Terrorists aren’t just ‘made in the USA.’ The sharia supremacist worldview is the driving force.
Terrorists aren’t just ‘made in the USA.’ The sharia supremacist worldview is the driving force.
I wrote last weekend about the two terrorist attacks that had just occurred on the same day, in Michigan and Virginia. They brought to four the number of such atrocities since the war with Iran began less than three weeks earlier (NR has editorialized about the attacks here and here).
As noted, Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, the Lebanese man who plowed his truck into a Michigan synagogue and was fatally subdued by security personnel (thankfully, before killing anyone, including the 140 preschool children on scene), reportedly had brothers who were members of Hezbollah. That, of course, is Iran’s forward militia, based in southern Lebanon. It has joined the war, and the brothers were killed in the fighting. The Israeli government has confirmed that one of Ghazali’s brothers, in fact, was a Hezbollah commander.
On Monday, regarding these terrorist attacks in the U.S., the Wall Street Journal published a seemingly tough-minded op-ed by Kevin Cohen, who runs a Tel Aviv-based security company called RealEye. To my mind, alas, the piece is more a manifestation of the problem than a diagnosis of it.
It’s titled “Terrorists Are Now Often Made in the USA.” The dubious argument is that “for decades” our counterterrorism investigators operated on the premise that terrorists inside the United States were agents of foreign powers — of formally designated foreign terrorist organizations, such as Hezbollah — who covertly entered the United States to carry out subversions on behalf of their masters. Now, Cohen’s theory goes, terrorists are unaffiliated with foreign organizations; instead, they are “radicalized domestically.”
The author argues that our our government’s vetting process ends when an immigrant is admitted into our country; based on federal agencies’ warnings, he concludes that we are plagued by “lone actor violence.” Cohen opines that such violence is extremely difficult to detect “precisely because people who are radicalized domestically often remain invisible to investigators until they act” (emphasis added).
This analysis has a certain cosmetic appeal. After all, Cohen is essentially saying that there are some uncomfortable facts here that cry out for our attention. That’s true. But he, too, is consciously avoiding the vital point: an ideology that is anything but invisible.
Strikingly, nowhere does Cohen mention the word Islam in the sense of a creed. The closest he comes is three references to ISIS, the first of which is to “Islamic State.” That is, he just refers in passing to the nomenclature of a particular terrorist organization. In his telling, the title “Islamic” has no more relevance than if the terrorists had called themselves the “Righteous State” or some such. There is no discussion of the role any ideology might have in “radicalization.”
Although not what Cohen intends, his framing is akin to that of transnational-progressives, who took to calling the group “ISIS” precisely to avoid uttering the word Islamic in referring to it — to avoid, that is, the implication that brutal atrocities could possibly have anything to do with Islam. Oh, and never you mind scriptural directives to:
Let not those who disbelieve think they will escape. Indeed, they will not cause failure [to Allah]. And prepare against them whatever you are able of power and of steeds of war by which you may terrify the enemy of Allah and your enemies and others besides whom you do not know [but] whom Allah knows.
(Koran, Sura 8: 59-60. There are many similar verses, but you get the idea.)
In fact, in the Obama era, American officials and their European Union counterparts tried to make “Daesh,” rather than “ISIS,” the more fashionable term because it better conceals the I-word. (Daesh is an acronym roughly derived from the Arabic term for the group’s name, Dawla al-Islamiya fi al-Iraq wa al-Sham. Dawla essentially means “state” or “regime.”)
Cohen speaks of “radicalization” as if it were just something that happens spontaneously and, hence, could happen as easily in Austin or Dearborn as in Peshawar or Bekaa. But let’s put aside that the “radicalized” actors almost invariably have ties to Muslim majority countries (the four recent terrorist attacks in America were carried out by immigrants from such societies or their young male offspring). The factor that knits all these “radicalized” actors together is sharia supremacist ideology.
That is what makes these actors not merely terrorists but jihadists — another word Cohen omits. They are unified in their ideology, no matter where they act globally, because they are engaged in “jihad fi sabil Allah” — struggling or striving for the sake of Allah. (The phrase appears in the Koran a number of times, such as Sura 2:218, referring to “those who believed and those who suffered exile and fought and strove and struggled in the path of Allah.”)
As I’ve recounted many times over the years, the late Bernard Lewis, the West’s preeminent scholar of Islam, explained:
Conventionally translated “holy war” [jihad] has the literal meaning of striving, more specifically, in the Qur’anic phrase “striving in the path of God” (fi sabil Allah). Some Muslim theologians, particularly in more modern times, have interpreted the duty of “striving in the path of God” in a spiritual and moral sense. The overwhelming majority of early authorities, however, citing relevant passages in the Qur’an and in the tradition, discuss jihad in military terms.
Even Cohen’s fleeting mentions of ISIS overlook vital intelligence about the threat he purports to analyze. Originally, the Islamic State was the Iraq-based faction of al-Qaeda, the jihadist organization that carried out the 9/11 attacks. The faction broke away from al-Qaeda after U.S. forces overthrew Saddam Hussein. As noted above, its shorthand, ISIS, is an acronym for the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham.
What’s in a name? Well, ISIS aspired to establish a caliphate — an Islamic state under the rule of a caliph — that would at first be regional while it sought global dominance. So ruthlessly successful was ISIS in striving in the path of Allah that, by 2015, it controlled more territory than several countries in Europe and the Middle East. Throughout its rise, commentators mindlessly referred to ISIS as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, which is where it was then operating. But to the jihadists, the second “S” in ISIS was drawn from the Arabic term Bilad al-Sham. It’s a reference to a vast expanse of territory conquered by Muslims, beginning in the early to mid-seventh century; this empire came to include not just what is now Syria but Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories, and parts of Turkey.
