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Militant Islam Monitor > Articles > Attempting to Delineate "Homespun" from Foreign Islamic Terror Counterproductive in Long Run

Attempting to Delineate "Homespun" from Foreign Islamic Terror Counterproductive in Long Run

April 19, 2010

April 19, 2010 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - In a preachy Reuters article published today [see, Special Report: U.S. shifts gears to tackle homespun terrorism, http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63F2HZ20100416] the point is repeatedly made that segregating terror threats as being either of domestic or foreign origin would be helpful from a national security perspective.

Aside from the obvious, that threats must be dealt with in whatever setting they are found, this effort to categorize then bifurcate the various manifestations of religiously motivated warfare, as if they were in any way dissimilar, is not only pointless but counterproductive.

The root cause of the terror phenomenon we face lies in the ideology of Islamism, something this administration adamantly assures us does not exist.

Islamism is a political creed that mandates the immediate imposition of Shari'a [through a process of destabilization] in compliant societies and for more assured societies such as our own, posits a slow, stealth jihadist process of cultural subversion and eventual, incremental but forced, Shari'a compliance.

The motive force behind modern Islamism is of course the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian terrorist organization [the intellectual mother of all contemporary Islamic terror organizations] which this administration seems to feel can be reasoned and even partnered with in an effort to "understand" and assign the perceived causes of Islamic terrorism outside the purview of religion.

To be fair, in previous years some in the Bush administration's State Department, also counseled sidling up to the Brotherhood, though that was an idea adhered to by a very limited number of players.

Now with the Obama presidency, however, that vague sentiment has been put into policy, most recently and concretely demonstrated by Secretary of State Clinton overriding a long standing Bush administration policy of barring Tariq Ramadan - the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood - from entering the country.

The result of this poorly thought out move is that last week Mr. Ramadan completed a short speaking tour of the United States, acting the part of conscientious moderate.

The shift has also been seen with increasing inclusion of Muslim Brotherhood linked organizations such as ISNA and CAIR in WH outreach plans.

This tilt within the administration started almost immediately, with the president's much criticized Cairo speech [see, Obama's Muslim World Address In Cairo Examined, http://www.pipelinenews.org/index.cfm?page=obamaid=6.4.09%2Ehtm] about which even "progressive" sources [the Atlantic in this case] were reporting that members of the Muslim Brotherhood had been quietly invited:

"A sign that the Obama administration is willing to publicly challenge Egypt's commitment to parliamentary democracy: various Middle Eastern news sources report that the administration insisted that at least 10 members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the country's chief opposition party, be allowed to attend his speech in Cairo on Thursday. The brotherhood is a Salafist/ Islamist party with branches in many countries, and it does not have a reputation for liberalism and has supported violent campaigns against Israel (and Egypt's own government). It has deep roots in the region and traces its intellectual lineage to Sayyid Qutb, a top American-educated Islamic intellectual who was executed -- or martyred -- by the Egyptian government in 1966. The Brotherhood has direct links with Sunni groups like Hamas in the Palestinian territories..." [source, "Brotherhood" Invited To Obama Speech By U.S., http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2009/06/-brotherhood-invited-to-obama-speech-by-us/18693]

That the Brotherhood presents a clear and present danger is beyond question, as anyone familiar with MB history is well aware.

Consider the following short passage from the Muslim Brotherhood's plan for "cultural jihad" in the West which was discovered in a Virginia terror raid during the 1990s, said document having served as a key piece of evidence in the U.S. most far-reaching Hamas terror funding prosecution, U.S. vs. Holy Land Foundation.

"...we must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and 'sabotaging' its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah's religion is made victorious over all other religions." [source, http://www.pipelinenews.org/images/GX3-85.pdf]

Of note, this template for internal subversion was devised with the expressed intent of "sabotaging their miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious..." [source, ibid]

In previous large scale conflicts, the United States had little trouble in identifying the enemy, often to the point of not only clearly stating who it might be - the Hun for instance during World War I - but in demonizing the opponent as a technique of further motivation.

Today, that demonstrably effective strategy has been totally abandoned with the official language even having been stripped of the descriptors, jihadist, Islamist, Islamo-fascist, radical Muslim etc., necessary to intelligently discuss the issue.

What has happened here is that though the other side has and continues to pursue a multi-front war against the West and liberal democracy, the threatened societies have inexplicably donned blinders, convincing themselves that al-Qaeda is not only the greatest but only terror threat.

Within this destined to fail paradigm, there is no taking into account the ideology which imbues al-Qaeda and its sister organizations.

Unless and until it is realized that we are engaged in a civilization war kindled by a particular and radical interpretation of Islam, the simple categorization of threats as being either domestic or foreign is most foolish because it attempts to shape the threat into a form which is in the current political environment adequately nuanced and sensitive rather than look at as it actually is in its most stark form, a virulent ideology of religious based domination intent upon creating a global Caliphate.

Just as Italian fascism and Nazism were based upon a political theory developed largely by Benito Mussolini, today's jihad [both violent and stealth or cultural] is likewise defined by a specific set of precepts and unless we can bring ourselves to utter the name of our enemy, our ability to defeat him is not promising.

Not taking such elemental considerations into account has and will continue to cause the United States to be less than rigorous in its defense of democracy, itself a curious and quaint concept in this administration. Furthermore compartmentalizing the response and approach to Islamic terrorism upon the simplistic surface determination of it being either foreign or domestic is to reduce a genuinely complex and multi-faceted opponent into something out of Cliff's Notes, useless if we are to actively engage against it, rather than as an increasing number fear, engage in simply whistling past the graveyard.

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http://www.pipelinenews.org/index.cfm?page=domestic4.19.10%2Ehtm

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