Radical Islamists around the world have been reacting online to the bomb attacks that struck the Boston Marathon last month.
Since America intensified its counterterrorism efforts against al-Qaeda over the last several years, the terrorist group’s leaders have called on their followers in the United States to carry out smaller-scale attacks while at the same time providing online education and teach them how to carry them out.
According to Shiraz Maher of the International Center for the Study of Radicalization, the bombings at the Boston Marathon not only caught U.S. intelligence services by surprise, but debate raged onjihadist websites over the motivations and its implications.
“In the most generic and broadest sense, there was a sense of celebration on the jihadi forums. These guys are committed jihadists. They hate the United States and the West,” Maher said.
Terror analyst Raffaello Pantucci of the Royal United Services Institute says al-Qaeda cells are encouraging radicalized individuals in the West through the internet. Al-Qaeda has developed a new tactic which essentially teaches that even if it cannot take lives directly, it wants to inflict economic and financial losses on the United States and the West generally.
This is “Open-source jihad as they call it, in which individuals are very much empowered or the emphasis is on them to launch attacks where they can on targets that they specifically identify using materials on hand,” Pantucci said.
Countries all over the world have taken hold of the idea of ‘appeasement’ from the 1930’s and made it their policy regarding radical Islam. Western nations are the anthill and Islam the magnifying glass in the sun; where they cast their glance, people cower in fear.
This embarrassing fear has led to such ideas as: the presentation of a global ban on insults to Muhammad at the UN General Assembly as recently as September, 2012, the blame and subsequent incarceration of an American citizen because he insulted Islam in a movie which was used as an excuse for riots in the Middle East and the murder of a US diplomat in Benghazi, and the UN and Obama’s belief that the answer to the constant rocket attacks, threats of destruction, murder of Israeli civilians, and possible third Arab Intifada in Judea and Samaria is to simply give them what they want: more Israeli land, a Palestinian state, and other concessions which will lead to the eventual destruction of all Western nations.
Twenty years ago these ideas would have been laughed at by the media and the general populace, not thought of as great ideas to achieve peace. Would al-Qaeda have stopped after 9/11 if in response America had given them a portion of California to create their own state?
It seems that the world’s policy is to merely mitigate the destructive nature that is Islamic extremism, rather than cure the world of this infectious disease. We celebrated when a report shows that less Israelis were murdered this year than at the same time last year or when only one act of terrorism occurred during the entire month of January.
When did murder and destruction become the status quo in the Middle East? Why is the world more focused on the poor Palestinian refugees that never were and less on the families that are being slain in their beds by extremists?
The countries of the world seem content with slowing the rate of death and destruction caused by Muslim extremists and show no concern over a future where Islamic ideas have spread so far and have become so deeply rooted that it is too late to act. This is the reality that we face today.
Too long have the Western countries shown fear in the face of the enemy, too long has the only peaceful Western-friendly country in the Middle East been told it cannot defend itself, and too long has there been the attempted appeasement of an enemy that needs to be destroyed rather than given concessions.
Appeasement does not work. This was shown when Hitler understood the policy of appeasement to be a weakness and continued on his path of murder and destruction until it was almost too late for the entire world. This is where the world is headed again. Islamic extremists have rooted themselves in communities across the globe. Soon the riots will spread from the Middle East to all over Europe and the US, as they already have, yet this time there will not be any way to stop them.
The extremists have learned a very valuable lesson: kill a few Americans, kill a few Israelis, and the world will do nothing but bend its knee and beg for you to stop. The extremists attack and murder innocent civilians, yet there is no response due to the fear that the extremists will retaliate. The world’s response has been weak, if not nonexistent.
Islamic extremism is the weed that needs to be plucked from the garden before it spreads and destroys all that is held dear. The Western nations have a decision to make: strike back at the heart of the beast that bares it’s fangs to the world, or continue to fruitlessly appease and risk becoming an Islamic nation themselves.
The Obama administration’s policy banning references to “Islamic extremism” and “jihad” in discussions about terrorism drew criticism during last Thursday’s House Homeland Security Committee hearing on the Boston Marathon bombings.
