' struggle was righteous. Yet even this assertion, however
simple on its face, has enormous implications. If the terrorists were fighting
against forces harming the House of Islam, they would qualify as jihadis
even by the relatively innocuous standards of the definition of jihad propagated
by the Council on American Islamic Relations. CAIR defines jihad in part
as "fighting against tyranny or oppression." If September 11 can be justified
according to a widely accepted understanding of jihad, Umar's claim that
vast numbers of Muslims "secretly admire and applaud" the terrorist acts
actually becomes plausible. And if jihad is providing doctrinal support
and justification for terrorism on a large scale, it will be that much
harder to eradicate from the Islamic world.
Most officials refuse to face this
possibility. Even as he announced (after the Journal story broke) that
Umar would no longer be allowed into the prisons, James Flateau, chief
spokeman for the New York State Department of Correctional Services, declined
to investigate the many Muslim prison chaplains that Umar brought into
the system. According to an Associated Press report, "Flateau said it would
be a 'dangerous philosophy' to assume they shared Umar's 'extremist views.'"
Dangerous for whom? If Umar was
reasoning from an established concept of jihad, the ones facing danger
might not be those chaplains who would come in for extra scrutiny, but
the Americans who might be confronted by a fresh regiment of jihadis rising
up out of the nation's prisons.
Determining how much the terrorists'
understanding of jihad gibes with the historical Muslim usage of the word
can help to gauge how much of a responsive chord calls to jihad from the
likes of Jaffar Umar Thalib, the Indonesian cleric linked to the Bali bombings,
or Osama bin Laden and his sons and heirs may strike in fellow Muslims
who strive to be loyal to their faith.
When today's PC jihadis compel even
the Washington Times to rule such investigations out of order, they force
the nation to fight against terrorism while suffering from a huge blind
spot.
The other day I was talking with
Eric Erfan Vickers, the Executive Director of the American Muslim Council,
which has appealed to the United Nations to stop the U.S. Government from
profiling Muslims. I asked him what he would suggest as an alternative
to such profiling, in view of the unfortunate fact that the Islamist terrorists
are, after all, Muslims and are operating out of mosques. The alternative,
Vickers said, would be to stop stereotyping Islam and to look for suspects
according to "proper police procedure."
An entirely reasonable answer. Yet
the story of Warith Deen Umar shows its limitations in the current situation,
at least if the monitoring of mosques is regarded as contrary to standard
police procedure. Protected by his constitutional right to freedom of religion,
Umar was preaching violence and treason in the name of Islam to an audience
all too vulnerable to manipulation of that kind. Without infringing on
that right or any of his other rights, surely it is only sensible self-protection
to listen carefully to what he and others are saying. The freedoms of speech,
assembly and religion must not be taken as a free pass to spread sedition
in what are, after all, public forums.
In light of the use to which Islam
has been put in our nation's prisons and in all too many mosques here and
abroad, it may be suicidal not to pay attention to what the imams are preaching
and to ask pointed questions about what they think Islam really involves.
For there are many who, like Warith Deen Umar, have no problem with the
idea of a "religion of war." To vilify those who point out this fact is
simply to play into the terrorists' hands.
(Robert Spencer is author of "Islam
Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World's Fastest Growing Faith"
(Encounter Books). A long-time student of Islam, Spencer is working on
a new book, "Onward Muslim Soldiers: Jihad Then and Now", and is a frequent
contributor to a broad spectrum of publications. He is an adjunct fellow
with the Free Congress Foundation.)
