Tag Archives: Robert Spencer

Robert Spencer: Osama bin Laden’s Miscalculations 4 (1)

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by Robert Spencer

Did each side misjudge the other?

A fascinating article in the New York Post Monday reveals that “Osama bin Laden had been ‘very eager to replicate the 9/11 attacks’ against the US — and actively plotted to blow up oil tankers, derail trains and use private jets as weapons, according to a trove of seized documents.” Yet while there have been numerous jihad attacks in the U.S. since 9/11, none matched its magnitude. Osama wasn’t able to replicate, for as it turns out, he misjudged the U.S. as drastically as the U.S. misjudged him and his movement.

“The plots,” the Post reported, “were spelled out in more than 500,000 letters and files seized by the Navy SEAL team that executed the mass-murdering al Qaeda leader in 2011, according to Nelly Lahoud, an Islamic scholar who spent years carefully studying the trove.” In his eagerness to bring about another 9/11, but aware that airport security had dramatically increased, bin Laden told his followers to “consider chartering private jets to attack the US.” He also “spelled out a detailed plan to slaughter American commuters on a train.” Osama “wanted to have around 40 feet of track removed so that a ‘train could be derailed.’”

The jihad mastermind had other ideas as well: “In 2010, a year before his death, bin Laden plotted to target multiple crude oil tankers and major shipping routes around the Middle East and Africa.” This was because, according to Lahoud, Osama saw “the importance of oil for the industrialized economy” as “similar to blood for human beings. So, if you cause somebody to bleed excessively, even if you don’t kill him you will at least weaken him. He really wanted to do to the American economy.”

He certainly did severe damage to the American economy. The war on terror cost the United States trillions of dollars, and all it gave us was a diminished presence on the world stage, an onerous and irritating security apparatus in airports, and an emboldened jihad force worldwide that continues to pose a problem for governments around the world (often self-inflicted, in the form of mass Muslim migration).

But apparently Osama thought that his victory would be more comprehensive and immediate. According to Lahoud, he made a “huge miscalculation” in predicting how the U.S. would respond to 9/11. “He thought,” she says, “that the American people would take to the streets, replicate the anti-Vietnam war protests and they would put pressure on their government to withdraw from Muslim majority states.” All he expected as retaliation for taking down the Twin Towers was “a limited airstrike.”

A huge miscalculation indeed. But the U.S. miscalculated as well. Six days after 9/11, George W. Bush went into a mosque in Washington, accompanied by the head of a Hamas-linked group and another Muslim leader who is now in prison for financing al-Qaeda, and proclaimed that “Islam is peace.” This discouraged those who were trying to understand the beliefs, motives, and goals of the jihadis from investigating even the jihadis’ own statements, for fear of giving the impression that 9/11, and jihad terrorism in general, had something to do with Islam. The false assumption that Islam was a religion of peace deformed the American response to 9/11 in numerous ways, leading to wrongheaded policies on both the domestic and international fronts, with consequences that have yet to play out fully.

When Donald Trump tried to correct one of those wrongheaded policies by restricting immigration from several Muslim countries that would not or could not provide adequate information about the people who wanted to enter the United States, he was roundly denounced as an “Islamophobe,” as those who have spoken honestly about the motivating ideology behind jihad terror have been for years, and Joe Biden repealed the policy on his first day in office. How many jihad terrorists, including al-Qaeda members, are in the country now as a result of this, awaiting their best opportunity? We’ll find out.

There were miscalculations on both sides. Both thought that the other posed a threat that was smaller than it actually was. The Post notes that “al Qaeda had just $200,000 in its coffers in 2006 and was unable to support its increasingly fractious jihad.” It would be another miscalculation, however, to take that as a sign that the jihad is largely a spent force. Al-Qaeda is just one of many jihad groups around the world. Since the death of bin Laden, his group has been largely eclipsed by another jihad group that emerged from it, the Islamic State (ISIS). Bin Laden may have underestimated America in 2001; other jihadis are sizing America up in 2022, and it would be much harder to underestimate us now.