The bombings “should again teach us that the enemy we face is violent Islamist extremism, not just al Qaida,” said former U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman. “Osama bin Laden is dead. And the remaining leadership of al Qaida is on the run, but the ideology of violent Islamist extremism is rapidly spreading.”
The Boston investigation already has shown that Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev “adopted the outrageously false narrative of violent Islamist extremism, that Islam and America are involved in a struggle to the death with each other,” Lieberman said.
It has been more than five years since the Department of Homeland Security, under the Bush administration, issued a directive about “the difficult terrain of terminology” as recommended by unidentified academics and Muslim American activists. “Jihadist” and “Islamist terrorist” were identified as terms to be avoided. Jihad “glamorizes terrorism, imbues terrorists with religious authority they do not have, and damages relations with Muslims around the globe,” the memo said.
By identifying them as mere extremists or criminals, they lose some of the luster that attracts recruits, the argument goes.
Is it working? How can you tell?
Anecdotally, this strategy did nothing to dissuade the Tsarnaevs, or any of the otherhomegrown terrorist plotters in recent years. The policy’s effectiveness is difficult, if not impossible, to quantify. But skeptics, such as Monterey Terrorism Research and Education Program Director Jeffrey M. Bale, say the language policy is illogical.
“Why, after all, would Muslims look to non-Muslims to interpret their religion for them, or for guidance about how to identify and label Islamists?” Bale said in response to an email from the Investigative Project on Terrorism. “Indeed, if we call jihadists ‘criminals,’ it may actually have the counterproductive effect of garnering more sympathy for them given the levels of anti-U.S. and anti-Western hostility throughout the Muslim world.”
Jihadists routinely make it plain that – while religion may not be the sole factor driving them to violence – their Islamic beliefs and identities dominate their thinking. “We in the West just don’t seem to want to believe what they constantly say,” Bale wrote. (Read his full response here.)
Last month, Canadian authorities prevented Chiheb Esseghaier and Raed Jaser from committing an Islamic terror attack that involved derailing a VIA passenger train.There is no telling how high the death toll would have been had they been successful. Thankfully, they were not.
The left-wing media would have you believe that Islam is not what motivated these two ‘lone wolves’. That westerners don’t seem all that interested in finding out – largely because failed terror attacks rarely get people to look up from their smart phones – is part of the problem.
In addition to Esseghaier’s facebook page revealing an Al-Qaeda flowchart and a photo of Bin Laden, his favorites included the likes of Abu Mus’ab Zarkawi, the guy many believe personally beheaded Nicholas Berg in Iraq.
Now it’s being reported that a third ‘lone wolf’ may have been part of the Esseghaier / Jaser pack. Ahmed Abassi was arrested in New York and apparently had plans to perpetrate a separate attack, designed to kill 100,000 people.
Acting like a weapon of mass destruction, a Tunisian Jihadist is accused by US authorities of planning to poinson thousands of Americans. As usual, the debate about lone wolf or not, and who radicalized him and so on, surges. By now, precedents and global analysis shows that every Jihadist is indoctrinated by someone. There are no exceptions. Every Jihadist is either recruited or recruits itself to some group. That is not what worries me in my analysis, it is the type of attacks the latest Jihadists are selecting. Most of the targets are mass casulaties types and frequency of attemps is higher.
Since my book ‘Future Jihad’ of 2005, I have challenged the ‘Lone Wolf’ assertion raised by many in the mainstream academia, media and among ‘consultants’ to Government. There is no full Jihadi lone wolf when he makes phone calls to other Jihadists. I published dozens of pieces and was interviewed several times over the past few years trying to explain that in the making of a Jihadist, there must be other Jihadists. The Bush bureaucracy, not policy makers, dodged this reality and the Obama Administration and bureaucracy pushed back against it. But Ft Hood, Arkansas and Boston reconfirmed it, sadly and deeply. Walid Phares
A mass exodus of Christians is currently underway. Millions of Christians are being displaced from one end of the Islamic world to the other.
We are reliving the true history of how the Islamic world—much of which prior to the Islamic conquests was almost entirely Christian—came into being.
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom recently said: “The flight of Christians out of the region is unprecedented and it’s increasing year by year.” In our lifetime alone “Christians might disappear altogether from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Egypt.”
