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In "Islam Vs. Islamism: A Case for Wishful Thinkers," by Walid Shoebat at PJ Media, May 18, Shoebat provides a full case for not using the misleading and inaccurate term "Islamism." I wrote on this question here; Pamela Geller here; and Andrew Bostom here.

“Our killer question is ‘How do you propose to defeat Islamism?’ Those who make all Islam their enemy not only succumb to a simplistic and essentialist illusion but they lack any mechanism to defeat it.”

This is what historian and Middle East analyst Daniel Pipes asks in his recent Washington Times article.

To support his argument, Pipes makes an unsubstantiated claim that a majority of Muslims are moderate and that Islamism is only,

supported by 10-15 percent of Muslims…

So how and why did he come up with such numbers? Pipes uses different studies and surveys about which he himself confesses: “These ambiguous and contradictory percentages lead to no clear, specific count of Islamists.” Why then use such statistics? It is only to serve the major argument he made in my first paragraph.

And there are more “confessions.” Pipes writes: “Out of a quantitative mish-mash, I suggested just three days after 9/11 that some 10-15 percent of Muslims are determined Islamists.” This is in itself contradictory and is even absolutely nonsense mathematically as he clearly admits. To further support this conservative number, Pipes adds:

 Indonesian survey and election results led R. William Liddle and Saiful Mujani in 2003 to conclude that the number of Islamists “is no more than 15 percent of the total Indonesian Muslim population.”

He did this while he ignored his other statement:

In contrast, a 2008 survey of 8,000 Indonesian Muslims by Roy Morgan Research found 40 percent of Indonesians favoring hadd criminal punishments (such as cutting off the hands of thieves) and 52 percent favoring some form of Islamic legal code.

So here we have 52% of Indonesians are extremists, not 15%.

Yet even that doesn’t determine the correct percentages to separate Muslims from Islamists. To say that “views on 9/11″ or “supporting Hadd” (Islamic punishment) is the yardstick to measure the percentages is also absurd and mathematically false. What if a Muslim doesn’t support 9/11 or Hadd but supports the idea that it takes two women in a court of law to equal the testimony of a man? Will Pipes count him as a moderate Muslim or an extremist Islamist? If he chooses “moderate,” then Pakistan got it right. No matter what Pipes chooses, it debunks all his unsubstantiated claims about moderate Islam.

What if a Muslim couldn’t care less about Sharia, jihad, and 9/11, yet he kills his sister for marrying a Jew? Is he a “Muslim” or is he an “Islamist”?

And what if we even use terrorism as a yardstick as Pipes prefers; in Saudi Arabia and across the Muslim world, you have many who do not support al-Qaeda. Are these then counted as moderates? In Pipes’ view the answer is “yes.” But this is false. Last week I had an exchange with Sheikh Faisal Al-Harbi, who chastised me on such issues,stating that his clan (Al-Harbi) would not support terrorism. Indeed, on his clan’s official website they denounce al-Qaeda, adding:

Jihad for the sake of Allah is to go to war with the infidels and the polytheists to remove these and enforce Unitarianism. That is after inviting them to Islam and they reject the invitation (Da’wa). This Jihad is then organized and supervised by the Imam.

That cannot be placed in the moderate Islam camp. In light of this and my other arguments, Pipes’ percentages are escalating dramatically.

The true number for Islamists is 100%. Here, let me add more beef to my claim. What if a Muslim denounces today’s jihad, sharia, Islamic state and all? Is he then moderate?

Hardly. The Muslims who take this position take it by claiming that only the Khalifa or the Mahdi can establish these. Take Hisham Kabbani, for example, a Sufi Muslim scholar whose photo Pipes posted.

Islam is the fourteen-century-old faith of a billion-plus believers that includes everyone from quietist Sufis to violent jihadis.

Nonsense. Kabbani is Sufi and is in fact a Mahdist as all Sufi Muslims are. In his work Approach of Armageddon (page 231), he writes of an entire invasion of Israel and believes as Ahmadinejad does:

Hadith indicate that black flags coming from the area of Khorasan [Iran] will signify [that] the appearance of the Mahdi is nigh.

The “black flags” from “Iran” mean the end of Pipes. Just name the Sufi scholar and I can usually find their Arabic writings and prove they are moderate for the time being. Sheikh Maulana Nazeem Kibrisi, another major Sufi scholar, was found in Turkish speaking with the fervor of Adolf Hitler (watch here). Kibrisi was no small-time Sufi either; in a speech given in Germany to Turkish students, with tens of thousands gathered – including then-prime minister-to-be Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Erbakan of the Refah Islamist party – Kibrisi is found saying:

Glory and blessing to the Lord of the two worlds who is the cause of these days. Definitely, the victory belongs to Islam. This flood of people here is a sign of the rise of the glorious Islam. Do they not think that this a great sign? When the great sign appears [Mahdi] the world will shake. Our forefathers made the earth tremble. This gathering is a memento from our forefathers… You are the grand sons of the Ottomans who will make the world tremble again. If the Ottomans do not come back the unbelievers will never be brought down to their knees…history is made of recurrences, certainly our glorious era has come, the day being born belongs to Islam…as long as we have Allah we do not need America, nor do we need the unbelievers in Europe, nor do we need the unbelievers nor will we go their path.

What about Al-Ghazali, the famous theologian, philosopher, and paragon of mystical Sufism whom the eminent W. M. Watt describes as “acclaimed in both the East and West as the greatest Muslim after Mohammed, and he is by no means unworthy of that dignity”? Scholars like Pipes know the truth, yet completely ignore it. Al-Ghazali said:

One must go on jihad (i.e., warlike razzias or raids) at least once a year… one may use a catapult against them when they are in a fortress, even if among them are women and children. One may set fire to them and/or drown them…. If a person of the Ahl al-Kitab [People of The Book—Jews and Christians, typically] is enslaved, his marriage is [automatically] revoked.… One may cut down their trees/…One must destroy their useless books. Jihadists may take as booty whatever they decide…they may steal as much food as they need.

Pipes even went as low to claim that Muhammad was a “Muslim not an Islamist” and even distinguished him since, “Islamism represents the transformation of Islamic faith into a political ideology.”

By switching Muhammad from “Islamist” to “Muslim, Pipes must then answer a crucial question: is Islam defined by its founder or by Mr. Pipes? Muhammad throughout his career embodied the familiar quotation “Al-Islamu deen wa dawla” (“Islam is a religion and a state”). Pipes then must remove the “and” to substantiate his false case.

Then Pipes makes even more blunders:

Islamism relies heavily on conspiracy theories to interpret the world, on the state to advance its ambitions, and on brutal means to attain its goals.

All this from an historian who ignores that much of Islam, including the Quran, the Hadith and Islamic history, is littered with “conspiracy theories” in order “to advance its ambitions” by “brutal means.”

So here is my answer to Mr. Pipes’ question: We will fight Islam with the bible, history, our Constitution, and our laws and even militarily if we must, while working with any Muslim to bring them on our side of the fence, including terrorists. I was one myself. We will not do this by creating an end that justifies the means. Pipes insists we provide a solution, which according to him is only done by mischaracterizing the problem at hand, which is: it’s Islam, stupid, and it’s 100% all the Muslims that believe in it. To add more from history — Mr. Pipes’ favorite subject — Islam was defeated when the Ottoman Empire was dismantled. And in those times, they didn’t use Pipes’ strategy of differentiating between Islam and Islamism. Sir Winston Churchill said:

Mohammedanism [Islam] is a militant and proselytizing faith.

Is Pipes wiser then Churchill?

I rest my case.

[Note: This article has been slightly edited from its original form to correct a misattributed quotation.]

In Islamic theology, jihad warfare is fard kifaya, an obligation of the community as a whole but not of every individual believer. Jihad becomes fard ayn, obligatory on every individual Muslim to aid in some way, when a Muslim land is attacked. So what Dzhokhar Tsarnaev wrote on the boat is consistent with traditional Islamic theology. It is unlikely, however, that anyone will notice that or consider its implications. Most will instead fasten on the fact that he enunciates a grievance, and assume that if the U.S. got out of Afghanistan, the jihad would be over. That kind of analysis (like so many others) stems from a fundamental (and usually willful) misunderstanding of the jihad doctrine. In defensive jihad, the grievances always shift, but the jihad imperative remains.