FPM: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/osama-bin-ladens-miscalculations-robert-spencer/

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 23 books including many bestsellers, such as The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), The Truth About Muhammad and The History of Jihad. His latest book is The Critical Qur’an. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.

Robert Spencer: Biden’s Team of Israel-Haters 4 (1)

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by Robert Spencer

Would a supporter of Israel really fill his foreign policy staff with those who hate the Jewish State?

Just days after Joe Biden was inaugurated, pro-Erdogan Turkish journalist Hakkı Öcal, according to Ahval News, “highlighted a report on the strong presence of Jews in the cabinet of U.S. President Joe Biden.” The report claimed that there was an “over 50 percent Jewish presence in the new U.S. cabinet,” and pointed Secretary of State Antony Blinken and CIA Deputy Director David Cohen, among others. But Öcal was off base: among Biden’s handlers, Jewish and non-Jewish, there are few, if any, staunch friends of Israel. After just a few months in office, it was clear that Joe Biden’s handlers’ administration was shaping up to be the most anti-Israel presidency since the founding of the modern State of Israel.

Robert Malley, Special Envoy to Iran, has become notorious over the years for his support for Iran’s Islamic regime and pronounced distaste for Israel. The Washington Times revealed in February 2021 that back in July 2019, “Iran’s smooth, English-speaking foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, met with Robert Malley, who was President Obama’s Middle East adviser, in an apparent bid to undermine the Trump team and lay the groundwork for post-Trump relations.”

Malley was a good choice for such an assignment. An Israeli security official noted in February 2008 that Malley “has expressed sympathy to Hamas and Hizbullah and offered accounts of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that don’t jibe with the facts.” Obama dropped Malley in May 2008 after it came to light that he had met with representatives of Hamas, but six months later sent him as an envoy to Egypt and Syria.

Meanwhile, Reema Dodin is a deputy director of the White House Office of Legislative Affairs. According to the Jerusalem Post, “during the Second Intifada, in 2002, Dodin spoke about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict with residents of Lodi, California, saying that ‘suicide bombers were the last resort of a desperate people.’” Also, “in 2001, Dodin took part in a demonstration at UC Berkeley calling for the university to divest from Israel….The demonstrators compared Israel to apartheid South Africa.”

In a similar vein, Biden’s handlers appointed Maher Bitar the Senior Director for Intelligence on the National Security Council. In 2006, while a student at Georgetown University, Bitar was a member of the executive board of the viciously pro-jihad, anti-Israel Students for Justice in Palestine, and was seen dancing in front of a banner that said “Divest from Israel Apartheid.”

The Deputy Secretary of State is Wendy Sherman, who was the lead negotiator of Barack Obama’s disastrous nuclear deal with Iran. The State Department’s undersecretary for civilian security, democracy and human rights is Uzra Zeya. According to the Jewish News Service, Zeya “worked for the magazine Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and its publishing group, American Educational Trust. The Washington Report has questioned the loyalty American Jews have to the United States; published accusations against the ‘Jewish lobby’; claimed American Jews control the media; and accused the Mossad of perpetrating the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy and the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.”

The Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Israel-Palestine is Hady Amr. In an unhinged 2002 rant, Amr repeated Palestinian jihad propaganda, declaring: “I have news for every Israeli: a very large proportion of the more than 150 million children and youth in the Arab World now have televisions, and they will never, never forget what the Israeli people, the Israeli military and Israeli democracy have done to Palestinian children.”

Undersecretary of Defense for Policy is Colin Kahl. According to Israel Hayom, “Kahl has quite the anti-Israel record. He thinks the bombing of the nuclear reactor in Iraq was 1981 was a mistake. In 2012, he acted to remove recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital from the Democratic party’s platform. In 2015, he was among those to formulate the Iran nuclear deal. In 2016, at the end of his term, then-US President Barack Obama tasked him with enlisting support for the anti-Israel UN Security Council Resolution 2334 that determined Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria were a violation of international law.”

