A while back, my friend John Guandolo, a marine combat veteran and former FBI counterterrorism agent, had an important idea.
The Obama administration had recently purged the instructional materials used to train our government’s national security agents – law-enforcement, intelligence and military – about the threat posed by Muslim jihadists. Under the new training, the threat would no longer be recognizable. Obama theory, you see, holds that the threat is not jihadist terror and the Islamic supremacist ideology that catalyzes it. Instead, it is “violent extremism,” disconnected from any identifiable belief system – and, the administration cannot emphasize enough, having absolutely nothing to do with Islam … something a young agent better understand if he or she harbors any hope of being promoted up the ranks.
Of course, our enemies have no hesitation about announcing their intention to conquer America and the West, or about their conviction that seeking this conquest is an Islamic obligation imposed by very clear scripture. What’s more, this interpretation of scripture – Islamic supremacism – is the dynamic, preponderant Islam of the Middle East. True, only a small percentage of Muslims make the final, logical leap into terrorist aggression; but a majority of Middle Eastern Muslims – a substantial majority in several Islamic countries – construe Islam to require imposition of the repressive sharia societal system and all it entails. That means institutionalized discrimination against women and non-Muslims; rampant anti-Semitism; hostility to individual liberty; disdain for Western culture; cruel punishments; and endorsement of violence against perceived enemies under the guise of advancing Islam’s dominions.
The administration’s willful blindness to this reality, its dereliction of the duty to protect Americans at home and abroad, is how atrocities like the murders of American officials in Benghazi happen. It is how those atrocities are shamefully covered up by stonewalling and trumped up prosecutions designed to perpetuate the fraud that constitutional free speech rights, rather than Islamic-supremacist aggression, is the problem.
It is one thing for the White House and our post-American State Department to prattle about “violent extremism” and “religion of peace” while our enemies cry “Allahu Akbar” and “death to America.” It is quite something else for the government to force a fantasy version of the threat on the agents sworn to protect us from the threat – and to create an ethos that warns those agents to toe the line … or else.
Because he was one of them, John Guandolo understands that most of our agents want to do the job of protecting the country no matter how hard the government’s Big Thinkers make it. He wanted to come up with a practical way to help them. And so he has, by writing Raising a Jihadi Generation: Understanding the Muslim Brotherhood Movement in America.
Raising a Jihadi Generation is a handbook that is specifically designed for law-enforcement, intelligence and military officers. At less than a hundred pages, it is a succinct, well-organized primer on Islamic-supremacist ideology. Because the Muslim Brotherhood is the most significant and effective global proponent of that ideology, it is the focus.
The handbook lays out the Brothers’ history, its principles and goals, its interpretation of sharia, and its infrastructure in the United States – the key organizations and players. It provides insight into how radicals think, what motivates them, and how they recruit young people to the cause. It explains how the Brotherhood conducts influence operations under the guise of “outreach,” targeting major Western institutions, very much including law enforcement, pressuring them to accept sharia standards and the Brotherhood’s blame-America-first worldview.
While Raising a Jihadi Generation is geared toward government agents, it will prove useful to any American who wants to learn about the threat. An agent who spent an hour reading it would learn more pertinent information than can be gleaned in a hundred of Washington’s preferred sensitivity-training courses.
I was delighted to provide a brief foreword to the handbook. John has done the country another great service, providing essential information to the people we most need to have it, at a time when government is of a self-destructive mind to purge it.