Ongoing reports from the Islamic world certainly support this conclusion. Iraq was the earliest indicator of the fate awaiting Christians once Islamic forces are liberated from the grip of dictators.
In 2003, Iraq’s Christian population was at least one million. Today fewer than 400,000 remain—the result of an anti-Christian campaign that began with the U.S. occupation of Iraq, when countless Christian churches were bombed and countless Christians killed, including by crucifixion and beheading.
The 2010 Baghdad church attack, which saw nearly 60 Christian worshippers slaughtered, is the tip of a decade-long iceberg.
Now as the U.S. supports the jihad on secular president Assad, the same pattern has come to Syria: entire regions and towns where Christians lived centuries before Islam came into being have now been emptied, as the opposition targets Christians for kidnapping, plundering, and beheadings, all in compliance with mosque calls that it’s a “sacred duty” to drive Christians away.
In October 2012 the last Christian in the city of Homs—which had a Christian population of some 80,000 before jihadis came—was murdered. One teenage Syrian girl said: “We left because they were trying to kill us… because we were Christians…. Those who were our neighbors turned against us. At the end, when we ran away, we went through balconies. We did not even dare go out on the street in front of our house.”
In Egypt, some 100,000 Christian Copts have fled their homeland soon after the “Arab Spring.” In September 2012, the Sinai’s small Christian community was attacked and evicted by al-Qaeda linked Muslims, Reuters reported.
But even before that, the Coptic Orthodox Church lamented the “repeated incidents of displacement of Copts from their homes, whether by force or threat. Displacements began in Ameriya [62 Christian families evicted], then they stretched to Dahshur [120 Christian families evicted], and today terror and threats have reached the hearts and souls of our Coptic children in Sinai.”
Iraq, Syria, and Egypt are the Arab world. But even in “black” African and “white” European nations with Muslim majorities, Christians are fleeing.
In Mali, after a 2012 Islamic coup, as many as 200,000 Christians fled. According to reports, “the church in Mali faces being eradicated,” especially in the north “where rebels want to establish an independent Islamist state and drive Christians out… there have been house to house searches for Christians who might be in hiding, church and Christian property has been looted or destroyed, and people tortured into revealing any Christian relatives.” At least one pastor was beheaded.
Even in European Bosnia, Christians are leaving en mass “amid mounting discrimination and Islamization.” Only 440,000 Catholics remain in the Balkan nation, half the prewar figure. Problems cited are typical: “while dozens of mosques were built in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, no building permissions were given for Christian churches.”
“Time is running out as there is a worrisome rise in radicalism,” said one authority, who further added that the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina were “persecuted for centuries” after European powers “failed to support them in their struggle against the Ottoman Empire.”
In Muslim-majority northern Nigeria, where nary a Sunday passes without a church bombing, Christians are fleeing by the thousands; one region has been emptied of 95% of its Christian population.
In Pakistan, after a Christian child was falsely accused of desecrating a Koran and Muslims went on an anti-Christian rampage, an entire Christian village—men, women, and children—was forced to flee into the nearby woods, where they built a church, permanently resided there.
In Somali, where Christianity is completely outlawed, Muslim converts to Christianity are fleeing to neighboring nations, including Kenya and Ethiopia, sometimes to be tracked down and executed.
In Sudan, over half a million people, mostly Christian, have been stripped of citizenship in response to the South’s secession, and forced to relocate.
To anyone following the plight of Christians under Islam, none of this is surprising. As I document in my new book, Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians, all around the Islamic world—in nations that do not share the same race, language, culture, or economics, in nations that share only Islam—Christians are being persecuted into extinction. Such is the true face of the global Islamic resurgence.
Often forgotten is that, in the 7th century, half of the world’s entire Christian population was spread across what is now nonchalantly called the “Muslim world.” Then, Islam, born in the deserts of Arabia, burst out in a series of world-altering jihads, conquering and slowly transforming these once Christian nations into Islamic nations.
In order to evade sporadic persecution and constant discrimination, over the centuries most Christians converted, while others fled. A few opted to remain Christian and live as barely tolerated third-class subjects, or dhimmis, according to Sharia law.
They eventually experienced something of a renaissance during the colonial and post-colonial era, when many Muslims were Westward-looking.
