Whether the bureau designates an Islamist attack ‘terrorism’ depends on a dubious judgment that it was inspired by ‘false’ Islamic teaching.
Whether the bureau designates an Islamist attack 'terrorism' depends on a dubious judgment that it was inspired by 'false' Islamic teaching.
T urns out that Shamsud-Din Jabbar kept Islamic scripture on, of all places, his internal profile page at Deloitte, where he was working as a “solutions specialist” — which sounds eerie now in light of the “solution” he had in mind when he rammed a rented Ford pickup truck into a crowd of revelers on Bourbon Street in the first hours of the new year, killing 15 and injuring dozens more.
The passage was drawn from the Quran, chapter 76, which is called Al-Insan, or “The Man.” As explained in The Holy Quran: English Translation of the Meanings and Commentary, a version of Islam’s highest scriptural source produced by the Saudi regime, the “theme” of the chapter (or sura) is “the contrast between the two classes of men, those who choose good and those who choose evil.” On his profile page, which said Jabbar’s top interests were hunting and prayer, he reportedly proclaimed verses 5 through 7, which explain that “the Righteous” — i.e., Muslims who comply with Allah’s law — will be rewarded in the hereafter for “performing their vows” and “fear[ing] a Day Whose evil flies far and wide,” meaning Judgment Day, on which horrible, everlasting punishment will be the fate of the class of men who have chosen evil — the nonbelievers who have spurned Allah’s law.
In New Orleans in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, Jabbar believed he was delivering Judgment Day to the nonbelievers and would be rewarded for it.
This is not really difficult to understand. What is difficult, for us who have to rely on the United States government for our security, is that it has become forbidden to understand.
I observed in the hours after the attack that the FBI had conformed to its “habitual woke incoherence.” A top official in the New Orleans field office leading the investigation, assistant-special-agent-in-charge (ASAC) Alethea Duncan, could not get to a microphone fast enough to state emphatically, “This was not a terrorist event.” Mind you, Jabbar had just flown from the rear hitch of his rented pickup truck the black jihadist flag made notorious by terrorist organizations designated under laws the FBI enforces. He had just employed a classic, oft-repeated jihadist tactic of driving a vehicle into a crowd gathered for a public celebration offensive to fundamentalist Islam — in this instance, an observance of the New Year (i.e., the hallmark of time measured from the birth of Christ, not the Hijra) in which men and women mingled freely, danced to bouncy tunes, consumed alcohol, and made merry.
In sum, Jabbar had just “cast terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers,” as the Quran instructs in Sura 3:151 — an injunction fundamentalist Muslims take literally and regard as immutable, one that enables terrorism by dehumanizing nonbelievers in sharia-supremacist eyes because, as verse 151 continues, “their abode will be the Fire: and evil is the home of the wrong-doers.”
In what realm were Jabbar’s atrocities not a “terrorist event”? In the realm of willful blindness, where our national defense apparatus is blithely ensconced, as it has been for decades. This didn’t start with the Obama years, but it was during that era that the FBI, the Justice Department, and the other security components dug in unyieldingly.
It’s very simple — and note, simple to grasp does not mean easy to fix.
Fundamentalist Islam, which is better described as sharia supremacism, is an authoritative interpretation of Islam. It may not be the authoritative interpretation — Islamic practice and belief is diverse, so the authoritative version really doesn’t exist. But it is undoubtedly an authoritative interpretation. So dominant is it in the Muslim Middle East that it is accepted as authoritative even by Muslims who, in their private thoughts and lives, do not necessarily believe or practice it. That is because it is an Islam supported by more than a millennium of scholarship, and championed by some of the world’s most influential Muslim nations (such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia), establishments (such as Al-Azhar University in Cairo), organizations (such as the Muslim Brotherhood and its global tentacles), and figures (such as the late Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi and Turkey’s strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a key backer of the Brotherhood, Hamas, and Sunni jihadists tied to such groups as al-Qaeda and ISIS).
Under this fundamentalist interpretation, it is the duty of Muslims to spread Islam by implementing sharia, Allah’s law and societal framework. This can be done in many ways. One of those ways, undeniably endorsed by scripture, is jihad — or “struggle” — in Allah’s cause (the spread of Islam). In its classic understanding, jihad is a military struggle. Jihad is considered defensive when Muslims deem themselves under attack, in which case all Muslims are obliged to support the jihad. “Under attack” is in the eye of the beholder. Sharia supremacists perceive Islam to be under attack, for example, if a territory that was once under Muslim rule falls under the control of non-Muslims; or if Muslims form an enclave in the West and the local government interferes with their determination to live under sharia strictures rather than the jurisdiction’s laws; or if Muslims are aggressors and the aggrieved people dare to fight back.
