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When it comes to Big Lies about Islam, nothing much has changed except the administrations
Posted on July 24, 2016 by creeping
But it has gotten worse and more obvious. Diana West writes:
I am struck anew by how very long this official effort to suppress the facts about Islam (not, not, not “Radicalislam”) has
been going on — throughout the Obama administration, of course, but
long before it began. This battle of suppression was already being waged
when on September 17, 2001 President George W. Bush told the nation, “Islam is peace.” Soon he would send armies into that Islamic world of peace to do battle, wholly ignorant of Islamic war, or jihad.
Read the excerpt below from American Betrayal.
Once upon a time, about a decade ago …
… in this
long-drawn-out post-9/11 era, this admiral received a lengthy,
extensively documented briefing on the Islamic doctrine of jihad
(Islamic war) from Maj. Stephen C. Coughlin,
U.S. Army Reserves. Coughlin is an expert on the legal-religious
doctrine that Islamic terrorists claim as the justification for
campaigns of violence against infidels and rival Muslims.3 His
briefings, which I’ve attended multiple times, are legendary in security
circles in Washington and elsewhere for their comprehensive, if not
overwhelming, compilation of factual, Islamic-sourced evidence, which
demonstrates, for example, that Islamic terrorists are not “hijacking” Islamic law (sharia) when they engage in jihad. On the contrary, they are executing it.
Nor are they “twisting” the foundational principles of Islam as
codified in each and every authoritative Islamic source. They are
exemplifying them.
For reasons
that should become clearer over the following pages, this briefing on
these basic facts of jihad doctrine is typically our top military
leaders’ first exposure to what is known in Pentagon parlance as the
“enemy threat doctrine.” I am not exaggerating.
Years of battle—even worse, years of battle planning—have passed without
our leadership having studied, or even having become acquainted with,
the principles and historic facts of Islamic war doctrine. Four
years into the so-called war on terror, then–Joint Chiefs Chairman Peter
Pace even pointed this out in a speech at the National Defense
University on December 1, 2005.4
Notwithstanding Pace’s concern, the study and analysis of Islam and jihad remained de facto forbidden in policy-making circles inside the Bush White House,
which even codified a lexicon in 2008 to help government officials
discuss Islamic jihad without mentioning “Islam” or “jihad.”5 The Obama
administration would carry this same see-no-Islam policy to its zealous
limit, finally mounting a two-front assault on the few trainers and
fact-based training materials that were sometimes (sparingly) used by
law enforcement agencies and the military to educate personnel about
Islam and jihad. What history should remember as the Great Jihad Purges of 2012
began at the Justice Department, affecting domestic law enforcement
agencies, and spread to the Pentagon, affecting the entire U.S.
military.
First, the FBI eliminated hundreds of pages of “anti-Islam” educational material
from its own training programs and those of other law enforcement
agencies. Several Muslim advocacy groups applauded these purge results
at the briefing at the bureau on February 15, 2012, “unexpectedly”
attended by FBI Director Robert Mueller himself.6 Next, on April 24,
2012, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin E. Dempsey
ordered a similar scrub, calling on the entire U.S. military to
“review” its educational and training classes, files, and rosters of
instructors to ensure that no members of the armed services were studying material “disrespectful of the Islamic religion.”7
What exactly
does the U.S. government and its Muslim advisers consider “anti-Islam”
or “disrespectful,” or, as a Pentagon spokesman put it on Al Jazeera TV,
“warped views”?8 One trophy of this so-called Islamophobia that made it
into Wired.com (whose reportage seems to have energized if not
triggered these government purges) was a PowerPoint slide created by
Stephen C. Coughlin about the “permanent command in Islam for Muslims to
hate and despise Jews and Christians and not take them as friends.”9
Pretty
disrespectful and warped for sure—but only if Coughlin’s premise and
supporting documentation were untrue. The statement and the
documentation, however, are incontrovertible. There is a permanent command in Islam for Muslims to hate and despise Jews and Christians and not take them as friends. The
slide in question includes citations of the most authoritative Islamic
texts, the Koran and the hadiths (the sayings and deeds of Mohammed,
which Muslims hold sacred) to document its veracity.10
Veracity is
not the issue here, though. Evidence is not the issue here. Reality is
not the issue here, either. The issue is a commandment from on high in government—“Islam is a religion of peace.” It is the Big Lie that is the basis of the prevailing ideology,
and, above all, the Big Lie must live. No one in the leadership
contradicts it “because then,” as Hans Christian Andersen tells us, he
would be “unfit for his job or very stupid.”
