Jihadists claim Islamic authenticity, “moderates” remain silent. My piece in FrontPageMagazine.com this morning:
It is a unquestioned dogma of American policymakers and the mainstream media that Islamic jihadists have twisted and hijacked the authentic, peaceful teachings of Islam, and are motivated not by Islamic imperatives but by poverty exacerbated by ignorance and other factors. Yet from the words of the Islamic jihadists themselves, one gets just the opposite impression: recent statements by a variety of Islamic jihadists reinforce the fact that jihadists gain recruits and justify their actions within the larger Islamic community by claiming for themselves the mantle of Islamic authenticity. And while virtually all Western policymakers and analysts are convinced that they actually have no claim to that authenticity, self-proclaimed moderate Muslim groups have never yet formulated an Islamic response to these claims that is comprehensive and convincing enough to counter the jihadist challenge among Muslims worldwide.
Recent examples abound. New tapes have come to light this week, on which accused North Carolina jihad plot ringleader Daniel “Saifullah” Boyd saying, “The blood of Muslims has become cheap in the marketplace. It has become cheap because Muslims have abandoned the jihad”¦.I love jihad. I love to stand there and fight for the sake of Allah.”
Meanwhile, a boy in Pakistan, one of a large group of pre-teens whom the Taliban recruited to become suicide bombers, explained that the appeal to them was purely Islamic: “They just told us that they (army) are against Islam, are against the Quran. They said wage jihad against them; we are waging jihad for the Quran.”
And on Al-Jazeera television on July 21, two representatives of the Lebanese branch of the Islamic supremacist group Hizb Al-Tahrir (which recently held a convention in Chicago) made statements about jihad that differed sharply from the “jihad is a spiritual struggle or at best a war of self-defense” line upon which Islamic apologists in the West insist. Salah Al-Din “˜Adhadhda of Hizb Al-Tahrir’s Lebanese press bureau declared: “We have come here to talk about the pinnacle of Islam — Jihad for the sake of Allah.” He said that jihad, “like other precepts of the Shari”a,” had been “subjected to distortion and perversion, due to the ideological and cultural invasion from which our nation continues to suffer.” But in this he didn’t mean that its true, peaceful or spiritual meaning had been obscured. On the contrary, he declared that Muslims must work toward “the conquest of the capitals of the world by the message of Islam, in order to save and liberate humanity, by pulling the people out of the darkness and tyranny of capitalism into the light and justice of Islam.”…