But today, with the international resurgence of Muhammad’s religion, these remaining Christians are reaching extinction, as Islam’s 1400 year mission of supremacy and global hegemony continues unabated—even as the West looks the other way, that is, when it’s not actually supporting it in the context of the so-called “Arab Spring.”
RAYMOND IBRAHIM, a Middle East and Islam specialist, is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum. A widely published author, best known for The Al Qaeda Reader (Doubleday, 2007), he guest lectures at universities, including the National Defense Intelligence College, briefs governmental agencies, such as U.S. Strategic Command and the Defense Intelligence Agency, provides expert testimony for Islam-related lawsuits, and has testified before Congress regarding the conceptual failures that dominate American discourse concerning Islam and the worsening plight of Egypt’s Christian Copts. Among other media, he has appeared on MSNBC, Fox News, C-SPAN, PBS, Reuters, Al-Jazeera, CBN, and NPR.
Thursday, May 2, is a day to be especially watchful. Jihadists are particularly fond of celebrating anniversaries and on that day in 2011 Seal Team Six found and killed Osama bin Laden. September 11. 2001 is now an indelible part of U.S. history and on September 11, 2012, jihadists attacked and killed an American ambassador and three others.
The threat that Islam presents to America in particular and the world in general is beginning to influence what non-Muslims think of this death cult.
In a recent commentary, the Dr. Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum, referred to the process by which opinion in democratic nations turns against Islam as “education by murder.”
Dr. Pipes was sanguine regarding the American response to the Boston Marathon attack. He did not foresee any increase in security measures or a greater preparedness for what he called “sudden jihad syndrome” violence. Even so, he said “High profile terrorism in the West—9/11, Bali, Madrid, Beslan, London—moves opinion more than anything else.”
A new report about the Islamist terrorist threat, “Al Qaeda in the United States”, issued by the Henry Jackson Society, a British-based think tank, noted that, of the 171 al Qaeda related or inspired acts of terrorism from 1997 to 2011, 54% were by American citizens, some naturalized, but more than a third (36%) were born in the U.S., concluding that this statistic dispels the myth that the terrorist threat is primarily external.”
I keep wondering how long it will be before Americans will begin to take seriously the threat that Islam represents. The list of attacks is a long one such as the 1982 attack on the U.S. embassy in Beirut and the 1983 attack on the U.S. Marine Barracks after Reagan sent them there as peacekeepers. The first attack on the World Trade Center was in 1993. In October 2000, the USS Cole was attacked. On September 11, 2001, the second attack killed 3,000 Americans. When George W. Bush came into office, he told his national security advisor, Condoleeza Rice, that he was “tired of swatting flies.”
In this video lecture, Center for Security Policy senior fellow Stephen Coughlin explains doctrinal and historical background for the recent jihadist attack in Boston. Beginning with media reports willfully confused about the motivations of the Chechen Mulsim Tsarnaev brothers, Coughlin deconstructs the lineage of the ‘individual jihad’ vs ‘jihad by bands’ or secret, foreign-controlled cells.
Key Points:
1. The government and media’s ‘reality dislocation’ in false narratives for Boston jihadists’ motivations.
Political or ideological considerations are promoted ahead of actual analysis. Placing motivation on idiosyncratic psychological factors constitutes a lack of understanding that, at some point, could be understood as a campaign of disinformation.
2. In one of the final pronouncements of the Ottoman Caliphate during WWI, the concept of “individual jihad” was outlined alongside other types of jihad.
The statement included a Koranic proof putting “individual jihad” into context. The major schools of Islamic law agree that a “call to jihad” is binding, especially when issued from the seat of the Caliph. Another type of jihad described by the statement is “jihad by bands” (also known as brigands); “the most profitable of [jihad by bands] is that which makes the use of ‘secret formations’”– otherwise known today as terrorist cells.
3. Any analysis of the Boston bombing– especially considering the use of pressure cooker bombs– should have began with an awareness of al Qaeda’s 2010 change in strategy.
In it’s first edition of the English-language Inspire Magazine, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula outlined its change of strategy in its conflict with the West: it would move from an emphasis on ‘secret formations/organizations’ and ‘overt fronts and open confrontation’ to “individual jihad,” known as “lone-wolf terrorism.”