Have Biden’s handlers appointed a balancing group of strong supporters of Israel, who will move to prevent this unsavory group (which is larger than just those named here) from disrupting America’s relationship with its strongest, most reliable ally in the West? Is there any brake to the ability of the anti-Israel group in Biden’s administration to force Israel to make potentially life-threatening concessions to the Palestinian jihad force. The answer to both questions is no.

FPM: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/bidens-team-israel-haters-robert-spencer/

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 21 books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book is Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster. Follow him on Twitter here. 

Robert Spencer: In Iraq, pope views mosques and churches destroyed by the Islamic State, laments ‘our cruelty’ 4 (1)

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by Robert Spencer

The pope was making a theological point, that all human beings are sinful, and that this destruction is a manifestation of that sinfulness. But it is also noteworthy that he ascribed the destruction he saw to all of humanity, and decried nations that sell weapons, but never said a word about why the ruined buildings he saw were destroyed in the first place. The Islamic State destroyed mosques because the people who attended them did not accept their authority, and were thus apostates in rebellion against the caliphate. It destroyed churches because they were places of unbelief (see Qur’an 5:17, 9:30, etc.) and shirk, the association of partners with Allah in worship. But there was never any possibility that the pope might ask the assembled Muslim leaders to fight against jihad violence and teach their people to refrain from jihad violence. After all, the pope has committed himself and the Catholic Church to the proposition that Islam is peaceful and has nothing to do with terrorism, so as far as he was concerned, there was nothing for him to ask the Muslim leaders about. And that rendered the trip a useless and indeed counterproductive exercise.

“Pope Francis dismisses ‘heresy’ charges for his commitment to Christian-Muslim dialogue,” by Claire Giangravé, Religion News Service, March 8, 2021:

VATICAN CITY (RNS) — Aboard the papal flight back from Iraq, the first papal trip since the COVID-19 pandemic began, Pope Francis addressed criticism of those who have accused him of being “one step away from heresy” in his commitment to promoting human fraternity among the world’s faiths.

“There are some critics who say the pope is not brave but reckless, that he’s taking steps against Catholic doctrine, that he’s one step from heresy,” the pope told journalists on Monday (March 8).

Francis said that his decision to speak with Muslim religious leaders and promote interreligious dialogue is “always made in prayer, in dialogue, asking for advice.” He said that his efforts to mend Christian-Muslim relations, far from being “capricious,” are in keeping with the doctrine laid out by the Second Vatican Council….

On Saturday (March 6), the pope met in Najaf, a holy city to Shia Muslims, with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s most prominent Shiite leader. The historic meeting, which lasted roughly 45 minutes, was the first official meeting between a pope and a prominent Shiite representative.

The pope described al-Sistani as “a humble man” who has “wisdom and prudence,” adding that “it was good for my soul to encounter him.” Francis said the meeting was “a duty in his pilgrimage of faith” to promote human fraternity among religions….

It was the tragic decimation of the Yazidi ethnic community by the Islamic State group following the 2014 occupation of Northern Iraq that inspired the pope to make the trip, he said. The book “The Last Girl” by Nobel Peace Prize-winner Nadia Murad, which described the suffering of the Yazidi people, “provided the background for the decision,” he said.

On Sunday (March 7), Francis viewed the ruins of mosques and churches in Mosul, the capital of the Islamic State during the occupation. He said he “had no words” after seeing the scale of destruction. “Human cruelty, our cruelty, is impossible to believe,” he added.

The pope also criticized those nations selling weapons, though he didn’t single out any particular country….

Among the topics addressed by the pope during the trip was the question of the suffering of immigrants, which has been a main focus of this pontificate. Francis met with the father of a 3-year-old boy who died attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea. The picture of Alan Kurdi’s body became a symbol of the plight of immigrants and refugees in Europe and beyond….

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 21 books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book is Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster. Follow him on Twitter here. 

Robert Spencer: Mattis Wants Biden to Put America Last 4 (1)

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by Robert Spencer

Just what country is the top priority of the military and foreign policy establishment?