"Boston bombings suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev left note in boat he hid in, sources say," from CBS News, May 16 (thanks to Anne Crockett):

(CBS News) Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev left a note claiming responsibility for the April 13 attack, reports CBS News senior correspondent John Miller.

Sources tell Miller that Tsarnaev wrote the note in the boat he was hiding in as police pursued him, and as he bled from gunshot wounds sustained in an earlier shootout between police and his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

The note, scrawled with a pen on the interior wall of the cabin, said the bombings were retribution U.S. military action in Afghanistan and Iraq, and called the Boston victims collateral damage in the way Muslims have been in the American-led wars. "When you attack one Muslim, you attack all Muslims," the note added.

Dzhokar said he didn't mourn older brother Tamerlan -- the other suspect in the bombings -- writing that by that point, Tamerlan was a martyr in paradise -- and that Dzhokar expected to join him there.

Miller's sources say the wall the note was written on was riddled with bullet holes from shots fired into the boat. The shots were fired after Dzhokhar came up through the tarp that was covering on the boat and a police officer watching that side of the boat thought Dzhokhar had another bomb.

According to Miller, the note will be a significant piece of evidence in any Dzhokar trial -- it is "certainly admissible," and paints a clear picture of the brothers' motive, "consistent with what he told investigators while he was in custody," Miller said Thursday on "CBS This Morning."

Miller explained that while Dzhokar admitted many of the same details to authorities, those admissions came "during the time he was interrogated but before he was given his Miranda warning." The note gives prosecutors supporting, clearly admissible evidence even if there is an fight over whether things he said before he was given his Miranda rights are admissible as evidence.

Investigators struggled without a clear claim of responsibility, Miller observes. It took days to learn the identity of the bombers, and there was no official claim of responsibility, which is unusual in these cases. As investigators move forward with the investigation, "the last big question remaining is going to be who else knew anything? Is it going to be the wife? Is it someone overseas?" Miller added.

The suspects didn't plan to stop after the Boston bombings, authorities say. They intended to go to New York City and set off a device or devices in Times Square.

The brothers didn't have well-developed plans for New York, but they still had intent, Miller says. So as Dzhokhar lay in the boat, he wanted to leave a message behind clearly supporting what the note says he and his brother had just done.

For a plot as organized as the one was for Boston, it seems odd that -- with a choice of leaving behind a martyrdom video on a computer or a more formal claim of responsibility -- the brothers had nothing prepared, Miller says. A larger terror organization ensures that such videos are made out of the country and are ready to launch after the attack.

It appears these guys cobbled their plot together themselves and didn't have the organizational skills to plan out their end game, which would have included putting together a formal claim of responsibility.

So in the end, Miller concludes, the boat note was a way for Dzhokhar to get on the record as publicly claiming responsibility for the bombings.

This research is from 2005, but has not been mentioned on Jihad Watch and only rarely in English in general. It might give those experts who are now struggling to find the motives of the Boston jihadists and the "Canadian" train terrorists a hint. From JyllandsPosten, "Islam is the most violent religion":

The religious texts of Islam call upon its followers to commit acts of terror and violence to a much higher degree than any other religion, concludes Tina Magaard, who graduated from the Sorbonne in Paris as a PhD in Textual Analysis and Intercultural Communication, after a three-year research project that compared the basic texts from 10 religions.

"The texts in Islam are clearly distinct from the other religious texts, as they to a much higher degree call for violence and aggression against followers of other faiths. There are also direct incitements to terror. This has long been a taboo in Islam research, but it is a fact we have to acknowledge," says Tina Magaard.

Furthermore, the Qur'an contains hundreds of calls to fight against followers of other faiths.

"If it is true that many Muslims view the Qur'an as God's own words that can not be interpreted or rephrased, we have a problem."

True.

Common sense from an ex-Muslim. "Calling Islam 'Islam,'" by Bosch Fawstin at FrontPage, April 26:

I wrote this a few years ago, and I think it’s worth posting again, particularly after the latest jihadist attack in Boston. I noticed, after the attack this week, that a number of people are using more proper terminology to identify this enemy, which is very important in taking on the enemy. I recall watching panel discussions after 9/11, with each panelist using a different term to describe the enemy we face. That annoyed the hell out of me as I think it’s incredibly important to identify the proper terms when speaking about our enemy, and to NEVER create terms, for whatever reason. To me, the only difference between “Islamism” and Islam is three letters. Below I try my best to make the case why we should always call Islam “Islam.”

Western intellectuals and commentators refer to the enemy’s ideology as:

“Islamic Fundamentalism,” “Islamic Extremism,” “Totalitarian Islam,” “Islamofascism,” “Political Islam,” “Militant Islam,” “Bin Ladenism,” “Islamonazism,” “Radical Islam,” “Islamism,” etc….

The enemy calls it “Islam.”

Imagine, if during past wars, we used terms such as “Radical Nazism,” “Extremist Shinto” and “Militant Communism.” The implication would be that there are good versions of those ideologies, which would then lead some to seek out “moderate” Nazis. Those who use terms other than “Islam” create the impression that it’s some variant of Islam that’s behind the enemy that we’re facing. A term such as “Militant Islam” is redundant, but our politicians continue praising Islam as if it were their own religion. Bush told us “Islam is peace” — after 2,996 Americans were murdered in its name. He maintained that illusion throughout his two terms, and never allowed our soldiers to defeat the enemy. And now we have Obama, who tells us, from Egypt:

“I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.”

If only he felt that way about America. Washington’s defense of Islam has trumped the defense of America and this dereliction of duty could well be called Islamgate.

Islam is a political religion; the idea of a separation of Mosque and State is unheard of in the Muslim world. Islam has a doctrine of warfare, Jihad, which is fought in order to establish Islamic (“Sharia”) Law, which is, by nature, totalitarian. Sharia Law calls for, among other things: the dehumanization of women; the flogging/stoning/killing of adulterers; and the killing of homosexuals, apostates and critics of Islam. All of this is part of orthodox Islam, not some “extremist” form of it. If jihadists were actually “perverting a great religion,” Muslims would have been able to discredit them on Islamic grounds and they would have done so by now. The reason they can’t is because jihadists are acting according to the words of Allah, the Muslim God. From the Koran:

“Slay the idolators wherever you find them…” Chapter 9, verse 5

“When you encounter the unbelievers, strike off their heads until you have made a great slaughter among them….” Ch. 47:4

Beyond the doctrine, there is the historical figure of Mohammad, who, more than anyone, defines Islam. How would you judge a man who lies, cheats, steals, rapes and murders as a way of life? This evil man is Islam’s ideal man, Mohammad. Whatever he said and did is deemed moral by virtue of the fact that he said it and did it. It’s no accident that the only morality that could sanction his behavior was his own. Nor is it an accident that Muslims who model themselves after him are the most violent.

For the 13 years that Mohammad failed to spread Islam by non-violent means, he was not so much peaceful as he was powerless. It was only through criminal activity and with the help of a large gang of followers that he managed to gain power. But he wanted his moral pretense too, so he changed Islam to reflect the fact that the only way it could survive was through force. And so, acting on Allah’s conveniently timed “revelation” that Islam can and should be spread by the sword, Mohammad led an army of Muslims across Arabia in the first jihad. From then on, violence became Islam’s way in the world. And today, acting on Mohammad’s words, “War is deceit” — in the sense that Muslims use earlier “peaceful” verses from the Koran as a weapon against the ignorance and good will of their victims. Those “peaceful” passages in the Koran were abrogated by later passages calling for eternal war against those who do not submit to Islam. How Mohammad spread Islam influenced the content of its doctrine and therefore tells us exactly what Islam means.

Note also that the only reason we’re talking about Islam is because we’ve been forced to by its jihad. And where are Islam’s “conscientious objectors”? Nowhere to be found, for even lax Muslims have been silent against jihad. But that doesn’t stop desperate Westerners from pointing to them as representives of “Moderate Islam.”

