Jerry Newcombe
Political correctness handcuffs us in the war against Islamic jihad
By Jerry Newcombe
Maybe we should have a "Ramadan Alert." Every time this "holy" season comes up on the calendar, the attacks by the Jihadists increase.
This year, Ramadan began with a bang – actually several of them, as a number of Christians in Egypt were killed on their way to a monastery. On 5/26/17, they were murdered in cold-blood by Islamic Jihadists who asked them to renounce Jesus Christ or die. The Christians refused – God bless them – and they were murdered for it.
Gary Bauer ("Special Alert," 6/5/17) notes that about 150 people worldwide have been killed since Ramadan began on May 26. Bauer defines Ramadan as the time: "when the Muslim faithful believe Allah handed down the first verses of the Koran to Muhammad."
Why are we now hearing about an increased number of attacks in the West? Robert Spencer, best-selling author on all things Islamic, told me in a radio interview that it's because there are now more Muslims in the West.
I asked Spencer of Jihadwatch.org for a statement about political correctness and the war against Islamic Jihadists. He emailed me: "Certainly the politically correct unwillingness to deal honestly with the motivating ideology behind the jihad threat hamstrings our ability to respond to that threat. Governments all over the West assume many Islamic institutions are 'moderate' when they are anything but, but it would be 'Islamophobic' to consider the evidence of that fact."
I also asked him about Ramadan and why there's so much violence during that time. He wrote me: "Ramadan is the sacred month in which Muslims fast during the day and redouble their efforts to please Allah. Since warfare against unbelievers is presented in the Qur'an as a divine command, Ramadan sees more jihad violence than the rest of the year (which sees plenty)."
The amazing thing about the Islamic Jihadist threat is the seemingly willful blindness on the part of so many in the West to see it. The radical Muslims can do anything and say, "This is for Allah" or "Allahu Akbar," which they often do, and the willfully blind Westerners will say there's no connection between Islam and the killing. They don't acknowledge that it's the Jihadists' understanding of Islam that is the problem.
Spencer also told me: "There are in the Qur'an 100 verses advocating jihad. They do not all explicitly advocate violence, but the only context in which the Qur'an discusses jihad is warfare against unbelievers."
A few years ago, I interviewed Andrew McCarthy, the prosecutor who put away the blind sheik for the first attempted blowing up of the World Trade Center, in 1993.
At the time, McCarthy noted a disturbing little trend – the initial voicing of the politically correct notion that Islam per se (at least the jihadists' interpretation of it) had nothing to do with their violence, while they repeated the mantra, "Islam is a religion of peace."
McCarthy told me: "Now that seemed at the time, I thought, to be a harmless fiction because, whatever the government was saying in Washington and even whatever the government was saying on the steps of the courthouse, we were not prevented inside the courtroom from showing exactly why the terrorists committed the acts that they committed. We were never stopped from showing the nexus between Islamic ideology, Islamic scripture and Islamic terror. So whatever the government was saying outside the courtroom was a bunch of noise and propaganda, as far as I was concerned." But over time, this "harmless fiction" has grown to be a big problem, which today handcuffs us from dealing with a genuine threat.
McCarthy added, "It started, I think, in their minds as a harmless fiction which was designed not to alienate our natural allies in the Islamic world, that is, pro-Western, pro-American Muslims who we don't want to drive into the arms of the bad guys, and there are hundreds of millions of [Muslims].... But there is a snowball effect, an avalanche effect...You keep doing this sort of stuff over the years and then the next thing you do is you're purging everything that Americans need to know about Islamic ideology. You're taking Islam off the table, even though what any basic book of good intelligence, good warfare, good law enforcement would tell you is, it's important to know what the other guy thinks so that you can anticipate what he'll do next."
Today, that "harmless fiction" has grown, and it continues to blind many in the West. In the eyes of many liberals, Islamaphobia is worse than radical Islam. But Todd Starnes of Fox News (6/4/17) notes: "You can't destroy the Muslim jihadists with candlelight vigils and benefit concerts."
May the true God keep us safe and spare us from political correctness.