Former Defense Secretary James Mattis, who left the Trump administration amid mutual acrimony, has declared, in a Foreign Affairs op-ed cowritten with establishment foreign policy wonk Kori Schake, that he hopes a Biden administration won’t put America first. He didn’t say which country he thought a president of the United States should put first instead. But even so, it was one of the strangest statements a member of the U.S. government has ever made, and the bland reception it received is an indication of how deep the corruption is at the highest levels.

If Donald Trump doesn’t take the Oath of Office on January 20, 2021, one principal but little-noted reason for this may be that he crossed one of the most powerful and least accountable forces in the nation: the military-industrial complex. As Trump said last September, “the top people in the Pentagon…want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy. But we’re getting out of the endless wars, you know how we’re doing.”

Mattis and Schake revealed the self-serving nature of these wars, and how they are actively against the genuine national interest, when they wrote: “In January, when President Joe Biden and his national security team begin to reevaluate U.S. foreign policy, we hope they will quickly revise the national security strategy to eliminate ‘America first’ from its contents, restoring in its place the commitment to cooperative security that has served the United States so well for decades.”

This was so important, they asserted, because “in practice, ‘America first’ has meant ‘America alone.’ That has damaged the country’s ability to address problems before they reach U.S. territory and has thus compounded the danger emergent threats pose.”

That’s ridiculous. Trump’s travel bans, which Biden has pledged to repeal on his first day in office, are designed to prevent problems from reaching U.S. territory. Biden’s repeal of them will only make Americans more vulnerable. Also, Trump’s America First policy was not “America alone” by any means: the U.S. was instrumental in concluding peace deals between Israel and three of its Arab Muslim neighbors, deals that John Kerry, who will soon be back in a position of power, assured us back in 2016 would be absolutely impossible. Trump has also demanded more responsibility from our allies, asking them to pay more for their own defense.

The only way in which Trump’s America First policy meant “America alone” was insofar as it broke from the internationalist arrangements that have been in place since the end of World War II, to which Mattis and Schake refer as “the commitment to cooperative security that has served the United States so well for decades.”

But if a “commitment to cooperative security” doesn’t involve being able to put one’s national interests first, how is it good for the people of that nation? That question doesn’t apply just to America.

In reality, the president’s primary job is clear from the oath of office that every president recites in order to assume office, and it isn’t to provide “cooperative security” for other countries in the world, or free health care for illegal aliens, or to make sure that Somalia or Afghanistan isn’t riven by civil war, or to make sure America is “diverse.” It is simply this: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Or, to put it even more simply, as Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster explains, the primary job of the president of the United States is to put America first.

It is in large part because they reject that principle that the elites have hated Trump with such burning intensity, and have worked so hard to get him out of office. Someone has to pay for that “cooperative security,” and someone has to be paid, and that means that Trump was threatening some extremely wealthy and powerful interests.

The internationalist elite has reasserted its hegemony and beaten back a serious challenge. And it is not a good sign that in spiking the football after that victory, Mattis makes it abundantly clear that “cooperating with like-minded nations” means putting their interests before our own. No responsible national leader should do that, but of course soon, if the Left’s quest for open borders is successful, there won’t be any more responsible national leaders, and even nations themselves will be a thing of the past.

JW: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/mattis-wants-biden-put-america-last-robert-spencer/

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 21 books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book is Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.

Robert Spencer: Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren hosting call with pro-Tehran lobby group NIAC 0 (0)

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by Robert Spencer

Which side are they on? The answer to that is clear.

Democratic presidential contenders Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) are slated to host a conference call with an Iranian-American advocacy group that has been accused of lobbying on Tehran’s behalf.

Along with Reps. Ro Khanna (D., Calif.) and Barbara Lee (D., Calif.), Sanders and Warren are scheduled to speak Wednesday evening with members of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC). The group played a central role in what former Obama national security adviser Ben Rhodes called the administration’s pro-Iran Deal “echo chamber,” spinning journalists, lawmakers, and citizens.

The Democratic candidates’ willingness to engage with NIAC—a group that aggressively pushed the accord and has strongly advocated against U.S. sanctions on the Islamic Republic—reflects their desire to see America reenter the nuclear deal, which released up to $150 billion in cash to the regime. Much of that money has gone to fund Iran’s regional terror operations, including recent attacks on American personnel stationed in the region.