Far from being a personal faith, Islam is a collectivist ideology that rejects a live-and-let-live attitude towards non-Muslims. And while the jihadists may not represent all Muslims, they do represent Islam. In the end, most Muslims have proven themselves to be mere sheep to their jihadist wolves, irrelevant as allies in this war. Recovering Muslims call the enemy’s ideology “Islam,” and they dismiss the idea of “Moderate Islam” as they would the idea of “Moderate Evil.” When, based on his actions, Mohammad would be described today as a “Muslim Extremist,” then non-violent Muslims should condemn their prophet and their religion, not those who point it out.

Islam is the enemy’s ideology and evading that fact only helps its agents get away with more murder than they would otherwise. Western politicians have sold us out, so it’s up to the rest of us to defend our way of life by understanding Islam and telling the truth about it in whatever way we can. If we can’t even call Islam by its name, how the hell are we going to defend ourselves against its true believers? One could argue that we’d be better off if the West would just choose one of the many terms currently used for the enemy’s ideology. For my part, I call the enemy what they are, “Jihadists,” and our response, “The War on Jihad.” But behind it all, it’s Islam that makes the enemy tick.

Despite my frustrations with the refusal of many to call Islam “Islam,” I know that those who speak out against Jihad put themselves in danger, and I respect their courage. But it’s important that we acknowledge Islam’s place in the threat we face and say so without equivocation. Not saying “Islam” helps Islam and hurts us. So let’s begin calling the enemy’s ideology by its name. Let’s start calling Islam “Islam.”

Postscript: Below is Bosch’s response to those critics, especially  Muslims and Leftists, who make the issue about Muslims and not Islam; who always allege that critics of Islam are condemning 1.5 billion people, that Muslims are good people and innocent, etc etc. So below he responds with an excerpt from his piece Non-Muslim Muslims and the Jihad Against the West:

For those who want to make this about Muslims and not Islam, here are some of my thoughts on that:

First, my name is Bosch and I’m a recovered Muslim, so I have some insight into this, coupled with the fact that I studied Islam as if my life depended on it after 9/11.

There is Islam and there are Muslims. Muslims who take Islam seriously are at war with us and Muslims who don’t aren’t. But that doesn’t mean we should consider these reluctant Muslims allies against Jihad. I’ve been around Muslims my entire life and most of them truly don’t care about Islam. The problem I have with many of these essentially non-Muslim Muslims, especially in the middle of this war being waged on us by their more consistent co-religionists, is that they give the enemy cover. They force us to play a game of Muslim Roulette since we can’t tell which Muslim is going to blow himself up until he does. And their indifference about the evil being committed in the name of their religion is a big reason why their reputation is where it is.

So while I understand that most Muslims are not at war with us, they’ve proven in their silence and inaction against jihad that they’re not on our side either, and there’s nothing we can say or do to change that. We just have to finally accept it and stop expecting them to come around, while doing our best to kill those who are trying to kill us.

Another problem with Muslims who aren’t very Muslim is that they lead some among us to conclude that they must be practicing a more enlightened form of Islam. They’re not. They’re “practicing” life in non-Muslim countries, where they are free to live as they choose. But their “Islam” is not the Islam. There’s no separate ideology apart from Islam that’s being practiced by these Muslims in name only, there’s no such thing as “Western Islam”.

Non-observant Muslims are not our problem, but neither are they the solution to our problem. Our problem is Islam and its most consistent practitioners. There is nothing in Islam that stays the hand of Muslims who want to kill non-Muslims. If an individual Muslim is personally peaceful, it’s not because of Islam, it’s because of his individual choice, which is why I often say that your average Muslim is morally superior to Mohammad, to their own religion. The very rare Muslim who helps us against Jihad is acting against his religion, but that doesn’t stop some among us from thinking that his choice somehow shines a good light on Islam. It doesn’t. A good Muslim according to us is a bad Muslim according to Islam.

He dismisses Canadian law as manmade, opting instead for what he thinks is the law of the Creator. And that law -- based on the Qur'an and Sunnah -- tells him that murdering Infidels in the cause of Islam is A-OK.

"Terror suspect Chiheb Esseghaier: 'Criminal Code is not holy book,'" by Michele Mandel for the Toronto Sun, April 24 (thanks to all who sent this in):

A Tunisian-born doctorate student accused of plotting with the guidance of al-Qaida to derail a Via Rail train showed his disdain for Canadian criminal law in a quiet but crowded Toronto courtroom.

Chiheb Esseghaier, 30, on Wednesday ignored Justice of the Peace Susan Hilton’s caution to “be careful what you say,” because his words could be used against him in future proceedings.

Instead of remaining silent, Esseghaier, listed as living at no fixed address in Montreal, embarked on a two-minute tirade on the Criminal Code and the serious charges he faces.

“All of those conclusions were taken out based on the Criminal Code and we all know that this Criminal Code is not a holy book,” said Esseghaier, who was busted in Montreal’s Central Station Monday near the Via terminus.

“It’s just written by a set of creatures and the creatures, they’re not perfect because only the Creator is perfect, so if we are basing our judgment ... we cannot rely on the conclusions taken out from these judgments,” he said....

They are charged with conspiring to interfere with transportation facilities for a terrorist group between April 1 and Sept. 25, 2012.

Both also face charges of conspiring to murder persons unknown with the same terrorist guidance, between those same dates, and with participating with a terrorist group.

Esseghaier also faces a charge that between Sept. 7 and Dec. 20, 2012, he instructed someone to participate in a terrorist group.

Born in Tunisia on Sept. 18, 1982, he came to Canada in 2008 on a student visa and last year was granted permanent residency under Quebec’s skilled worker program.

For the last two years, he has been pursuing a doctorate at a Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS), a research division of the University of Quebec, in suburban Montreal. He’s still officially a student and passed his doctoral exam in January.

Esseghaier has been threatened with expulsion for disruptive conduct driven by his strict religious views, which have driven a wedge between him and his academic peers.

Qaradawi is the most popular and influential Islamic preacher in the world. His endorsement of the rebellion against Assad as a jihad will mean that many more jihadis will stream into Syria.

Qaradawi was on the Board of the Islamic Society of Boston, as I pointed out at Jihad Watch back in March 2004. If anyone in Boston had been paying attention to the implications of that fact back then, the Boston Marathon bombings may never have happened.

Qaradawi has said on al-Jazeera: “Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them – even though they exaggerated this issue – he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers….”

Qaradawi continued: “I’d like to say that the only thing I hope for is that as my life approaches its end, Allah will give me an opportunity to go to the land of Jihad and resistance, even if in a wheelchair. I will shoot Allah’s enemies, the Jews, and they will throw a bomb at me, and thus, I will seal my life with martyrdom.”

In Islamic theology, jihad warfare is fard kifaya, an obligation of the community as a whole but not of every individual believer. Jihad becomes fard ayn, obligatory on every individual Muslim to aid in some way, when a Muslim land is attacked.

"Leading Sunni Scholar Yousuf Al-Qaradhawi: No Parental Consent Needed to Wage Jihad in Syria," from MEMRI, April 7:

Following are excerpts from an interview with leading Sunni Islamic scholar Sheik Yousuf Al-Qaradhawi, which aired on the Al-Jazeera network on April 7, 2013:

Yousuf Al-Qaradhawi: The Jihad in Syria is now a personal duty incumbent upon all Muslims. This Jihad is no longer a collective duty. There is a type of Jihad that constitutes a collective duty, which, if waged by some, is not incumbent upon the others. On the other hand, there is a type of Jihad in which everybody must participate – each according to his capabilities. The Jihad in Syria is a duty incumbent upon the entire people. There is a group that has been fighting for two years and has just entered the third, and whoever is capable must help this group. Parental consent is not required in this case.

It isn't actually hard to understand at all. The Qur'an tells Muslims to fight against "the People of the Book" and subjugate them (9:29). It tells them to kill the polytheists (i.e., anyone who worships anything other than the Allah of the Qur'an) wherever they are found (9:5; cf. 2:191 and 4:89). These are not random, "cherry-picked" verses, but are part of the foundation of a developed doctrine, theology and legal system that mandates warfare against non-Muslims. A manual of Islamic law that was certified in 1991 by the clerics at Al-Azhar University, one of the leading authorities in the Islamic world, as "conforming to the practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni community," stipulates about jihad that the Muslim community "makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians...until they become Muslim or pay the non-Muslim poll tax” ('Umdat al-Salik, o9.8).

