"We are jihadists, and jihad is not terrorism." Ramy Zamzam
On Christmas Day Northwest flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit averted near disaster. A 23 year old radicalized Nigerian jihadist, Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, attempted to detonate explosives he had smuggled aboard the flight, and only the malfunction of the detonating trigger saved the lives of the nearly 300 passengers and crew. Although there were multiple warnings that should have alerted authorities about Mutallab, including a personal visit to the American embassy by his father, he carried a large quantity of the explosive PETN aboard the plane concealed in his underwear and was never even subjected to secondary screening.
Injured by the botched explosion, Mutallab was restrained by quick acting passengers. After landing, he was turned over to authorities but rather than arrested and interrogated as an enemy combatant, the Obama justice department treated Mutallab like an American civilian. He was read his Miranda rights (which includes the right to remain silent), assigned a defense attorney who immediately told the jihadist to shut up. And, he has since entered a “not guilty” plea in federal court.
Two days after the attempted bombing, Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitanoshocked the world with the preposterous claim that “the system worked.” When President Obama spoke for the first time about the incident from Hawaii while on vacation he referred to Mutallab as “the suspect” who “allegedly” tried to blow up the plane, and despite already circulating media reports of connections to the al Qaeda network, Obama attempted to minimize the implications of the actions of an “isolated extremist.”
The President’s top terrorist adviser, John Brennan, appeared on television and proclaimed there was “no smoking gun” that would have alerted officials that Mutallab was a high risk individual even though litanies of “red flags” had already exploded across the global media. For two weeks, the nation watched and listened in disbelief as our highest ranking officials including the Commander-in-Chief gave every indication that they really did not understand the threat of radical Islam, or if they did, that they were unwilling and/or unprepared to deal with it.
For those suspicious of Obama’s heritage, that he was secretly soft on radical Islam, perhaps even sympathetic, all of this vacillation and mixed messages only added fuel to an already burning fire.
Nationally, bewilderment and outrage grew at the indefensible explanations and reactions coming from the Administration. Editorial pages burst with admonishment. Obama’s Security Breach wrote the Wall Street Journal questioning not only the reaction to the Detroit incident but Obama’s closing of Guantanamo Bay and releasing captured enemy combatants, many of which have already resurfaced on the battle field. Yes, Be afraid, Be very afraid said Investor’s Business Daily, concluding that America’s counterterrorism efforts appear to have been “switched to auto-pilot” by the Obama Administration. Why didn’t they see it? asked the New York Times as they reviewed the host of ominous intelligence indicators that were ignored.
The fact that the Administration had stricken “war on terror” from their vernacular, preferring instead to speak of “man caused disasters” and “overseas contingency operations” didn’t help matters, either. Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer titled his New Year’s Day featureWar? What War? in which he chastised the Obama Administration’s naiveté. “Obama may have declared the war over. Unfortunately, al-Qaeda has not,” Krauthammer said. “The reason the country is uneasy about the Obama administration’s response to this attack is a distinct sense of not just incompetence but incomprehension.”
Former Vice-President Dick Cheney observed that this White House was “trying to pretend we are not at war” with al Qaeda and radical Islam.
Finally, after two full weeks of rubbish and mixed messages coming out of the Administration, the President addressed the nation for a third time on the attempted attack, and this time he at least said the words that were all too obvious to virtually everyone outside the White House. “We are at war. We are at war against al Qaeda,” he said. “And we will do whatever it takes to defeat them.”
When the American Commander-in-Chief has to address the nation and explain that he really does understand that the nation is at war and explain that he knows who the enemy is…well, at a minimum there is a major problem of perception.
Time will tell if Obama’s actions back up this rhetoric, but at least he finally got around to saying it.
For those two weeks of agony, many Americans felt exactly as Krauthammer described, wondering “do these people get it?” It’s a question we’d prefer to never have to ask, especially with our lives and those of our loved ones hanging in the balance. Do our leaders have the resolve to take-on and defeat the enemy, regardless? That question never seemed to come up with Roosevelt and the Nazis and Japanese, nor with Kennedy and the Soviets during the Cuban Missile Crisis, nor with Reagan during the Cold War years of the 1980s.
But Obama has invited us to raise the question about him and his team. Central to the question is whether they understand not just the tools and abilities of the enemy, but particularly the jihadist’s mind.
Lost in the understandable media attention given to the near disaster of Flight 253 on Christmas day was the arrest in Pakistan in early December of five “wholesome” American young Islamists from Northern Virginia. The quintet traveled to Pakistan to cross the border into Afghanistan and “wage jihad against Western forces” - as in, kill American soldiers.
One of the would-be jihadists, Ramy Zamzam, a 22-year-old Egyptian American who was a dental student at Howard University in Washington, D.C. told the Associated Press, "We are jihadists, and jihad is not terrorism."
The five were all members of a youth group at their community mosque. Mustafa Abu Maryam, youth coordinator at the I.C.N.A. Center, an affiliate of the Islamic Circle of North America, in Alexandria, Virginia, described the self-proclaimed jihadists “as fun-loving, career-focused children that had a bright future for themselves." Maryam added, "As far as I know they were wholesome kids. Very goofy. You know, talked about girls. Very wholesome."