NIAC has deep ties to Iran’s regime, including senior officials like Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. Zarif worked closely with NIAC founder Trita Parsi, who, in turn, consulted with the Obama administration.

Parsi lobbied Congress against sanctions on Iran in 2013 and met with Obama administration officials at the White House dozens of times leading up to the nuclear deal’s signing in 2015. Multiple U.S. officials and senior congressional sources informed the Washington Free Beacon that Parsi helped the White House craft its messaging as it tried to sell the nuclear deal to the public. The NIAC chief met with Rhodes, among other top officials, during multiple visits throughout the Obama era.

Rhodes delivered a keynote speech at the 2016 NIAC leadership conference.

NIAC was ordered to pay more than $180,000 in 2013 to the legal defense fund of Hassan Daioleslam, an Iranian-American writer, after a failed defamation lawsuit. Daioleslam had accused NIAC of failing to disclose its clandestine lobbying efforts to undo sanctions on Tehran, the Free Beacon previously reported. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said Parsi’s work was “not inconsistent with the idea that he was first and foremost an advocate for the regime.”

JW: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2020/01/bernie-sanders-and-elizabeth-warren-hosting-call-with-pro-tehran-lobby-group-niac

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His new book is The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS. 

Robert Spencer: Elle Magazine Puts White Linda Sarsour on Its List of ‘Women of Color in Politics to Watch in 2020’ 0 (0)

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by Robert Spencer

Elle magazine seems somewhat embarrassed by its list, published last week, of “20 Women of Color in Politics to Watch in 2020.” The article now carries this prominent disclaimer: “The below list was compiled by She the People, a national non profit network of women of color committed to social justice and voter mobilization. A previous version of this story did not make clear that the list was compiled by She the People and not ELLE magazine.” This was added because Elle faced a backlash for including the vehemently anti-Semitic Leftist activist Linda Sarsour on the list. But no one seems to have noticed another problem: the list is of “women of color,” and Sarsour is white.

Such minor quibbles will fall on deaf ears among Leftists. For the Left is at war not just with conservatives, but with reality itself. This has been clear for quite some time. Instead of trying to achieve some reconciliation with the nature of things as they are, the Left is growing ever more divorced from truth, reason, and ineluctable facts. For example, witness the hijab-wearing feminist (an oxymoron just as much as a white “woman of color,” as white is not a color in the Left’s world) Linda Sarsour’s magical race transformation.

It has been absurd enough to see Sarsour, a hijab-wearing defender of that most misogynistic of legal codes, Sharia, emerge as a champion of women’s rights and a feminist leader. But that was rational compared to the weapons-grade absurdity that Elle, or She The People, is now serving up regarding this palest of “women of color.”

The stage was set for Elle to anoint Sarsour as a “woman of color in politics to watch in 2020” several years ago, when the blogger Elder of Ziyon made an amazing discovery: Linda Sarsour claimed she “magically changed from white to a ‘woman of color’ in an instant,” just by putting on a hijab.

It’s true: in a Vox video published in January 2017, Sarsour said: When I wasn’t wearing hijab I was just some ordinary white girl from New York City.

But in an April 2017 interview of this hero of feminism, there is this: After watching Michelle Pfeiffer’s character in Dangerous Minds, Sarsour decided to become a high school teacher, “inspiring young people of color like me, to show them their potential.” She graduated a year early, gave birth to her eldest son, and enrolled in community college.

In the ensuing controversy, Linda Sarsour doubled down, saying: I’m Palestinian. If I want to say “I’m black,” I’m black!

What did being Palestinian have to do in Linda Sarsour’s crowded mind with her spurious claim of blackness? Well, it’s a fictional nationality, so Sarsour might as well take on a fictional race to go along with it. Maybe she was saying that since she had already made one fantasy a cornerstone of her public identity, adding another couldn’t hurt. As The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process demonstrates, the “Palestinians” as a people were indistinguishable from the neighboring Arabs. The “Palestinian” ethnicity or nationality was never known or mentioned throughout human history until the 1960s, when Yasser Arafat and the KGB invented it as a stick to beat the Israelis with. Tiny Israel arrayed against 22 hostile Arab countries looked like the plucky, heroic underdog; but the tinier “Palestinian” people facing the massive Israeli war machine reversed the narrative.