© Jerry Newcombe
June 8, 2017
Maybe we should have a "Ramadan Alert." Every time this "holy" season comes up on the calendar, the attacks by the Jihadists increase.
This year, Ramadan began with a bang – actually several of them, as a number of Christians in Egypt were killed on their way to a monastery. On 5/26/17, they were murdered in cold-blood by Islamic Jihadists who asked them to renounce Jesus Christ or die. The Christians refused – God bless them – and they were murdered for it.
Gary Bauer ("Special Alert," 6/5/17) notes that about 150 people worldwide have been killed since Ramadan began on May 26. Bauer defines Ramadan as the time: "when the Muslim faithful believe Allah handed down the first verses of the Koran to Muhammad."
Why are we now hearing about an increased number of attacks in the West? Robert Spencer, best-selling author on all things Islamic, told me in a radio interview that it's because there are now more Muslims in the West.
I asked Spencer of Jihadwatch.org for a statement about political correctness and the war against Islamic Jihadists. He emailed me: "Certainly the politically correct unwillingness to deal honestly with the motivating ideology behind the jihad threat hamstrings our ability to respond to that threat. Governments all over the West assume many Islamic institutions are 'moderate' when they are anything but, but it would be 'Islamophobic' to consider the evidence of that fact."
I also asked him about Ramadan and why there's so much violence during that time. He wrote me: "Ramadan is the sacred month in which Muslims fast during the day and redouble their efforts to please Allah. Since warfare against unbelievers is presented in the Qur'an as a divine command, Ramadan sees more jihad violence than the rest of the year (which sees plenty)."
The amazing thing about the Islamic Jihadist threat is the seemingly willful blindness on the part of so many in the West to see it. The radical Muslims can do anything and say, "This is for Allah" or "Allahu Akbar," which they often do, and the willfully blind Westerners will say there's no connection between Islam and the killing. They don't acknowledge that it's the Jihadists' understanding of Islam that is the problem.
Spencer also told me: "There are in the Qur'an 100 verses advocating jihad. They do not all explicitly advocate violence, but the only context in which the Qur'an discusses jihad is warfare against unbelievers."
A few years ago, I interviewed Andrew McCarthy, the prosecutor who put away the blind sheik for the first attempted blowing up of the World Trade Center, in 1993.
At the time, McCarthy noted a disturbing little trend – the initial voicing of the politically correct notion that Islam per se (at least the jihadists' interpretation of it) had nothing to do with their violence, while they repeated the mantra, "Islam is a religion of peace."
McCarthy told me: "Now that seemed at the time, I thought, to be a harmless fiction because, whatever the government was saying in Washington and even whatever the government was saying on the steps of the courthouse, we were not prevented inside the courtroom from showing exactly why the terrorists committed the acts that they committed. We were never stopped from showing the nexus between Islamic ideology, Islamic scripture and Islamic terror. So whatever the government was saying outside the courtroom was a bunch of noise and propaganda, as far as I was concerned." But over time, this "harmless fiction" has grown to be a big problem, which today handcuffs us from dealing with a genuine threat.
McCarthy added, "It started, I think, in their minds as a harmless fiction which was designed not to alienate our natural allies in the Islamic world, that is, pro-Western, pro-American Muslims who we don't want to drive into the arms of the bad guys, and there are hundreds of millions of [Muslims].... But there is a snowball effect, an avalanche effect...You keep doing this sort of stuff over the years and then the next thing you do is you're purging everything that Americans need to know about Islamic ideology. You're taking Islam off the table, even though what any basic book of good intelligence, good warfare, good law enforcement would tell you is, it's important to know what the other guy thinks so that you can anticipate what he'll do next."
Today, that "harmless fiction" has grown, and it continues to blind many in the West. In the eyes of many liberals, Islamaphobia is worse than radical Islam. But Todd Starnes of Fox News (6/4/17) notes: "You can't destroy the Muslim jihadists with candlelight vigils and benefit concerts."
May the true God keep us safe and spare us from political correctness.
© Jerry Newcombe
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