Admiral X
certainly didn’t want anyone to think that. So what did he make of his
Coughlin briefing, an introduction to the central Islamic doctrine of
jihad and its role in driving global jihad? How did he react to the
spectacular if not shattering array of information contained in the
authoritative Islamic texts and books of authentic, mainstream Islamic
jurisprudence before him, which shattered the Islam-is-peace mantra?
He said, and I quote, “I’ll have to check with my imam on that.”
I was
staggered when I first heard this story, and, in a way, I still am. Was
the admiral kidding? Did he not have the wit to make up his own mind
based on the ample, annotated, inconvenient evidence before him?
Witlessness, however, wasn’t the admiral’s problem, just as witlessness
wasn’t the problem in the Justice and Defense Departments. If the
admiral was announcing that he would be deferring to “his imam”—in other
words, to an Islamic interpreter of things Islamic—on the matter of
Islamic war-making doctrine, there was a reason for this, and it had
nothing to do with IQ. Similarly, if FBI Director Mueller and Joint
Chiefs Chairman General Dempsey were deferring to the wishes of an array
of Muslim advocacy groups—including groups designated by the U.S.
government as Muslim Brotherhood front groups11—regarding education
about Islam, something else had rendered them, and countless others like
them in military, security, and civilian leadership, incapable of
assessing facts and passing judgment.
What was it?
This is the
leading question that guided the research going into this book. What, in
a nutshell, throughout eight years of George W. Bush and four years of
Barack Obama, caused our leadership to deny and eliminate categorically
the teachings of Islam from all official analysis of the global jihad
that has wracked the world for decades (for centuries), and particularly
since the 9/11 attacks in 2001? This omission has created a
scrupulously de-Islamized, and thus truly “warped,” record for future
historians to puzzle over. What will they make, for example, of a
2007 ninety-slide briefing on “the surge” in Iraq presented by
counterinsurgency guru David Kilcullen that failed to mention Islam
(let alone jihad war doctrine) once? Instead, the militarily,
politically, and academically elite audiences for whom the presentation
was created were asked to “think of the [Iraqi] environment as a sort of
‘conflict ecosystem.’ ”12 How will they explain Gen.
Stanley McChrystal’s 2009 “assessment” of the war against Islamic
jihadists in Afghanistan, which, in sixty-six pages, contained not one
discussion of Islam, jihad, or how they fit into both the Taliban
struggle and the Afghan people’s antipathy for Western forces? How will they explain why “everyone” agreed to fight blind?
To be fair,
there is one passing reference to Islam in the McChrystal assessment.
Calling for an improved communications approach, the commander demanded
that insurgents and jihadist militias be “exposed continually” for their
“anti-Islamic” use of violence and terror. The report elaborates,
“These include their causing of the majority of civilian casualties,
attacks on education, development projects, and government institutions,
and flagrant contravention of the principles of the Koran” (emphasis
added).13
It would be
easy to toss off a derisive quip at this point and move on, but it’s
well worth mulling over how it could be that eight years after 9/11, a
West Point–trained, battle-hardened, and by all accounts capable
commander fighting jihad forces in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan
could assume the role of an apologist for Islam rather than an
expert analyst of holy war as waged against his own forces. Flagrant
contravention of the Koranic principles of jihad? Au contraire. Between
the Koran’s teachings against befriending Christians and Jews (noted
above) and its teachings that it is a “grave sin for a Muslim to shirk
the battle against the unbelievers,” as the scholar and critic Ibn
Warraq explains (“those who do will roast in hell”), it is also
perfectly Islamic to wage jihad against any and all infidel “education,
development projects,” not to mention against Muslims not actively
fighting or supporting jihad.14
Don’t just
take my word for it. Back in 2003, the man who used to be described as
Osama bin Laden’s “spiritual guide” castigated President Bush along
similar lines, and rightly so. In response to
Bush’s repeated slander of the religion of jihad as the “religion of
peace,” Abu Qatada said, “I am astonished by President Bush when he
claims there is nothing in the Koran that justifies jihad or violence in
the name of Islam. Is he some kind of Islamic scholar? Has he ever
actually read the Koran?”15
If Bush, or
McChrystal for that matter, ever did crack the book, he read only the
“good parts”—the 124 verses of tolerance—that are rendered meaningless
according to the rule of “abrogation.” The rule of abrogation is the key
that Islamic scholars use to resolve contradictions within the Koran.