4. “How to Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.”
Inspire Magazine included a recipe for pressure cooker bombs in its first edition and, crucially, reprised that article in its most recent edition on “the Lone Mujahid” (the individual jihadist). Interestingly, the issue– which was released in Spring 2013, just in advance of the Boston attack– featured a photograph of Times Square on its cover. Note the next target of the Tsarnaev brothers was reported to be Times Square.
5. Convergence of al Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood stages.
The inaugural edition of Inspire Magazine included a notice to da’wah-oriented Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood; the message was that events on the ground in the Muslim world were primed for proceeding from ‘Mecca’ stage to the ‘Media’ stage, as according to the Milestones Process and the concept of Abrogation in Islamic law. Essentially, it is a call to go to war. In late 2010, the Muslim Brotherhood reoriented itself under new leadership and seemed to embrace the transition to the more militant phase, also putting emphasis on “individual acts of sacrifice” or jihad/martyrdom operations.[For more analysis of the Islamist convergence, see 'Part 4: The Muslim Brotherhood, Arab Spring & the Milestones Process']
6. The winter 2012 issue of Inspire Magazine outlines what is meant by ‘Individual jihad’– with consideration to attacking large sporting events, of which the Boston Marathon was certainly one.
Inspire point out, also, that the lone jihadist should avoid killing foreigners from countries with which the Islamic ummah is not at war. In line with that guidance, the Tsarnaev brothers waited until most foreign nationals had finished the race and set off the bombs during the time when average Americans, for the most part, were in the blast radius.
7. What al Qaeda Really Wants, circa 2005.
Investigative reporting in Der Spiegel with remarkable access to and insight from al Qaeda strategists points to AQ goals and– surprisingly– how closely their milestones have been met. The “Fourth Phase” predicts the collapse of the relatively secular Arabic governments (in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, etc), to be followed by the overthrow of the kingdoms. The Fifth Phase describes the rise of the Caliphate and the Sixth is “total confrontation” with the west. For a group that the Obama administration calls, “on the ropes,” they are well into their multi-phase plan.
8. “Against them Make Ready” and Convergence.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s motto as a da’wah organization, taken from the first words of Koran 8:60, is “Against them make ready.” The following phrase– “…and prepare against them to the utmost of your power” appears on the cover of the Spring 2013 Inspire Magazine special Lone Mujahid Pocketbook. Also in the same issue, al Qaeda re-published the pressure cooker bomb recipe. (Did they have any operational awareness?)
9. The Explanatory Memorandum’s “Process of Settlement.”
Analyzing the Muslim Brotherhood in America’s strategic document, as entered into evidence in America’s largest terrorism funding trial, US vs. Holy Land Foundation. From the Memorandum: “The process of settlement is a ‘Civilization-Jihadist Process’ with all the word means. The Ihkwan must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.” In other words, the Muslim Brotherhood defines “settlement” as “a jihadist process.”
10. “Islamic Center of…” / Islamic Society of…”
Both phrases can be seen as “brands” indicating involvement of the Muslim Brotherhood at the leadership or foundational level. The Explanatory Memorandum goes on to describe how “The Islamic Center in every city… achieves the goal of the Process of Settlement” [defined earlier as a 'Civilization-Jihadist Process']: “The Islamic Center [is] in action not in words.. a seed ‘for a small Islamic society’ which is a reflection and a mirror to our central organizations.” In other words, Muslim Brotherhood-established and administered mosques in the United States should be assessed according to this mission. This is especially true for mosques with strong ties to MB entities like the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), both unindicted co-consprirators in the Holy Land Foundation trial.
11. The Islamic Centers’ mission is to “supply our battalions.”
The Explanatory Memorandum further defines the goals and strategic uses for its Islamic Centers: it “should be the same as the mosque’s role during the time of God’s prophet… when he marched to ‘settle’ the Da’wah in its first generation in Medina, from the mosque…” This makes clear the Muslim Brotherhood’s future vision; in the first generation of Islam, Mohammed used mosques in the Medina period as staging areas for attacks on non-Muslim tribes in Arabia. The military implications of this phrase are clear and important to understand.
12. “Islamic Society of…” Boston.