Western progressives — because they tend to be hostile to religion in general, see religion as outdated superstition, and can’t fathom the centrality of religion to others when it is a void in their own lives — do not take sharia supremacism seriously as an ideology. For them, Muslims are just an oppressed “other” resisting their oppressors and the white, male, Judeo-Christian power structure. In this way of thinking, why Muslims themselves may believe they must resist is beside the point.
Since progressives don’t take religious beliefs seriously, they regard religion as an abstraction that, though obsolescent, has certain universal, well-meaning attributes. In the case of Islam, the relevant one is peace. People who study sharia supremacism forthrightly note its propensity toward militant jihad when Muslims become a critical mass of the population in a given place. Progressives reject this, demagoguing it as “Islamophobia” (as if critical examination were the equivalent of racism). Ergo, the regnant syllogism: Religion is peace, Islam is one of the world’s great religions with close to 2 billion adherents, therefore Islam is (all together now!) a religion of peace.
What, then, to do about fundamentalist Muslims and the inconvenience that some of them routinely engage in violent attacks? Easy: People who claim religious justification for brutality are simply said to be engaged in false religion; after all, true religion is inherently peaceful — indeed, to hear progressives describe the Islam of their very own that they’ve fashioned, you’d think peace might be Islam’s only tenet. Consequently, another syllogism: Religion is peaceful, al-Qaeda and ISIS (among other jihadist groups) unabashedly claim Islamic tenets as justification for committing violence, therefore al-Qaeda and ISIS represent false Islam.
Again, this rationalization is at war with reality, in which there is an authentic Islam that summons Muslims to wage jihad in Allah’s cause — and has been doing so for centuries. But unreality is where the FBI dwells. And don’t blame the FBI for that. While I have no doubt that ASAC Alethea Duncan and other agents recruited and promoted since the Obama era are perfectly comfortable spouting the party line, it is the party line, imposed on the bureau by its superiors. I used to feel confident saying that most agents doing actual investigations don’t buy into this nonsense. But 15 years is a long time; enough time to change an agency’s culture, which Obama undertook to do — recall the purging of such terms as jihad, the termination of instructors versed in sharia supremacism, and the instructions that agents should avoid noticing any nexus between ideology and violence (a core principle in the transformation of counterterrorism into what Obama officials dubbed “countering violent extremism”).
So what is the upshot of all this?
Whenever a Muslim carries out (or attempts to carry out) a terrorist attack, even a patent one, the FBI starts from the premise that it is not terrorism unless agents can establish a solid, operational tie between the Muslim who committed the attack and a group designated as a foreign terrorist organization under federal law — such as al-Qaeda or ISIS. The bureau has no problem labeling such an incident a terrorist attack because the government’s official position is that those groups are driven by false Islam (i.e., their claim to be faithful Muslims is deemed false). There is no danger, then, that the FBI and the U.S. government will be perceived as linking terrorism to Islam — a “religion of peace.” Or so they tell themselves.
Besides the tortured logic here, there is also a temporal problem: In an investigation, it can take a long time to establish (assuming it is true) that a person who has committed an attack in, say, New Orleans is being directed by a foreign terrorist organization operating out of, say, Syria. In the interim, the FBI is in the embarrassing position of insisting that a blatant terrorist attack was not terrorism at all.
Of course, it is even more maddening when the operational tie to a formally designated foreign terrorist organization cannot be established owing to lack of evidence. That scenario is the worst of all worlds because it brings an unwelcome truth into sharp relief: At root, it is not foreign terrorist organizations that ignite jihadist violence; it is sharia supremacist ideology — which is the reason the organizations form in the first place. Under the government’s controlling delusions, religious ideology — at least when the religion is Islam — cannot catalyze violence. Hence, we have the other now familiar word game: Even if the Muslim who carried out a mass murder attack was not a member of, say, ISIS, or was not operationally directed by ISIS, surely he was inspired by ISIS. That is, the terrorist attack cannot be pronounced as terrorism unless we can trace it to something we can call false Islam.
When I prosecuted terrorists in the Nineties, there was willful blindness in government, but it wasn’t the fortress it is post-Obama. In the courtroom, I was permitted without interference to demonstrate the linear truth: There are scriptural commands to violence in the Quran and hadith, they are mediated to the ummah by influential Islamic scholars and firebrands, and many Muslims will thus be recruited into this fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, a certain percentage of whom will execute violent jihadist attacks — terrorism. In my courtroom, we called that evidence; today the government regards it as Islamophobia.
As a result, the FBI chokes on the word terrorism until the moment agents finally decide they can prove that an atrocity was catalyzed by what our government insists is false Islam. Unless and until that happens, the premier investigative agency in the United States cannot bring itself to say that a terrorist attack is a terrorist attack.