By means of this doctrine, Koranic passages are “abrogated,” or
canceled, by any subsequently “revealed” verses that convey a different
meaning. In other words, when there is a contradiction (e.g., don’t kill
the infidel vs. yes, kill the infidel), whatever was “revealed” to
Islam’s prophet, Mohammed, more recently trumps whatever was “revealed”
before it. This technique comes from Mohammed himself at the Koran’s
sura 2:105: “Whatever verses we [i.e., Allah] cancel or cause you to
forget, we bring a better or its like.”
It’s a simple
concept, unforgettable once taught—but our elected officials, our
military and other security providers, our pundits and other public
voices seem never to have learned it, much less explained it to the rest
of us. Or worse, they are ignoring it on purpose. In this ignorant
morass, then, We, the People are left on our own to make sense of
misinformation and disinformation. Why? Why haven’t they sought and told
the truth?
There are reasons. In his book What
the Koran Really Says, Ibn Warraq explains that while abrogation
resolves the abundant contradictions to be found in the Koran, it
“does pose problems for apologists of Islam, since all the passages
preaching tolerance are found in Meccan (i.e., early) suras, and all the
passages recommending killing, decapitating and maiming, the so-called
Sword Verses, are Medinan (i.e., later).” His conclusion: “‘Tolerance’ has been abrogated by ‘intolerance.’”16 Just to be clear: Islamic tolerance in the Koran has been canceled by Islamic intolerance in the Koran.
Like
Coughlin’s slides and presentations, this fact contradicts the Big Lie
at the root of the prevailing ideology: “Islam is a religion of peace.”
Therefore, our leaders don’t want us to know it. They also don’t want to
know it themselves. So they don’t, as the Kilcullen “surge”
presentation and the McChrystal Afghanistan “assessment” demonstrate.
Such knowledge would collapse their deceitful balloon of “universal”
values, which rises on the hot air of “Kum-bay- a”-interchangeable
sameness. Such a collapse would, in turn, doom the relativism, moral and
cultural, that currently drives these same utopian fantasists to
undermine liberty in their quest to order or even rule our world and
beyond.
Suppression
of the facts, then, becomes the only way to keep this enterprise of
lies buoyant, something for which there is ample precedent in our past,
as the pages ahead will show. Under both the Bush and Obama
administrations, then, any fact-driven discussion of Islamic religious,
legal, and historical imperatives to make holy war until the world is
governed by Islam threatened this same enterprise and had to be, in
effect, outlawed and later officially forbidden. “Cultural sensitivity”
had to become the name of the game. Thus, as Joint
Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey wrote in April 2012, U.S. military
programs must “exhibit the cultural sensitivity, respect for religion and intellectual balance that we should expect of our academic institutions.”17 In plain English: Whitewash Islam or else.
Why? And how
did the whitewashing of Islam become the business of the United States
government? This is another question that inspired this book. It is also
a question which, true confession, has driven me to distraction for
more than a decade. Sometimes I despair. Sometimes I play it for laughs,
or at least revel a little in the absurdity. You have to. Imagine the
following scenario coming across your desk: Kifah Mustapha, a known
Hamas operative and unindicted coconspirator in the landmark Holy Land
Foundation trial, gets invited into the top secret National
Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) and then to the FBI’s training center at
Quantico.18 The auspices were a six-week “Citizens’ Academy” hosted by
the FBI in 2010 as part of the agency’s “outreach” to the Muslim
community.
You look at
the story and rub your eyes. A Hamas operative? An unindicted
coconspirator? Must they “reach out” quite so far? Here we see the U.S.
officials charged with fending off the jihad that Mustapha’s activities
supported (as laid out in court documents filed by federal
investigators) flinging open the doors to this man on their own terror
watch lists. How could this even be happening?
“The plugs
had to be pulled” on the watch system just to get Mustapha in the NCTC
door, Patrick Poole wrote online at PJ Media, quoting a Department of
Homeland Security official. After all, “the NCTC has Kifah Mustapha on
the highest watch list we have.”19
Unbelievable.