PLO executive committee member Zahir Muhsein said this in 1977: The Palestinian people does not exist.

The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct “Palestinian people” to oppose Zionism.

For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a “Palestinian,” I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem.

However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.

If Islamic jihadis (with considerable help from Marxist strategists) can invent an entire ethnic group, why can’t Linda Sarsour, a proud member of this invented ethnic group, change races? For “tactical reasons,” in order to identify with the fashionable victim classes instead of with the universally designated oppressor, white people?

Elle’s article shows that Sarsour’s tactic has worked wonderfully, and reality can take the hindmost. The Left left it behind long ago, and if you still pay attention to it, you’re just not woke.

PJM: https://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/elle-puts-white-linda-sarsour-on-its-list-of-women-of-color-in-politics-to-watch-in-2020/

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His new book is The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS. 

Robert Spencer: Loyola Marymount University: It’s “Islamophobic” to be “Counter-Jihad” 0 (0)

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by Robert Spencer

The Los Angeles Loyolan tells us that it is Loyola Marymount University’s “award-winning, student-run news organization,” and it is not surprising that it would have won awards from the people who give out awards these days, because like all campus papers, it is a reliable guide to how deeply the far-Left indoctrination that most professors are conducting is taking root in their unwitting students. One of those students is the Assistant Opinion Editor for the Los Angeles Loyolan, a young man (I know that because he helpfully informs us that his pronouns are “He/Him/His”) named Cristobal Spielmann, who is, like all well-informed, duly woke students today, horrified at the prospect that someone would be so “racist” as to oppose jihad mass murder and Sharia oppression of women and others.

Inside Higher Ed may weep bitter crocodile tears over my noting the ominous assumptions behind Spielmann’s words, as the young fellow is only a child, but he is a child putting his views out in the public forum, and consequently must deal with public dissent from his views – at least until he and his fellow fascists secure power.

And Spielmann’s views are indeed ominous. I am an “anti-Muslim extremist,” he claims in an extended complaint against Loyola Marymount’s Young Americans for Freedom chapter, and offers this as his explanation of why: a pamphlet I wrote “takes every opportunity to paint the near entirety of Islam and the Quran as violent while creating a paranoid ‘us vs. them’ narrative of the West in a moral struggle with Islam.”

In reality, of course, the West is not in the least engaged in a moral struggle with Islam. Many Muslims, however, are in a moral struggle with the West and other non-Muslim entities. Apparently it is “Islamophobic” to take any notice of that. It is objectionable enough just to note that the Qur’an has passages calling for violence against non-Muslims. Did I misquote the Qur’an, or state its contents inaccurately? Spielmann had the residual honesty not to go so far as to say that, and of course he would not have been able to say it if he meant to tell the truth at all, since I don’t misquote or misrepresent the Qur’an. He just doesn’t like what I said about it, because it doesn’t fit the way he wants to pretend that the world is.

Even worse, “This isn’t even the first time that the LMU chapter of YAF has engaged in Islamophobia. Last fall semester, YAF posted a counter-jihad poster…”

So now it’s “Islamophobic,” at least at Loyola Marymount University, even to oppose jihad and to post a “counter-jihad poster.” Apparently now even opposing jihad, the imperative that led Mohamed Atta and his comrades to murder 3,000 people on September 11, 2001, and that has been the driving force behind over 36,000 terror attacks worldwide since that date, is “Islamophobic.”

This has been a long time coming. The seeds of it were planted the first time the establishment media labeled opposition to jihad terror and Sharia oppression “anti-Muslim.” If it’s anti-Muslim to oppose those things, then the establishment media narrative that such violence and oppression is perpetrated only by a tiny minority of extremists that misunderstands its own religion is false – but of course no establishment counterterror analyst has ever taken notice of that.