If this is a "perversion" of Islam, it has reached its highest levels, because that is what al-Azhar is. And there are so very many Muslim clerics worldwide who endorse the idea that Muslims must wage war against non-Muslims, as we have documented regularly here at Jihad Watch for the past ten and a half years. How is it that so many Muslim clerics endorse what O'Malley would call a perversion of the Islamic religion?

The Cardinal rightly says that no one should indulge in "hatred" or "revenge" or "prejudice against Muslims." That is absolutely true. It is unlikely that he is aware, however, that Islamic supremacist groups in the U.S. such as the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) consistently characterize any and every attempt to explore the roots of jihad terrorism in Islamic texts and teachings, and the ways in which jihadis use those texts and teachings to justify violence and supremacism, as a manifestation of "hatred" and "prejudice against Muslims." This needs to be clarified: that resistance against jihad and Islamic supremacism do not constitute such hatred or prejudice -- it would be refreshing to see a prominent Catholic churchman affirm that. I am not holding my breath.

"O’Malley: Don’t focus on hatred, revenge," by Christine McConville for the Boston Herald, April 22 (thanks to Kamala):

Don’t succumb to the hate that killed, maimed and traumatized so many people in Boston last week, a resolute Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley told terror-weary parishioners and public officials yesterday at a crowded Mass inside the Cathedral of the Holy Cross.

“We must be a people of reconciliation, not revenge,” O’Malley urged the 1,800 Mass celebrants, a group that included U.S. Rep. Stephen F. Lynch, Boston Police Commissioner Edward F. Davis and Boston police Superintendents William Evans and Kevin Buckley.

“The crimes of the two young men must not be the justification for prejudice against Muslims and against immigrants,” he said....

Days later, Massachusetts Institute of Technology officer Sean Collier, 26, was gunned down in his cruiser allegedly by brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Chechen immigrants and Muslims who authorities say are responsible for the marathon bombings.

Hours after Collier was killed, Transit Police officer Richard Donohue, 33, was shot in a gun battle, during which Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was captured late Friday.

O’Malley reminded people that the brothers’ vicious hate triggered so much goodness.

“It is very difficult to understand what was going on in the young men’s minds, what demons were operative, what ideologies or politics or the perversion of their religion. It was amazing to witness, however, how much goodness and generosity were evidenced in our community as a result of the tragic events they perpetrated,” he said.

“The individualism and alienation of our age has spawned a culture of death. Over a million abortions a year is one indication of how human life has been devalued. Violent entertainment, films and video games have coarsened us and made us more insensitive to the pain and suffering of others. The inability of the Congress to enact laws that control access to automatic weapons is emblematic of the pathology of our violent culture,” O’Malley said. “I hope that the events of this past week have taught us how high the stakes are. We must build a civilization of love, or there will be no civilization at all.”

Pamela Geller points out that this resonates with a passage in the Qur'an that says that waging jihad brings calm and comfort to the jihadis: "Fight them! Allah will chastise them at your hands, and He will lay them low and give you victory over them, and He will heal the breasts of folk who are believers. And He will remove the anger of their hearts." -- Qur'an 9:14-15

The North Carolina jihadist Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar cited that verse in exactly such a context.

"Chilling tweets from suspected Twitter account of Boston Marathon bomber," from FoxNews.com, April 19 (thanks to Pamela Geller):

Amid the mundane chatter of an ordinary digital teenager, a Twitter account believed to belong to the Boston Marathon bombing suspect who remains at large contains some chilling chatter.

The @J_tsar Twitter feed is believed to belong to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, one of two Chechen brothers police say carried out Monday's terror attack in Boston. Buzzfeed on Friday reported that a high school classmate of Dzhokhar, Stefanie Gardner, confirmed that the account belonged to Tsarnaev.

The last post, on April 16, after the Monday bombing that killed three and left dozens gruesomely injured: "I'm a stress free kind of guy."

I'm a stress free kind of guy

And right before the bombing, on April 15: "Ain't no love in the heart of the city, stay safe people."

Later that evening, in response to someone else's protected Tweet: "..and they what 'god hates dead people?" Or victims of tragedies? Lol those people are cooked."

Most of tweets account were ordinary fodder that could have come from anyone: talk about TV shows and cars, for example. A connection between Tsarnaev and the Twitter account has not been verified by the police or FBI.

Police believe Tsarnaev could be armed and consider him extremely dangerous. He and his brother — in a vehicle they carjacked from a man who later escaped — led police on a chase through city streets Thursday night and Friday morning, after robbing a 7-11 in Cambridge and killing a Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer, according to authorities.

Anyone with information on the whereabouts of Tsarnaev is urged to call the FBI: 800-CALL-FBI.

He states that Syrians are turning to "jihadism" to free themselves from the oppressive Assad regime -- he doesn't seem to have any illusions about the Syrian rebels being some kind of democratic force. He also says that there is a strain of "jihadism" that is "open to dialogue." I have no idea what he means by that or to whom he could be referring, as generally Muslims who are waging jihad against non-Muslims are interested only in implementing Islam's theological imperatives of subjugating those non-Muslims and imposing Sharia restrictions upon them. But he does seem to be calling for an honest recognition with that jihad imperative, and for attempts to deal with it openly and honestly -- and those things are sorely needed among Catholic leaders and non-Muslim leaders in general. Instead, they seem intent on ignoring the jihad and the Muslim persecution of Christians in the pursuit of an illusory and empty "dialogue" that appears to be more directed toward making all parties involved feel good rather than to making real headway on any actual problems.

I discuss the problem of "dialogue" at length in my new book, Not Peace But A Sword.

"Syria: jihadism cannot be ignored, Father Dall'Oglio says," by Luciana Borsatti for ANSAmed, April 12 (thanks to Insubria):

ROME, MARCH 12 - Jihadism is a cultural, political and military reality that is growing stronger by the day and cannot be ignored, not even on the theological level, according to Father Paolo Dall'Oglio, an Italian Jesuit who lived in Syria for 30 years before being expelled by Damascus authorities in 2012.

The jihadist galaxy is ''a considerable cultural, religious, political and military subject'', he told ANSAmed in an interview, stressing the weight of jihadism ''in its local and transnational expressions'' within the current ''geo-strategic'' framework.

''It is a political and military actor whose weight must be reckoned with, given that is has won in Iraq, is winning in Afghanistan, will not be defeated in Mali, and is making a solution for Somalia impossible'', he added.

What is to be done? ''First of all, operating on an intelligence level to prevent even graver consequences and to bring about the downfall of its projects to universalize terror''.

But action must also occur on the social level, continued the Jesuit, a recent guest at the Anna Lindh Foundation Euro-Mediterranean Forum in Marseille.

This means ''helping Islamic civil societies take their responsibilities on the ground'', he added in reference to areas that have fallen under the control of Islamist forces, which have until now been excluded if not banned from power. ''They have lived off criticism, but now must begin to live on assumed responsibility, and to work to organize their societies''.

The founder of the Mar Musa monastic community for interfaith dialogue north of Damascus, the Jesuit has the Syrian civil war uppermost in his mind.

''It's important to protect the democratic diversity of the Syrian people, which, feeling abandoned, turned to jihadism to free themselves of the regime'' of President Bashar al-Assad.

Diversity within the Muslim world must also be protected, he added, in order to ''defend the pluralism that exists within Islam, which is also an ethnic pluralism''. But in order to do this, the three monotheistic religions must make ''a theological effort'' to analyze ways to stand up to Islamism and political jihadism, Dall'Oglio said, inviting their intellectual communities to ''listen in order to foster mutual understanding''. There are two types of jihadism, he stressed. ''One that is open to dialogue'' and another that is rigidly dogmatic, ''harder to manage, a swamp in which all sorts are crawling, from secret services to mafiosi to extremists. A swamp which we must pull our youth, our children out of: religious youth, that need religious discourse, which they certainly do not find in prisons like Guantanamo''.

