Robert Spencer: Jihad with a Human Face

Over at AtlasShrugs I discuss the new effort to portray jihad as schoolgirls skipping rope, and to package the purveyors of and apologists for the most hateful and murderous ideology active in the world today as lovable lugs who root for the Lakers and giggly girls who can't help indulging their sweet tooth:

Pamela Geller has described the new #MyJihad ad campaign from by the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as an “insult to our intelligence,” and that it certainly is. In one of the CAIR ads, a hijabbed woman lifts a barbell while explaining, “My Jihad is to stay fit despite my busy schedule.”

The whole endeavor is reminiscent of Alexander Dubček’s “Socialism with a human face.” In Communist Czechoslavakia in 1968, Dubček limited the power of the secret police and relaxed restrictions on speech; but when the Czechs got too much of a taste for freedom, the Soviet tanks rolled in to remind them of just how human the face of socialism really was.

And now Hamas-linked CAIR is trying to paint a human face on the Islamic doctrine that has caused untold suffering for human beings worldwide for fourteen centuries, and continues to do so today. The leading Islamic supremacist advocacy group in the U.S., treated as a reputable authority by the mainstream media, as well as politicians and law enforcement officials around the country, is trying to manipulate Americans into thinking that because some Muslims think of jihad in benign, peaceful ways, therefore the ones who think of it in its traditional Islamic sense, as a divine command to wage war against and subjugate unbelievers, somehow don’t matter and are unworthy of attention.

But just as sure as the tanks rolled into Prague, no matter how many Muslims think that jihad involves patting puppies on the head and giving dollar bills to noble, grateful homeless people, sooner or later the bombs go off and the heads roll anyway. It’s like trying to convince people that because Lyndon Johnson declared a war on poverty and legions of earnest high school counselors have waged war on drugs, that therefore it’s “bigoted” to point out that the word war usually involves shooting and killing people.

It is indeed an insult to our intelligence – and it is part of a larger initiative. Pro-Hamas Islamic supremacists such as Zahra Billoo of CAIR and Linda Sarsour of the Arab American Association of New York tweet about their love of chocolate and children and their pious good wishes for the people of Newtown, Connecticut, while simultaneously expressing their support for the genocidal Palestinian jihad against Israel, even to the point of retailing fabrications of the Palestinian propaganda machine. Qasim Rashid, an Ahmadi apologist for the Islamic jihadis who are massacring his own people in Pakistan and Indonesia, likewise made a great show of his grief over the Newtown massacre, but couldn’t resist using it to retail Palestinian jihad propaganda, tweeting: “As u pray for the #Newtown children, pray for Palestinian children dying of poverty.” 

Zahra Billoo and Linda Sarsour crave chocolate! How bad could they be? Plenty bad: Billoo has advised Muslims to shun law enforcement and called U.S. troops “terrorists.” Sarsour has claimed that the jihad underwear bomber was a CIA agent – part of what she claims is a U.S. war against Islam. They are part of the Islamic supremacist establishment that is attempting to lull Americans into complacency about the nature and source of the jihad threat, and their just-us-girls tweets about chocolate and cute kids are all part of that, after the manner of the See How Hitler Loves His Dogs photo spreads that Nazi authorities published long ago to humanize der Führer. It’s a sweet jihad, a chummy jihad, a chocolatey jihad – but a jihad just the same.

One clue to this phenomenon comes from jazz musician Tarek Shah, who pled guilty to providing martial arts and hand-to-hand combat with weapons training to Al-Qaeda operatives. In 2004 Shah told a man he thought was a fellow jihadist but who turned out to be an undercover agent, “I could be joking and smiling and then cutting their throats in the next second.”

Of course, Zahra Billoo and Linda Sarsour will never slit our throats. They will just kill us with kindness, insistently and self-consciously trying to show the world that they’re cute and cuddly just like the girl next door while fronting for an inhuman, oppressive ideology that, not coincidentally, has one of the most sophisticated propaganda machines ever seen on the planet.

Today’s jihad terrorists are adherents of a totalitarian, genocidal ideology that teaches them that murders committed under certain circumstances are a good thing. Those murders are committed for the sake of a societal vision that portrays itself as the exponent of all that is good, even while committing unimaginable atrocities to secure and retain power. But it is not good, and anyone who still retains even rudimentary clarity of vision in this increasingly befogged age can see that. 

That’s where Hamas-linked CAIR’s #MyJihad campaign and the sweet-tooth tweets of Zahra Billoo and Linda Sarsour come in: to lull those few who may still be awake into thinking that it won’t be so bad to accept the special accommodations for Muslims upon which CAIR insists, and the continued enabling of Islamic supremacism in U.S. foreign policy. After all, there will still be time to stay fit on a busy schedule, and the need to do so after indulging one’s chocolate craving. Coming from two hijabbed Muslim women, enslaved to the will of men and subject to their every whim, this is abundantly reassuring – isn’t it? There’s chocolate! How bad could slavery be?