Al-Sham, then, is the area collectively known as the Levant, or Greater Syria. ISIS intended to found its empire on land that was the heart of the Umayyad Caliphate that reigned in what ISIS sees as the golden age, from shortly after Islam’s founding into the eighth century. At the time, it was one of the largest empires in history.
The name, therefore, announces the ambition: conquest. Not just to defeat the perceived enemies of Islam but to claim their territories for Allah by establishing sharia, Islam’s legal code and societal framework. There is diversity in Islam, but the sharia supremacists interpret their law and the mandates of their social structure as it was construed over a millennium ago.
What matters is not ISIS the organization. Jihadist organizations come and go. The ideology, sharia supremacism, is what endures. It predates and causes jihadist groups to form; it persists in fundamentalist Islamic societies after the organizations have been quelled or have fallen away.
There is no self-radicalization. There is no made-in-America terrorism. There is indoctrination in sharia supremacism. Wherever this occurs, a certain percentage of young Muslim men, catalyzed by both sharia scholars and experienced jihadists who’ve gained community prestige by fighting Jews and the West, will carry out terrorist attacks.
That’s the inevitable pattern. Wherever the ideology is permitted to gain enclaves in the West, those enclaves will begin clamoring for autonomy (to govern their affairs under sharia). The more they are accommodated, the stronger they become. As they become stronger, they get more aggressive. Inexorably, some enclave denizens carry out violent attacks because the ideology teaches that attacks against the West are sacralized.
It’s common sense. We miss it only because we choose not to see it.
America and the West are committed to religious liberty. But the Judeo-Christian tradition on which the West was built is hospitable to the tenets that we are all equal, made in the image and likeness of God, and that the realms of religious belief and practical governance, while they could never be totally walled off from each other, operate separately, imposing different obligations on the governed. This creates expectations of tolerance. It promotes diversity.
These concepts are antithetical to fundamentalist Islam. Its sharia supremacist ideology is systematically and harshly discriminatory in favor of Muslim men (women are treated as chattel, though Muslim women are favored over non-Muslims). The ideology can abide no separation of religion and governance: The authority to govern comes from Allah, sharia is the divine blueprint, the ruler’s duty is to implement it faithfully, and the subjects’ duty is to obey. In fundamentalist Islam, there are no citizens, representatives, consent of the governed, individual liberties, or equality before the law. There is sharia. And while the lip service holds that Islam forbids conversion by force, the system’s every incentive coerces non-Muslims to convert. All must accept sharia, and the penalty for apostasy from Islam is death.
In the West, we like to think we’ve found the formula for peaceful coexistence among people with deep divisions. But the sharia supremacist worldview rejects peaceful coexistence. It is a conquest ideology. Coexistence is limited to what is prescribed in Islamic law: Muslims rule and non-Muslims live as dhimmis (a lower tier of society whose members pay a tax for the privilege of living under the protection of the sharia state, and who are subjected to systematic discrimination to encourage conversion).
None of this is hard to detect or understand. To miss it is willful blindness. It has been for over 30 years.
When the World Trade Center was bombed in 1993, the act was not carried out by sleeper agents of a foreign terrorist organization. It was carried out by Muslims living in the United States: mostly Egyptians and Sudanese, mostly legal immigrants to the United States from Islamic countries; some American-born but none “self-radicalized” — those who were not already indoctrinated when they got here from overseas were marinated in the sharia supremacism of domestic Muslim communities in which the fundamentalist, anti-Western fervor of the local mosques was well known to law enforcement. (There were scores of mosques in New York City; the ones that were fundamentalist hotbeds felt no need to conceal that they were fundamentalist hotbeds.)
Their ideological leader, the “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel Rahman, was a renowned sharia scholar who exhorted his followers to attack America (“the head of the snake”) out of what he couched as religious duty to wage jihad in Allah’s cause. In Egypt a dozen years earlier, it had been he who urged young Muslim men to kill President Anwar al-Sadat for the grave sin of making peace with Israel — and he was able to pull it off because his status as a mufti of high order endowed him with great influence in a sharia supremacist culture.
In New York, many young men were drawn to the group not only by the sheikh’s fiery rhetoric but by the example of his votary, Sayyid Nosair, who had recently and infamously murdered Rabbi Meir Kahane in a Manhattan hotel. Much of the recruitment and planning for terrorist bombings took place at Rikers Island and Attica prison, where Nosair was incarcerated. No self-radicalization. This was the actualization of ideological fervor.
It cuts against the grain of a people constitutionally committed to religious liberty to scrutinize beliefs that are portrayed as religious. We deflect what we don’t what to confront. We resort to such claptrap as “radicalization” as if becoming a terrorist is just some mysterious metamorphosis, such that where it happens matters more than why it happens. In reality, sharia supremacism is the driving force of a very specific brand of terrorism — jihadism.
For purposes of legal analysis, we have to think of sharia as a political ideology, rather than a strictly religious one. In American law, we have long had provisions permitting the exclusion and removal of aliens adherent to totalitarian ideologies that urge the violent overthrow of the United States’ constitutional system.
But let’s not keep fooling ourselves. Religion is a powerful draw. The conceit that violence is divinely ordained makes violence more likely to happen. Yes, sharia supremacism is rejected by millions of Muslims who want to live in tolerant, pluralistic, Western-style democracies. Still, even if it would be unfair to equate Islam with sharia supremacism, we must recognize that there would be no sharia supremacism without Islam.