As far as Syria, Dall'Oglio concludes, ''in the first phase I fought for a diplomatic intervention'' to prevent the great international conflicts ''from being fought on the living bodies of Syrians''. Then he supported a non-violent NGO presence ''when everything was still possible, that is, until the summer of 2011''. But now the time has come, he concludes, for ''the right to self-defense and the obligation to rescue a people in great adversity''. (ANSAmed).

If Hamas-linked CAIR were really serious about countering the "extremists" with their #MyJihad campaign, they'd be running their ads in Cairo and directly challenging people like Jihad Movement Mufti Sayed Imam. "Jihad Movement leader calls for applying Sharia," from the Egypt Independent, April 14 (thanks to Bill):

Circumstances in Egypt will not improve unless Sharia is applied, Jihad Movement Mufti Sayed Imam said.

Imam said the Afghanistan’s Taliban model and Somali Islamic rule are the best systems and most able to protect society from “thuggery” and rape.

In an interview on privately owned satellite channel CBC Saturday, Imam called the Egyptian state an “infidel,” since the Muslim Brotherhood, after President Mohamed Morsy’s took office, introduced — like previous regimes in Egyptian history — manmade laws that he described as “imported from abroad.”

The mufti, whom show host Emad Adib described as the “real leader of the movement,” said the “infidel state does not mean that its people are infidels, but they should perform jihad as long as they have the ability.”

He defined “jihad” as “fighting infidels, not to seek livelihood and or education.”

“The Muslim Brotherhood does not have a basis in Sharia,” Imam said, saying the group has since its foundation been too flexible toward Sharia. “Hassan al-Banna believed the Egyptian state was a home for Islam, and its ruler was Muslim, which is incompatible with the idea of founding the group.”

Banna, an Islamic scholar, founded the Brotherhood in 1928.

“The Brotherhood spent 80 years between infidelity and negligence until we ended up with it as infidel ruler, and those who want the permanence of infidelity are infidels,” Imam said.

The mufti also discussed Al-Qaeda, saying the group is just training camps. He said most Al-Qaeda members were Saudis and Yemenis as well as followers of Osama bin Laden who “refused to comply with any approach and to give him the freedom to act with this followers, and he expulsed those who demanded that he adopt a doctrine.”

Bin Laden required his followers to have absolute obedience, Imam said. A person would not follow bin Laden unless he or she was “ignorant of religion or a mercenary.”

Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri’s relationship with Al-Qaeda came late, only three months before the September 11 attacks, Imam said, adding that Zawahiri, an Egyptian, was not aware of bin Laden masterminding the attacks.

Imam said he has cut relations with others.

“I see, however, that armed jihad is the duty of everyone, whatever their sins, depending on their abilities,” he said.

On ABN.

Spencer Ackerman, the hard-Left propagandist at Wired whose "exposes" of U.S. government training materials led to the wholesale purge of any true information about jihad and Islamic supremacism from those materials, has just interviewed the American jihadist Omar Hammami. The interview has some interesting bits, and is here -- but most interesting was a portion of the Twitter exchange between the two, which Ackerman (@attackerman) published along with the article.

One caveat: Hammami is actually @abumamerican on Twitter, while this shows Ackerman corresponding with @abuamerican, who appears to be someone else, so the whole exchange may not be authentic -- and I don't think Ackerman would be above fabricating the whole thing. However, Ackerman's repeated attempts to get Hammami, if this is Hammami, to acknowledge that he is only fighting because of U.S. foreign policy, and Hammami's counter that fighting is an imperative in his Islamic religion, has the ring of truth: Leftists like Ackerman hold the unshakeable assumption that the Islamic jihad against the free world is solely motivated by U.S. policies -- an ethnocentric and paternalistic presupposition that Muslims are merely passive reactors who have no thoughts or aspirations of their own, but can only react to what the big, bad powerful U.S. does. It never occurs to them that jihadists may hate the U.S. for reasons of their own, stemming from their own beliefs and outlook on the world.

And so Ackerman here practically begs Hammami to blame it all on the U.S., and Hammami refuses: "US policy is the factor defining specific target, but fighting is part of the religion." But Ackerman can't hear that, or investigate the questions of whether or not what Hammami says is accurate, how many other Muslims believe that same way, etc. For him to do anything like that would be "Islamophobic."

In PJ Lifestyle, I discuss the conversion to Islam of Aurora murderer James Holmes:

The debate over James Holmes’s sanity has raged hotly ever since he murdered twelve people and wounded 58 in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado in July 2012. But now the controversy can be laid to rest: Holmes is sane. The clearest indication of his sanity came last week, when the Daily Mail reported that he had converted to Islam.

The Mail reported that Holmes is apparently quite devout: he has grown a lavish beard, eats only halal food, prays the obligatory five daily prayers, and studies the Qur’an for hours every day.

Holmes’s conversion reveals that instead of being unaware of what he did, or utterly remorseless, as one might expect of a psychotic or a sociopath, the murders must trouble him a great deal. For it is souls that are troubled – intellectually, morally, spiritually, psychologically – who cast about for some solution to what troubles them, and often find it in religious conversion.

But it is what Holmes converted to that is significant. Had Holmes converted to Christianity, he might have found relief for any remorse he might be feeling for the massacre in the proposition that in Christ his sins, no matter how great, were forgiven; if he had explored Buddhism, he might have focused upon developing right intention, right speech, and right action, and eradicating the illusions that led him to kill in the first place.

Instead, Holmes chose Islam. A prison source noted: “He has brainwashed himself into believing he was on his own personal jihad and that his victims were infidels.”

This suggests that Holmes’s conversion is a defensive action against any regret that he may be feeling. But instead of meeting that regret with repentance, he has found a way to justify his actions. Instead of acknowledging his wrongdoing, he chose a belief system that justifies violence in certain circumstances, and has attempted to cleanse himself of any wrongdoing by seeing his murders in light of that belief system.

Jihad may take the form of indiscriminate mass murder of infidels, as we saw on 9/11, and 7/7, and in Beslan and Mumbai and Fort Hood and in so very, very many other places. Unfortunately for Holmes, however, jihad is not retroactive. If Holmes was an infidel at the time of the murders, then it doesn’t make his actions jihad to convert to Islam afterward.

Nonetheless, his conversion illustrates yet again why Islamic supremacist groups make such a concerted effort to make converts in prison. They know that men who are already in many cases notably aggressive and violent, and who have a grievance against society, are perfect fits for a religion that contains teachings that are themselves aggressive and violent, and that sets itself against infidel society. Islamic proselytizers in prisons hope to channel that aggression by sanctifying and thereby justifying it – as Holmes seems to be trying to justify his murders by affecting Islamic piety now.

There is more.

I sent Pamela Geller the notes below about this egregious example of mainstream media distortion and propagandizing, which she posted here. "Campaign Aims To Reclaim True Meaning Of 'Jihad,'" by Heather Maher for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, March 29:

He laments the fact that moderate Muslims “have been sitting out the debate” and allowed it to be hijacked by two extremes who have defined how the West should see Islam and how Muslims should see the West.

“To us, it’s time we fought against the dumbing down of the conversation,” he says. “There is no inherent schism, there is no inherent conflict, and here am I, as living witness to this -- an American Muslim who very much loves America and very much practices my faith and actually sees jihad as something I would do to make America a better place.”

Ahmed al-Rahim, an assistant professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Virginia, says the Muslim extremists the ad campaign refers to are jihadi Salafis -- Sunni Muslims who believe violence is justified to achieve their political objectives.

This subgroup “takes a particular puritanical interpretation of Islam -- and they emphasize the jihad that is here, the holy war aspect," he says. "They are emphasizing the violent, war-like nature of the term, as it’s used [today], and for them, that is also an attempt to reclaim what they think is the original meaning.”

What is the original meaning? Muhammad said: "Fight in the name of Allah and in the way of Allah. Fight against those who disbelieve in Allah. Make a holy war...When you meet your enemies who are polytheists, invite them to three courses of action. If they respond to any one of these, you also accept it and withhold yourself from doing them any harm. Invite them to (accept) Islam; if they respond to you, accept it from them and desist from fighting against them....If they refuse to accept Islam, demand from them the Jizya. If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay the tax, seek Allah's help and fight them." (Sahih Muslim 4294) But what could Muhammad possibly know about the original meaning of jihad?