Founded by Abdulrahman Alamoudi, a long-time Muslim Brother who was convicted of attempted murder of a foreign dignitary with al Qaeda involvement. Similarly, Anwar al Awlaki was a popular and powerful voice of “moderate Islam” before revealing himself as the head of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The lesson is, when dealing with Muslim Brotherhood, there are no sharp dividing lines between the that and more well-known “militant jihadist” groups.
13. The Purge of Counterterror Training.
About Stephen Coughlin
Over more than a decade following 9/11, MAJ Stephen Coughlin was one of the US government’s most astute and objective analysts, and an expert in the connections between Islamic law, terrorism and the jihadist movement around the globe. Through knowledge of published Islamic law, MAJ Coughlin had an demonstrated ability to forecast events both in the Middle East and domestically and to accurately assess the future threat posture of jihadist entities before they happen. He has briefed at the Pentagon, for national and state law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and on Capitol Hill for Members of Congress. With this series of presentations, the general public has access to a professional standard of intelligence training in order to better understand the jihadist threat.
Defense policies are not created in a vacuum. They are designed to meet threats. Over time, threats change in ways that are difficult to predict. In the past, America’s enemies generally wore uniforms and confronted American soldiers on a foreign field of battle. Today, America’s enemies may wear backwards-facing baseball caps and attack marathon runners along with the men, women, and children cheering for them on a sunny April afternoon in New England.
What happened in Boston last week was terrible and terrifying — precisely the outcome terrorists seek to achieve. But it could have been worse. It was worse on September 11, 2001, and it will be worse again if we let down our guard, if we stop taking the fight to those sworn to destroy us, and if we refuse to understand who they are, what they believe, and what they want.
They have told us — over and over — that they are waging what they call a jihad. The policy of the current administration, and to a great extent the previous administration as well, has been to avoid such terminology. One notable exception: Just before she stepped down as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton spoke with rare candor. “We now face a spreading jihadist threat,” she said, adding, “we have to recognize this is a global movement.”
Yet so many people — in government, the media, academia — refuse to believe this, or at least refuse to acknowledge it. I was on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal this week debatingHina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project. She declared, “There is no global war. . . . There is no global jihadist movement.”
About the massacre in Boston there is much we still do not know. But the evidence available so far can only lead to the conclusion that two young men from Chechnya committed an act of terrorism on American soil in support of what they believe is a global jihad.
How do we know the bombs were not a protest — a secular one, with no Islamist roots — against Russia’s occupation of Chechnya and in favor of Chechen independence? Because then the target would have been Moscow, not Boston.
There is an enormous irony contained in the Boston Marathon bombing. When the jihadi Tsarnaev brothers carjacked a Mercedes, it had a Coexist bumper sticker.
The Coexist bumper sticker is the religious symbol of the multicultural crowd — you know — all religions are the same. Well, the leading symbol of those who want to Coexist is the star and crescent Islam. And exactly how well has Islam coexisted with all the others? What kind of neighbor has Islam been over history?
Start with Mohammed. We know an enormous amount about Mohammed as a neighbor to Kafirs (non-Muslims), pagans, Jews, and Christians.
When Mohammed was in Mecca before he became a Muslim, he was a good neighbor who was prosperous and helped to settle disputes. But, that all changed when he became the prophet of Allah. Once he became a public preacher of Islam, he became an irritant to his neighbors. You see, not only did Mohammed know what was right, he demanded that everybody do everything his way, Allah’s way. He was a neighbor who was always right and you were always wrong. Not only were you wrong, but your parents and grandparents were wrong. Mohammed no longer settled arguments; he created arguments. After 13 years of this, the Meccans told Mohammed to leave Mecca.
So he went to the town of Medina, which was half Jewish. And what kind of neighbor was Mohammed to the Jews? Put briefly, two years later, Medina was Judenrein (cleansed of Jews). When he arrived, there were three tribes of Jews. In rapid order, the first tribe was driven out of town, bereft of its goods. Then the second tribe of Jews was exiled. They were lucky. The last of the Jewish tribes suffered the most. The women were enslaved and sold wholesale for money to purchase horses and arms for jihad. For the rest of his life, Mohammed used slavery to help finance his jihad. The children were kidnapped and adopted into Muslim families to be raised as Muslims. Then the 800 male Jews were all beheaded.
