Here is my column in FrontPage this morning, discussing the denial and obfuscation coming from Muslims in Dallas in the wake of Hosam Smadi’s jihad plot:
Late in September, a Muslim named Hosam Maher Husein Smadi, was arrested after placing an inert car bomb at a 60-story office tower in downtown Dallas. In March 2009, according to his indictment in U.S. District Court, Smadi declared his intention to wage war in the name of Islam. Yet characteristically, if dispiritingly, Muslims in the Dallas area are now expressing fears of a “backlash,” rather than taking the hard steps necessary to make sure there are no more jihad plotters who are inspired by Islamic teachings, as was Hosam Smadi.
Smadi was very clear about the Islamic motivation for his plot: “I truly say it that [sic] my dream is to be among God’s soldiers, first for the support of Islam and my beloved Sheik Usama, may God give him long life.” He decried the “world plan to destroy Islam, Muslims, and to seize their lands for the benefit of the Jews and for the love of infidelity.” He swore: “In the name of God, the Gracious and Merciful, this is my vow to you, my brother, that I am ready. And if you were a lover of Jihad as I am, then, by God, I am ready for the Jihadi life.” And he affirmed: “The reign is only for the living and powerful God.”
Smadi also said that “with the permission of the Almighty Lord of the Worlds, we will have victory and allies from God Almighty. He is the powerful and helpful. Victory is coming, is coming to defeat the Romans [i.e., Christians] and for the destruction of the Jews. God is Most Great. We shall attack them in their very homes.”
Yet despite the strong Islamic content of Smadi’s statements, Islamic spokesmen have – instead of honestly acknowledging Smadi’s Islamic motivation and offering steps toward reform of the elements of Islam that incited Smadi to violence – disingenuously pretended that Smadi’s Islam was incidental to his terror plot. Chief among those practicing this deception was Salam al-Marayati of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC). Al-Marayati complained, according to the Dallas Morning News, that “when non-Muslims commit extreme acts, they are quickly dismissed as being crazy or weird or having some deep-seated emotional problem, and are not viewed as representative of an entire group of people. But Muslim bad actors, he said, don’t get the same treatment. ‘When a Christian does something … that’s how it’s reported, that they happen to be a Christian,’ Al-Marayati said. ‘But if it’s a Muslim, it’s as if it’s the [Muslim] religion that’s driving it.”
Of course, it was manifestly the Muslim religion that was driving Smadi, but Al-Marayati said nothing about that. He pretended not to notice the elephant in the living room – the fact that people see the Muslim religion as driving terrorist acts not because of some inveterate “Islamphobia,” but because Islamic jihadists say that that’s what drives them. Just days ago the American-born jihadist Anwar al-Awlaki exhorted Muslims: “Whenever you see the word terrorism, replace it with the word jihad.” Jihad, of course, is a concept of Islamic theology. And al-Awlaki was not alone.