Counter Campaign

In that sense, he adds, “there is a kind of jihad for reclaiming or redefining the term ‘jihad’ among Muslims.”

The other group of extremists is represented by people like Pamela Geller, who eagerly embraces the word's most violent meaning.

This is the basest libel. Pamela Geller doesn't "eagerly embrace" jihad's "most violent meaning." She dares to notice it, when Rehab and others are trying to obfuscate it. She is trying to call attention to it so as to increase resistance to it.

Geller, who leads an anti-Islamic group called the American Freedom Defense Initiative, even promoted it in controversial ads she ran in New York City last year and this year in Chicago, in response to the “My Jihad” campaign.

Geller "even promoted it." This is like saying that Winston Churchill "eagerly embraced" and "promoted" Nazism.

​​Rehab and his supporters, she says, “are sanitizing and whitewashing ‘jihad’ and, in effect, disarming the American people in what is clearly the greatest national security threat that this nation faces.”

Geller insists that her group “doesn’t editorialize” to make its point because it doesn’t have to. “Our ad campaign that uses the texts and the teachings of Islam to justify violence and supremacism uses actual quotes by Islamic supremacists and jihadists,” she says, “including the prime minister of Turkey, [former Al-Qaeda-leader] Osama bin Laden, and the Times Square bomber” Faisal Shahzad.

But Jamal Elias, a professor of Islamic thought at the University of Pennsylvania, says -- strictly grammatically speaking -- the ads err because they reduce the meaning of "jihad" to one definition, when it actually has many.

“It’s defined in several different ways. It’s a term that actually means ‘struggle’ or ‘striving,’ and the longer term is actually ‘striving in the path of God,’” he explains. “So in a most literal sense, it is not -- as people sometimes wrongly assume -- an explicit reference to some form of violence, whether justified or unjustified. It’s a very loose definition which can fit a lot of things within it.”

In a political context, he admits, the word is widely understood to mean some form of armed activity. But he adds that “generally when Muslims have used the term -- and this is historically true -- they’ve frequently used it as a struggle for self-improvement at a personal level.”

Al-Rahim says plenty of medieval Islamic legal texts refer to jihad as a religiously sanctioned, or holy, war, but he also points out that the Koran tells how the Prophet Muhammad once told his fighters after a battle that they had “achieved the minor jihad.”

When his followers asked why their battle against infidels and pagans was only minor, al-Rahim says Muhammad replied, "The greater jihad is that against the lower self, or the purging of the self or the soul of evil intention, a kind of spiritual struggle."

Rehab’s campaign  -- which he plans to take abroad -- may have begun with a disagreement over a word, but it’s landed him squarely in the larger debate over who speaks for Islam.

It’s a role he sounds happy to take on. “It is a huge loss to humanity if we live on believing that these extremists are the only voices,” he says. “In fact they’re not. In fact, they’re a minority.”

RFE/RL ends with Rehab repeating his outrageous moral equivalence of mass murderers with those who oppose them. It shows how far RFE/RL, and mainstream journalism, has descended.

Over at American Thinker via RaymondIbrahim.com, I discuss how, if some Muslims, including women, are willing to attend churches and become like “family members” to those Christians they intend to assassinate, how much deceit and betrayal must some of the smiling Muslim activists of America, especially those in positions of power and influence, be engaging in to subvert and eliminate the most dangerous of all infidels, the original Great Satan?

A recent assassination attempt in Turkey offers valuable lessons for the West concerning Islamist hate—and the amount of deceit and betrayal that hate engenders towards non-Muslim “infidels.”

Last January, an assassination plot against a Christian pastor in Turkey was thwarted. Police arrested 14 suspects. Two of them had been part of the pastor’s congregation for more than a year, feigning interest in Christianity. One went so far as to participate in a baptism. Three of the suspects were women. “These people had infiltrated our church and collected information about me, my family and the church and were preparing an attack against us,” said the pastor in question, Emre Karaali, a native Turk: “Two of them attended our church for over a year and they were like family.”

And their subversive tactics worked: “The 14 [suspects] had collected personal information, copies of personal documents, created maps of the church and the pastor’s home, and had photos of those who had come to Izmit [church] to preach.”

Consider the great lengths these Islamic supremacists went to in order to murder this Christian pastor: wholesale deception, attending non-Islamic places of worship and rites to the point that “they were like family” to the Christian they sought to betray and kill. While some may think such acts are indicative of un-Islamic behavior, they are, in fact, doctrinally permissible and historically demonstrative.

Islamic teaching permits deceits, ruses, and dispensations. For an in depth examination, read about the doctrines of taqiyya, tawriya, and taysir. Then there is Islam’s overarching idea of niyya (or “intention”), best captured by the famous Muslim axiom, “necessity makes permissible the prohibited.” According to this teaching, the intentions behind Muslim actions determine whether said actions are permissible or not.

From here one may understand the many incongruities of Islam: lying is forbidden—unless the intention is to empower Islam; killing women and children is forbidden—but permissible during the jihad; suicide is forbidden—unless the intention is to kill infidels, in which case it becomes a “martyrdom operation.”

Thus, feigning interest in Christianity, attending church for over a year, participating in Christian baptisms, and becoming “like family” to an infidel—all things forbidden according to Islamic Sharia—become permissible in the service of the jihad on Christianity.

History offers several examples of Muslims feigning friendship and loyalty to non-Muslims only to break faith at the opportune moment, beginning with Islam’s founder. When a non-Muslim poet, Ka‘b ibn Ashraf, offended Muhammad, the prophet exclaimed: “Who will kill this man who has hurt Allah and his prophet?” A young Muslim named Ibn Maslama volunteered on condition that, to get close enough to Ka‘b to assassinate him, he be allowed to deceive the poet. The prophet agreed. Ibn Maslama went to Ka‘b feigning friendship; the poet trusted his sincerity and took him into his confidence. Soon thereafter, the Muslim youth returned with a friend and, while the trusting poet’s guard was down, they slaughtered him.

Likewise, Muhammad commanded a convert from an adversarial tribe to conceal his new Muslim identity and go back to his tribe—which he cajoled with a perfidious “You are my stock and my family, the dearest of men to me”—only to betray them to Islam.

Such are the lengths some Muslims—past and present—go to in order to win the trust of those infidels they mean to betray. For example, in October 2012 in Somalia, a nation that has nothing in common with Turkey, neither race, language, nor culture—only Islam—this same story of betrayal recently took place. When a Muslim sheikh became suspicions that a woman in his village had converted to Christianity, he sent his wife to the apostate, instructing her to pretend to be interested in learning about Christianity. The trusting Christian woman was only too happy to share the Gospel with the feigning Muslim woman. After it was verified that the woman was Christian, the sheikh and other Muslims went to her house and shot her dead...

Sheikh Mohammed Said Ramadan al-Buti was the author of Jihad In Islam: How to Understand & Practise It, an exposition of the doctrine of jihad that I discuss at length in my book Islam Unveiled. Al-Buti argued, not quite ingenuously, that three of the four Sunni schools of Islamic jurisprudence held jihad warfare to be purely defensive, and that only the Shafi'i school allowed for offensive jihad. This was not accurate in itself, but also, as we saw on 9/11 and since then, the concept of what constitutes a "defensive" jihad attack is so elastic as to allow for almost anything. Was the jihad-martyrdom suicide attack that murdered al-Buti offensive or defensive? Opinions will differ. But in any case, the noted scholar has now become the recipient of a final and enduring lesson in jihad in Islam: how to understand and practice it.

"Damascus mosque blast kills 42 including senior Syrian imam," from Reuters, March 21:

(Reuters) - An explosion at a mosque in the Syrian capital on Thursday killed at least 42 people, including a senior pro-government Muslim cleric, and wounded 84, the Syrian health ministry said.

State television and anti-government activists earlier had reported 15 dead. The television said a "terrorist suicide blast" hit the Iman Mosque in central Damascus, and Mohammed al-Buti, imam of the ancient Ummayyad Mosque, was among the dead.