But wait. Mohammed was not through coexisting with the Jews. Later he left Medina and went to Khaybar and attacked them. Mohammed crushed them, took their wealth and put them to work under the Sharia s dhimmis and give him half of what they earned.
That was how Mohammed coexisted with the Jews.
But Mohammed was not through with coexisting with the Arabians. He attacked the Meccan caravans. His jihadists killed, kidnapped, stole, assassinated and fought the pagan Arabs at every turn. Mohammed’s coexistence policy with the Arabs was jihad. This went on until every Arab became a Muslim.
After Mohammed made every soul in Arabia convert to Islam, he turned his coexistence policy to the Christians north of Arabia in Syria. He attacked the Christians, with the losers becoming dhimmis just like the Jews.
Dhimmis are the way that the Sharia allows Kafirs to coexist within a Muslim society. The dhimmi is a third-class non-citizen who pays special taxes and has no real civil rights. A dhimmi cannot testify against a Muslim in court, for instance.
Look at how Islam coexisted with Africa. A clue as to the nature of that coexistence is that Arabic has one word, “abd”, that means both black slave and African. Context must supply which meaning is used. Islam ran the slave trade on the West coast, East coast and Mediterranean coasts of Africa. Islam sold every slave that was brought to the Americas. Conservative estimates are that 120 million Africans were killed in the jihad that produced all of the slaves in Africa.
How did Islam coexist with the Buddhists in what is now Afghanistan? Jihad annihilated every single Buddhist and their libraries and monasteries.
There is a massive database of the coexistence between Islam and the rest of the world at thereligionofpeace.com. It catalogs more than 20,000 jihad attacks around the world since 9/11 2001.
What will be the long-term impact of the Apr. 15-19 Boston Marathon attack and the ensuing action-movie-style chase, killing a total of four and wounding 265?
Let’s start with what its impact will not be. It will not bring American opinion together; if the “United We Stand” slogan lasted brief months after 9/11, consensus after Boston will be even more elusive. The violence will not lead to Israeli-like security measures in the United States. Nor will it lead to a greater preparedness to handle deadly sudden jihad syndrome violence. It will not end the dispute over the motives behind indiscriminate Muslim violence against non-Muslims. And it certainly will not help resolve current debates over immigration or guns.
What it will do is very important: it will prompt some Westerners to conclude that Islamism is a threat to their way of life. Indeed, every act of Muslim aggression against non-Muslims, be it violent or cultural, recruits more activists to the anti-jihad cause, more voters to insurgent parties, more demonstrators to anti-immigrant street efforts, and more donors to anti-Islamist causes.
Education by murder is the name I gave this process in 2002; we who live in democracies learn best about Islamism when blood flows in the streets. Muslims began with an enormous stock of good will because the Western DNA includes sympathy for foreigners, minorities, the poor, and people of color. Islamists then dissipate this good will by engaging in atrocities or displaying supremacist attitudes. High profile terrorism in the West – 9/11, Bali, Madrid, Beslan, London – moves opinion more than anything else.
I know because I went through this process first hand. Sitting in a restaurant in Switzerland in 1990, Bat Ye’or sketched out for me her fears concerning Islamist ambitions in Europe but I thought she was alarmist. Steven Emerson called me in 1994 to tell me about the Council on American-Islamic Relations but I initially gave CAIR the benefit of the doubt. Like others, I needed time to wake to the full extent of the Islamist threat in the West.
Westerners are indeed waking up to this threat. One can get a vivid sense of trends by looking at developments in Europe, which on the topics of immigration, Islam, Muslims, Islamism, and Shari’a (Islamic law) is ahead of North America and Australia by about twenty years. One sign of change is the growth of political parties focused on these issues, including the U.K. Independence Party, the National Front in France, the People’s Party in Switzerland, Geert Wilder’s Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, the Progress Party in Norway, and the Swedish Democrats. In a much-noted recent by-election, UKIP came in second, increasing its share of the vote from 4 percent to 28 percent, thereby creating a crisis in the Conservative party.
The Obama administration’s policy banning references to “Islamic extremism” and “jihad” in discussions about terrorism drew criticism during last Thursday’s House Homeland Security Committee 
