From the midweek Morning Jolt:

Don’t Call It a Comeback; al-Qaeda’s Been Here for Years
This claim of responsibility is not stunning, but the claim that the Awlaki had a hand in this is a bit surprising (and potential al-Qaeda disinformation) . . .
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula claimed responsibility Wednesday for last week’s deadly rampage at France’s Charlie Hebdo satirical newspaper — and said the attack was years in the making.
AQAP commander Nasr Ibn Ali al-Ansi made the claim in a video, with pictures of the two gunmen — Said and Cherif Kouachi — in the background.
“When the heroes were assigned, they accepted. They promised and fulfilled,” al-Ansi said.
He praised that attack, saying it was revenge for Charlie Hebdo’s depictions of the Prophet Mohammed.
And according to the video, the late Anwar al-Awlaki masterminded the attack before his death in 2011. If true, that means the planning for the massacre started at least three years ago.
Above: Anwar al-Awlaki a few years ago.
Above: Anwar al-Awlaki today.
Michael McGough makes the argument that the Obama administration doesn’t have its head in the sand on the Islamist nature of most modern terrorists; it just wants to dispel the notion that every Muslim you meet is a potential terrorist:
Like George W. Bush before him, President Obama wants to repudiate the libel — subscribed to by too many Americans — that violence is intrinsic to Islam. One way to avoid any such implication is to avoid mentioning “Islam” or “Islamic” at all in high-profile pronouncements.
Also, when the president does try to parse the relationship between Islam and extremism he can sound silly. In an address to the nation last September, he said the self-described Islamic State wasn’t really Islamic. That prompted one critic to tweet: “I was unaware our president was a theologian with knowledge sufficient to declare that which is, and is not, Islamic. Now I know.”
Obama realizes that the “violent extremism” he deplores comes overwhelmingly from people who claim to be acting in fidelity to Islam or who say they’re avenging the prophet.
And while the I word may have been absent from the announcement of the upcoming summit, Obama’s statement announcing the broader initiative against “violent extremism” focused on “Al Qaeda and its affiliates” and described how Muslim Americans (not Irish Americans or Polish Americans) were taking steps to protect their children from the group’s “murderous ideology.”
That the president is being diplomatic doesn’t mean he’s in denial.
There’s a lot of arguing past each other in this debate. How often do you run into an American who believes that every Muslim in the world is a violent threat? And how can anyone who seeks to defeat a terrorist threat to American lives insist that the ideology, philosophy, and apocalyptic worldview of the perpetrators is irrelevant to the discussion of how to defeat them?
As the editors aptly summarized:
A religion that commands murder as the punishment for blasphemy offends the God it professes to worship. In reality, it worships the Devil. And by such deeds as the half-random murders of innocent people ye shall know that truth.
Is Islam that religion? For most of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims, it is not. They follow the precepts of the Koran and seek to live harmoniously alongside their infidel neighbors, and where two Koranic interpretations clash, they choose to believe the one that conforms more to the civil laws and social customs of their societies. Most of the time they don’t ponder much on religious texts but get on with the daily business of living.
That is not so, however, for a large minority of Muslims — maybe hundreds of millions worldwide — who cleave to interpretations of their faith that enjoin murder, rape, torture, and cruelty as pious, even mandatory, acts. They take their diabolic faith seriously, and the result is what we saw in Paris today.
Thus, there are in practical terms two Islams — a religion, if not of peace, then of peaceful accommodation, and a religion of death.
Western political leaders try to dismiss this second death cult as a perverted or false Islam, or even as nothing to do with Islam at all. That dismissal is false and, worse, completely unpersuasive. The death cult has learned imams and sophisticated theologians among its adherents. They can quote Islamic texts in support of their revolting doctrines — and do so far more convincingly than President Obama, David Cameron, or Tony Blair do in support of their own. Their scholarship strengthens the faith of the suicide bombers and child soldiers. And because they justify murder and issue fatwas mandating it, they exercise some intimidation even over the leaders of the other Islam.