So who pulled those plugs? Wouldn’t it be great to get a bunch of
national security pooh-bahs into one room and ask them?
It would
be—and so it was. In September 2010, at a Washington conference on
domestic intelligence, I took the opportunity to ask as many of these
officials as possible this very question. First up was James Clapper,
director of national intelligence, who would later make history, or,
rather, antihistory, by proclaiming the Muslim Brotherhood to be a
“largely secular organization.”20 During a question-and-answer session, I
asked him about FBI “outreach” to Mustapha. “I think the FBI will be
here later,” Clapper boldly punted (laughter in the room). Meanwhile, he
continued, there is “great merit in outreach, to engage as much as
possible with the Muslim community.” Subtext: Bringing a Hamas op into a
top secret security installation is no big deal.
Between
panels, I buttonholed panelist Sean Joyce, a senior official with the
FBI. What did the FBI executive assistant director for national security
think about the Mustapha incident?
“We don’t comment on individuals,” he told me.
OK. How about
commenting on a blanket policy regarding FBI tours of sensitive
installations for unindicted coconspirators and terrorist group
operatives?
“Again, we don’t comment on individuals.”
It’s not
every day that you notice a former director of the Central Intelligence
Agency standing around, so I asked Michael Hayden for his overall
opinion of the speak-no-Islam policy that let jihadists through the
door. “People I trust”—uh-oh—”say to be careful not to use the term
‘jihadist’ because it does have a broader use across the Islamic world,”
he said, referencing the definition of jihad as “inner struggle.”
Oh, please.
This is another Grand Pulling of Wool over Infidel Eyes. Why? There is
precisely one explicit reference in the Koran to jihad (“ja-ha-da”) “as
an inner, spiritual phenomenon, not as an outwardly (usually military)
phenomenon.” So writes Tina Magaard, a Sorbonne-trained linguist
specializing in textual analysis. “But,” she continues, “this sole
reference does not carry much weight against the more than 50 references
to actual armed struggle in the Koran (and even more in the Hadith).”21
Unfortunately,
I didn’t have a Magaard cheat sheet with me when I happened on the
former CIA director, so I just erupted, politely: So what? That doesn’t
affect the accuracy of “jihadist” as a description of the enemy!
Then again,
not using the word “Islamic,” he continued, “obfuscates the issue (and)
neuters our understanding” of Islamic terrorism “however perverted it
might be.” Hayden continued, meaningfully: “This is in no way a comment
on the Islamic faith.”
Heaven
forfend. The Islamic faith can inflict censorship, death for leaving
Islam, marital rape, polygamy, and slavery on the world, but please,
none of the above is in any way a comment on the Islamic faith. Or so
the American “intelligence” community has determined. What we
inadequately label “political correctness” has obfuscated and neutered
fact-gathering and conclusion- drawing powers to the point where the
“political correctness,” too, is obfuscated. To wit: NCTC Director
Michael Leiter next took the podium to address the conference and
declared “there was no PC-ness” on his watch. “If someone is inspired by
Islamic ideology—” he began, then stopped. “Let me rephrase that: al
Qaeda ideology . . .”
Poor baby.
Later, I had
an opportunity to ask Leiter what he thought about the FBI bringing
Mustapha into NCTC. “Ask the FBI,” he suggested helpfully.
Isn’t NCTC your shop? I asked.
“Actually,” he explained, “the building isn’t owned by us. Three organizations have offices there.”
When I picked
myself up off the floor, he was still talking. “It’s more
complicated—talk to the FBI. They’ve got a lot more information than I
do.”
The FBI
better be good, right? They should be prepared, anyway. Indeed, on
taking my Mustapha question, FBI Director Robert Mueller, the
conference’s final speaker, said he’d been briefed to expect it. His
response? “I’m not sure I agree with the predicate of your question, and
we’re not going to debate it here.”
He continued discussing the Citizens’ Academy program, which he described as “exposing the FBI to a variety of communities.”
“Exposing” is right.
He, too,
wouldn’t discuss individuals, he said, but added, “We do look into the
individuals that we invite into the Citizens’ Academies.” The man who
pulled the plugs had spoken, but he explained nothing. Soon, the FBI
director would make his way out of the conference hall, his security
detail in tow. And he drew himself up more proudly than ever, while the
chamberlains walked behind him, bearing the train that wasn’t there.
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