In Pakistani court this week, the lawyer for the 19-25 year old men defended them explaining that “they only intended to travel to Afghanistan to help their Muslim brothers who are in trouble, who are bleeding and who are being victimized by Western forces."
The five were reported missing in November by their parents after a “farewell” video from one of the jihadists was found explaining his mission; “Muslims must be defended.” Pakistan authorities believe the five used Facebook and YouTube to network with a Taliban recruiter. They are also believed to have interacted with al Qaeda operatives, although their attorney denies any al Qaeda connection.
The Pakistan-Five adds to the growing evidence of the recruitment expansion by radical Islamists to all corners of the globe including the United States. Although the U.S. has avoided a terrorist event on the scale of the 9/11/01 attacks, the enemy has definitely not been silent. The Christian Science Monitor documents at least 21 attempts since that infamous day through May, 2009. To that list must now be added:
* June 1, 2009 when Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, an American Muslim, opened fire in a U.S. military recruiting office in Little Rock, Arkansas killing Private William Long and wounding another soldier,
* The November 6, 2009 massacre at Ft. Hood, Texas by another American Muslim, Nidal Malik Hasan, that left 13 dead and 43 wounded,
* The September arrest of Najibullah Zazi, the Denver Muslim that planned bombings of New York City subways and trains that authorities described as the “most serious terrorist attacks on American soil since Sept. 11, 2001,”
* The Christmas Day attempted bombing of Northwest Flight 253 by the radicalized Nigerian Islamist, Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab.
* Though not on American soil, on Dec. 30 seven Americans were killed when a Jordanian doctor, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al Balawi, blew himself up in the attack of the Camp Chapman CIA headquarters in Afghanistan. Al Balawi proved to be a double agent working for the Pakistani Taliban while infiltrating American intelligence as a trusted informant.
The profile of suicide bombers has evolved along with their country of origin. The Pakistan-Five and most recent would-be assassins follow a growing pattern of radicalized Muslims from comfortable, even privileged backgrounds that commit to jihad to the apparent astonishment of family and friends. As they exited the Pakistan court room from their first hearing, the jihadists “laughed and smiled” like any other college boys might who just got busted by the cops on spring break.
Drawing the distinction that “jihad is not terrorism” underscores the religious fanaticism that infects and poisons the minds of these assassins. Moral clarity has been abandoned. Evil has consumed them. They blaspheme the God they falsely profess to serve.
Before he opened fire at Ft. Hood, Nidal Malik Hasan reportedly shouted the all too familiar cry of the jihadists, "Allahu Akbar!" – “God is Great!”
In the twisted mind of these perverted mad-men, they are offering the highest form of praise to Allah by committing their lives to jihad, not defiling their God with their heinous acts of evil. So-called clerics, like American-Yemeni Anwar al-Awlaki, who encourages Muslims to kill U.S. troops in Iraq, is believed to have been in direct communication with Nidal Malik Hasan and Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab. In an email exchange, Hasan wrote “I can’t wait to join you” in the afterlife. Mutallab is said to have had personal meetings with al-Awlaki.
Al Awlaki studied under the most influential Islamic cleric in Yemen, Sheik Abdul-Majid al-Zindani, who is labeled a “spiritual mentor” of Osama bin Laden and a “global terrorist” by the United States. Al-Zindani heads Iman University, according to the Associated Press, an institution of up to 7,000 students where hard-line Sunni ideology is taught. It is from his position that helped fund and recruit jihadists for al-Qaeda. John Walker Lindh, the American captured in 2001 fighting alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan, studied there briefly.
To fully understand the mind of a jihadist we must first understand the perversion of these radical clerics that poison the mind of the easily influenced to believe that committing atrocities is the will of God and the surest path to eternal salvation. Religious perversion has occurred before in various denominations including Christianity, but radical Islam has pushed the distortion to new extremes.
Within the American culture and our accepting and forgiving mindset, all of this seems completely abhorrent and impossible. Along with our current obsession with “political correctness” it makes recognizing and pre-emptive action against jihadists all the more difficult. The most recent examples of the Ft. Hood massacres and the Christmas Day airplane near-disaster underscore how inept even our military and intelligence professionals are at identifying that this extreme form of evil does exit. Thus, even the most after-the-fact obvious measures are never taken to protect innocent lives from the inevitable attack by a preparing jihadist.
Natan Sharansky, veteran of the Soviet gulags and great Israeli patriot, in his masterpiece,The Case for Democracy, said “I have come to understand a critical difference between the world of fear and the world of freedom. In the former, the primary challenge is finding the inner strength to confront evil. In the latter, the primary challenge is finding the moral clarity to see evil." Americans have always found the inner strength to confront and defeat evil. However, until Americans, and in particular our elected leaders, remove the scales from their eyes and understand that our enemy is consumed by evil, is guided by evil principles, and is committed to an evil outcome…well, then the advantage will remain with the jihadists.