I have for years pointed out that when foes of jihad terror are smeared as “anti-Muslim” and “Islamophobic,” without any attempt whatsoever to delineate a proper and respectable response to that terror, then all resistance to the advancing jihad is stigmatized, and ultimately becomes impossible. That is exactly where we are now, in the thoroughly indoctrinated mind of young Cristobal Spielmann and millions of others like him. Leftist professors all over the country are turning out people like Cristobal on a daily basis. Before too long they will likely make it altogether impossible to say the slightest negative word about jihad mass murder, and when they do so, they will think they are doing something righteous. By that time even the most happily blinkered Leftist may wake up to what is happening. But it will be too late.

FPM: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/10/loyola-marymount-university-its-islamophobic-be-robert-spencer/

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His new book is The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS. 

Open Orlando Investigation? 0 (0)

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Open Orlando Investigation?

by Bill Lockwood

Last week’s Orlando night-club slaughter which claimed 49 lives at the hands of Muslim jihadist Omar Mateen continues to be “under investigation”, according to FBI official Ron Hopper. We must leave no stone unturned. Sounds very professional. “Ongoing investigations” defy drawing too many conclusions before the facts are all in.

However, there is one major zone that is absolutely off-limits to any “investigator”—professional or otherwise. The conclusions are already drawn and no further investigation is necessary. As a matter of fact, the entire Obama Administration has decreed this territory to be off-limits: Islam itself. Obama’s FBI has made it emphatically clear that examination of the teachings of Muhammad himself in the Koran or Sunna will be strictly avoided. No discussion or questioning that “Islam is a religion of peace” will be tolerated in our “tolerant society.”

How confident can an American citizen remain in this atmosphere of “accepted state doctrine” crafted by Dictator Obama? In explaining the obvious disconnect between the bloody reality in Orlando and our pro-Islamic state doctrine most pundits prefer that Barack Obama has been hugely embarrassed by his failures to keep America safe from Islamic jihadists and therefore has issued directives to discourage investigation into Islam. This is what I call the “Benefit-of-the-Doubt” option. Obama is trying, but not succeeding, therefore his administration alters the narrative.

Nonsense. This interpretation of Barack Obama’s handling of current events purposefully overlooks stubborn facts. Barack Obama has actually gone to great lengths to stigmatize any resistance to Islamic jihadist murder from the beginning. For example, in February 2012 the Obama Administration deliberately purged over 1,000 pages of documents from counter-terrorism training manuals for the FBI and other government agencies.

All references to “Islam” or “jihad” or related concepts were purposefully removed at orders from Barack Obama. He was not seeking to cover-up any particular jihadi crime that had recently been committed, but was giving voice to his world view. Islam good—Christianity bad. The FBI has been strong-armed by the Saul Alinsky radical in the White House to prostitute its common sense and investigative techniques to fit into Obama’s World. It has been in full retreat ever since Obama took the reins of power.

Barack Obama made clear early on that one of his main objectives is to crack down on “Islamophobic hate speech.” In Cairo in 2009 he told the Muslim world, “I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.” Jihadist mass murder by Omar Mateen certainly creates a negative stereotype.

These same pro-Islamic objectives Obama announced in September 2012 while speaking before the General Assembly of the United Nations. “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” To “slander” means “to mention anything concerning a person that he would dislike” (Al-Azhar University in Cairo, A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law, 1999; see Robert Spencer, Arab Winter Comes to America, p. 257). As Spencer points out, this does not necessarily mean something that is “untrue,” but just something that a person would prefer not to be known. In other words, Obama confesses that he prefers some things about Islam to remain un-investigated. Orlando or no Orlando.

If the President of the United States is our chief ambassador to foreign nations and the United Nations; and if he truly articulates our doctrine; then we can expect nothing less than wild-eyed lawless Democrats who follow him to continue radical student-like sit-in’s on the Congressional floor. The blood may continue to flow from one Muslim jihadist attack to another across this once-great nation—but one thing that will not occur: an examination into Islam.

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