"The death toll from the suicide bombing of the Iman Mosque in Damascus is 42 martyrs and 84 wounded," the health ministry said later in a statement.

While attacks in the capital during Syria's two-year-long rebellion have become almost commonplace, an attack on a mosque was deeply shocking to both sides in the conflict.

Buti, a government-appointed cleric reviled by the Syrian opposition movement, delivered the official weekly Friday mosque sermons on state television.

In one of his televised speeches, Buti described those fighting to topple President Bashar al-Assad as 'scum'. He also used his position to call on Syrians to join the armed forces and help Assad defeat his rivals in the rebellion.

Rebel spokesman Loay Maqdad said units associated with the opposition's Free Syrian Army were not behind the attack.

"We in the Free Syrian Army do not take any responsibility for this operation. We do not do these types of suicide bombings and we do not target mosques," he told Al Arabiya television.

Video released by Syria's al-Ikhbariya channel showed dozens of limp bodies lying on the bloodied carpet of the mosque, as emergency workers rushed in to give survivors first aid. Mangled limbs lay among the wreckage.

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which has a network of activists across Syria, said earlier that around 15 people died in the blast in central Damascus.

The Observatory said it was unclear if the explosion was caused by a car bomb or a mortar shell. Dozens more were wounded in the attack it said.

The Iman mosque is next door to the offices of Assad's ruling Baath party, as well as other government compounds.

Locals were panicked after the blast and described seeing ambulances rushing to the area while traffic came to a standstill. Residents near the mosque said the strong, acrid smell of gun powder still hung in the air.

"RECEIVING GOD'S WRATH"

Buti, 84, led the funeral prayers for Assad's father, the late President Hafez al-Assad.

The imam's critics saw him as a religious mouthpiece in support of Assad. When the revolt started in March 2011, he quickly threw his support behind the Assad family, which has ruled Syria for more than four decades....

Some opposition activists argued the rebels could not have been behind the attack, and called it a government plot. They said it was unlikely that rebels, many of whom are deeply religious, would target a mosque.

"The regime eliminated Buti," said Leena al-Shami, a Damascus activist speaking on Skype. "One of the last things he said is that Assad is the prince of Muslims and Syrians fight with him, as in jihad (holy war)....

Freelance writer Tammy Swofford has a thought-provoking analysis of the battles over the meaning of jihad and the freedom of speech that have been raging in the U.S. lately. Kudos to the Daily Times of Pakistan for publishing this. "COMMENT : The Lexicon wars: the meaning of jihad," by Tammy Swofford in the Daily Times, March 15:

Everyone hates the truth. The more visible jihad of recent decades falls in the category of mass murder, chaos, and anarchy

Cast of characters:

Council on American-Islamic Relations

Pamela Geller and the American Freedom Defence Initiative

Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) 2013

Robert Spencer: Jihad Watch

If you own the language you control the dialogue. If you control the dialogue you have the ability to censor thought. If you censor thought you can infiltrate culture. Freedom of expression remains the breastplate of our American freedom. There are many who do not understand this dynamic. They speak against the very guarantee of our liberty. For me the issue is quite simple. Freedom of expression is a process and not an outcome.

There is a war going on. It is being waged within the political trenches of our nations. This is a war birthed within a digital age. Lexicon War. It is important that there be no real winner. And it is equally important that there is no real defeat. Because when it comes to freedom of expression, the process is extremely important. But the process is always open-ended and continuing. The outcome is never fully determined.

Let’s look at the latest American cast of characters. In the first Lexicon War we have CAIR v Pamela Geller. The Chicago branch of CAIR decided to run a series of advertisements as part of a bus campaign to raise the awareness of jihad as a personal and internal struggle. One ad says, “My jihad is to stay fit despite my busy schedule. What’s yours?” Not one to take it lying down, Geller mounted her own campaign in her usual trailblazing style. Her ads are all on the scale of: “Reloading, firing again, reloading, firing again, while screaming Allahu Akbar — victim of Major Nidal Hassan, Fort Hood jihad mass murderer. That’s My Jihad, what’s yours?”

You say struggle. I say kill. You say jihad of the tongue. Mine is of the pen.

The second case involves CPAC v Robert Spencer. The Conservative Political Action Conference is one of those ‘see and be seen’ events, kind of like the National Prayer Breakfast. No sane person really attends the prayer breakfast to pray. It is a time to bite the ankles of your nearest enemy and shove a thumb in the eye of the person who hates you. It provides the encapsulated moment to pander to the individual who has the influence to advance political agenda. The tables are bloated with perils of predilection.

In their infancy, these gatherings are attended by mavericks. But mavericks must be owned and cordoned. The powerful Beltway vortex acquires a new target. Within a few years, all such gatherings are reduced to attendance by career political mules. Swofford doesn’t talk to mules.

Robert Spencer? There is no middle ground on opinion about this man. He runs what is essentially a clearinghouse of information for jihad-of-the-nasty-kind. If a Muslim kills a Copt in Egypt, it will make the page. If a Muslim woman is the victim of an honour killing, it finds full bloom on his site. You get the point. Recently, his blog took the CPAC people’s choice award by an impressive voting margin. But when the topic came up regarding his right to freedom of expression at the CPAC event, the right to address his perceptions, he quickly became persona non grata. CPAC will now present his award in absentia. Ghost award.

It wasn't just my perceptions, it was hard evidence of the ties of CPAC's Grover Norquist and Suhail Khan to Islamic supremacists -- and I hadn't even intended to speak about that until I was told not to.

Everyone hates the truth. The more visible jihad of recent decades falls in the category of mass murder, chaos, and anarchy. Anyone remember how many times the flight recorder for United Airlines 93 picked up the phrase Allahu Akbar as Muslim men terrorised their captives? 23. One score and three. XXIII. But the Lexicon War continues to rage between those who want intellectual ownership of the word jihad. On the one side are Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, a dynamic duo who wish to remind us that jihad means killing fields. On the other side, those who wish to scrub any and all violent connotation of jihad and neutralize the word to be one with less emotional impact....

Read it all.

Can Islam be reformed? If so, it would have to jettison huge elements of its self-understanding, particularly the idea of consensus (ijma) among the Islamic schools of jurisprudence establishing a matter as beyond question, and Muhammad's related assertion that "my community will not agree on an error." No one knows the future, but there is no large-scale movement for such a reevaluation on the horizon at this point.

Here is my debate with Zuhdi Jasser on this issue.

"Can Islam Be Reformed? Moroccan Exile Says No — But Not All Agree," by Tiffany Gabbay for The Blaze, March 12 (thanks to Andrew Bostom):

After turning away from Islam and becoming an atheist, young blogger Kassim al-Ghasali became a target in his native Morocco. Following a string of death threats, he sought political asylum in Switzerland, where he now lives and continues to embrace ideals of freedom and tolerance.

Ever-outspoken in his beliefs, al-Ghasali presented a speech at the Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy in February. Speaking to the German-language news outlet Die Welt following the event, the young Moroccan shared his views (a translation of the full interview can be found in the Gates of Geneva blog), on the Arab Spring, why he believes Islam cannot be reformed in the same way that Christianity was, and why moderate Muslims should admit that “terror and violence” — or more pointedly, “unmitigated horror” — is part of the Koran.

Al-Ghasali also poignantly added that the Koran is a “politically and historically-determined book and not the word of Allah” and that Islam cannot be reformed as its tenets are anathema to Western enlightenment, which helped to reform Christianity...

“In my opinion, there can be no reformation or enlightenment in Sunni or Shiite Islam, because there is no church to be reformed,” al-Ghasali explained to Die Welt.

“In Islam, we are subject to the power of a sacred book and the instructions it gives. Identity and understanding of self come from the Quran. If Muslims could use their reason without the instructions of a book which is recognized as the Word of God, then we could talk about enlightenment. But today most Muslims are against the ideas of the Western Enlightenment.”

He went on to note that, historically, “there were several attempts at reform in Islam, but they were not welcomed.”

“Any moderate Muslim who would like to reform Islam should admit to himself that terror and violence are in the Quran. The unmitigated horror. But no Muslim could admit that the Quran is a politically — and historically-determined book — and not the word of Allah.”

Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, author of “Battle for the Soul of Islam” and founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) disagrees with al-Ghasali’s premise, however, and told TheBlaze that the blogger “is mixing a number of different concepts” thereby “passing judgement on all Muslims.”

"Passing judgement on all Muslims"? Jasser sounds like the spokesmen for Hamas-linked CAIR and other Islamic supremacists, who constantly claim, in defiance of reason and logic, that any criticism of Islamic jihad terrorism and analysis of how jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and supremacism is somehow an indictment of "all Muslims." Ignorant dhimmis fall for this hook, line and sinker, as we saw in San Francisco yesterday. (Please help keep our jihad truth ads running in the face of this pressure: contribute here.)

“He is free to believe what he wants,” Jasser qualified, before saying that it is “wrongheaded” to credit Western Enlightenment with having reformed Christianity because reformation of the faith was brought on more by individuals rather than an entire movement.

“I agree that reform cannot come from the top-down, that is not going to happen, but so many Muslims have written about separation of mosque and state,” Jasser said before explaining that the entirety of Islam should not be stereotyped based on politically-motivated clerics and the goals of Islamism, or, political Islam.

“He [al-Ghasali] does not give any solutions. So do all Muslims need to leave their faith?” Jasser asked.

I don't know, but I do know that pretending the problem does not exist is not a solution, either.

The author and doctor also said that he “could not disagree more” that the Koran harbors “unmitigated horrors” and explained that, just as in passages from the Old Testament and scriptures, there are texts that contain hellfire. “Islam is not a pacifist religion, and there are historical contexts at the time in which God told Muslims it was OK to fight and defend themselves.”

“We elevate [the words] of theocrats that use verses for their own empowerment rather than take into account the context of a battle that happened in 6th century AD,” Jasser said.

Not the 6th century, but the 7th century: Muhammad's prophetic career, according to Islamic tradition, took place between 610 and 632 AD. In any case, invoking "context," as we have seen so many times, is the last refuge of a cornered Islamic supremacist. Of course, Jasser rejects Islamic supremacism, we're told, so I hope he will enlighten us as to why so many "theocrats" worldwide today somehow miss the all-important context of the Qur'an's martial verses and think they're applicable to today. I hope he will explain why Islamic scholars going back to Ibn Ishaq, Muhammad's first biographer, and including Ibn Qayyam, Ibn Khaldun, Ibn Taymiyya and many others, have argued just the opposite of what Jasser argues here, and have held that the Qur'anic verses mandating warfare against and subjugation of unbelievers are not just valid for the 7th century, but for all time.

...[Al-Ghasali] said that it makes “no sense” to “call for respect for human rights while, on the other hand, religious texts call for the killing of infidels, bullying women and oppressing minorities.”

On this point, another outspoken voice for human rights in Muslim countries, Nonie Darwish, agrees. The director for Arabs for Israel and author of the book “Now They Call Me Infidel,” left Islam for reasons similar to al-Ghasali.

She told TheBlaze that for her personally, Islam and being at peace with the world and those in it are “irreconcilable.”

“I personally cannot be a Muslim and be at peace with the world,” she said. “I could not make peace with Islam and the rest of the world at the same time. The problem with Islam is that it is very rigid in how it looks at others. I could not reconcile that with how to love the rest of the world.”

Darwish said that for her to have remained a Muslim, she would have had to “kid herself” or “try to create an Islam that does not exist.”

“Islamic ideology is obsessed with rejecting non-Muslims. The bulk of the scriptures are focused on condemning non-Muslims. I think it is hypocritical for people to call themselves Muslims and then say they can love the rest of the world because if they read their scriptures its always about cursing non-Muslims. It is hypocritical to reconcile Islam with peace.”

Darwish also shared her belief that being a Muslim “is a contract with the state, not a relationship with God.”

“If you leave the Islamic world — that state — or any Muslim — can kill you,” she said....

Here is one of the few fair presentations about our AFDI truth about jihad ads: "Despite CAIR Push-Back, Controversial Anti-Jihad Ads Launch in DC Metro Stations," by Tiffany Gabbay for The Blaze, March 8:

In October 2012, Pamela Geller — a blogger and the executive director of the American Freedom Defense Initiative — told TheBlaze in an exclusive interview about plans to expand her controversial DC-based ad campaign that features an image of Osama bin Laden. The ad is meant to shed light on the fact that jihad is a tenet of Islam, but some critics argue that the ad marginalizes all Muslims. Geller and others who support the ad campaign, meanwhile, maintain it is directed at fighting jihad and radical Islamism.

Geller was embroiled in a long battle with New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) over her ads as well, but a judge ruled in her favor. After additional push-back from MTA, the outspoken activist’s ads were permitted so long as they carried a disclaimer stating that the MTA itself did not endorse the message. Geller won a similar case with the DC’s Washington Metro Transit Authority (WMATA) and now, her string of ads have launched in subway stations across the DC-metro area. The campaign, which will run for one month, is also meant to satirize CAIR’s “MyJihad” ad campaign, which seeks to minimize the definition of jihad and portray it as a harmless inner-struggle within one’s-self alone.

The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) has not been a fan of the initiative, needless to say, and has fought to have the ads removed on the basis that it is offensive to Muslims. CAIR executive director Ibrahim Hooper was featured in a Fox5 news segment about the ads on Friday, stating that Geller is “one of the nation’s leading anti-Muslim bigots” and that the Southern Poverty Law Center named her “as one of the nation’s inner circle of hatemongers of Islam.”

Subway-goers were also asked their opinion of the ad, with some saying that they do not like seeing bin Laden’s face given his role in the 9/11 attacks. This, however, is likely Geller’s point as she seeks to have Americans remember rather than forget the extent of damage radical Islam can cause....

Why is this a story today? It isn't as if they haven't been doing this already. And note that their concept of jihad is clearly martial, contrary to the whitewashed and distorted view that Hamas-linked CAIR is cynically peddling. They would have us believe that somehow the Saudis, despite their fanatical desire to adhere to Islam, seem to have misunderstood it most drastically.

"Saudi Arabia to Teach Jihad in Schools: Students will be taught 'correct concept of jihad,'" by Vasudevan Sridharan for International Business Times, March 5 (thanks to all who sent this in):

Saudi Arabia has decided to introduce the concept of jihad at the intermediate school level in order to teach Islamic principles and duties to young students in the kingdom.

The ministry of education hopes the proposal will be widely welcomed by parents and educationists in the kingdom.

The ministry says the plan is to instil the "correct concept of jihad" in students.

"Textbooks will include all relevant information on jihad including a definition when it becomes a duty, and the role of women. The information on jihad was developed by the ministry's curriculum development project for intermediate-grade fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) textbooks," spokesperson of the education ministry Abdullah al-Dukhaini told Arab News.

The spokesperson said that the education will facilitate students in understanding Islam and help them play their "role" in society.

The curriculum will be produced by extracting ideas from various sources. Experts from a range of fields will be involved in preparing the course material.

"Saudi curriculum is prepared by experts who have specialised knowledge and is reviewed by a Shariah committee from the board of senior scholars, universities and specialised colleges," added al-Dukhani.

Speaking about the aggression related to jihad, the spokesperson said: "Saudi Arabia is not an aggressive country and will only get involved in conflict to defend itself."

He said that only the ruler has the right to "raise the banner of jihad" and not individuals or Muslim groups....

Actually, this is true only of offensive jihad. But there is also defensive jihad. All the schools of Islamic jurisprudence agree that when a non-Muslim force enters a Muslim land, jihad becomes the individual obligation of every Muslim (fard 'ayn) rather than a collective obligation of the entire umma, from which one is released if others are taking it up (fard kifaya). Bulghah al-Salik li-Aqrab al-Masalik fi madhhab al-Imam Malik ("The Sufficiency of the Traveller on the Best Path in the School of Imam Malik,") says this:

Jihad in the Path of Allah, to raise the word of Allah, is fard kifayah [obligatory on the community] once a year, so that if some perform it, the obligation falls from the rest. It becomes fard `ayn [obligatory on every Muslim individually], like salah and fasting, if the legitimate Muslim Imam declares it so, or if there is an attack by the enemy on an area of people.