America’s Islamist problem
The New Orleans attack is yet another wake-up call. Will it be heeded?
How many wake-up calls does a society need before it takes notice?
On New Year’s Day, a terrorist rammed a truck bearing an Islamic State flag into revellers on a New Orleans street and then started shooting, leaving at least 15 dead and others injured. Pipe bombs wired for remote detonation were found inside the truck, and two other bombs were found in the area.
Hours later, a Tesla Cybertruck exploded outside the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas, killing one person and injuring others. At the time of writing, it was unknown if the two attacks were connected.
The New Orleans terrorist, Shamshud-din Jabbar, was a US Army veteran from Houston, Texas. He worked in IT at Deloitte. Having initially suspected he had accomplices, the police later said they believed he had acted alone.
On Truth Social, US President-elect Donald Trump repeated his previous claim that “the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country”.
It’s undeniable that there’s a terrorism threat from the collapse of US border controls. There have been several reported instances of ISIS-affiliated terrorists crossing America’s southern border. But Jabbar was born in Texas.
For years now, America has told itself that Islamic terrorism is a European problem, in particular when it comes to home-grown Islamists. Now Americans have been brought up hard against the evidence that this is their problem as well.
Just as in Britain and elsewhere in the west, a curious state of denial and amnesia has afflicted America every time an Islamist attack takes place. There was the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, the attack at Ohio State University in 2016 and the bike path massacre in New York City in 2017. The response to every such attack is shock and disbelief, as if it’s come out of the blue.
Jabbar wasn’t the first radicalised Muslim army veteran. In 2009, a former US Army major, Nidal Hasan, murdered 13 people on the military base at Fort Hood. Nor was New Orleans the first vehicular attack. In 2006, Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar drove a rented Jeep into a crowd of students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Across the west, every time there’s an Islamist attack excuses are immediately found. The Muslim perpetrator, it’s said, was mentally ill, had personal problems or was the victim of social exclusion. Every time, loud voices insist reflexively that the priority now is to prevent attacks on Muslims.
The same excuses are never trotted out when terrorist attacks are mounted by white supremacists. No voices are then raised to insist that the priority is to protect against revenge attacks from others who hold similar views. On the contrary, attacks by white supremacists are deemed to be evidence of an urgent social crisis.
Jabbar’s brother, who told The New York Times that although Jabbar had been raised as a Christian he had converted to Islam at a young age, added: “What he did does not represent Islam. This is more some type of radicalisation, not religion.”
This notion that Islamic extremism has nothing to do with Islam is the west’s key error. In both the United States and the United Kingdom, governments have broadened their definition of extremism to dilute the crucial point that the overwhelming threat comes from radical Islam.
The Biden administration decided instead that the greatest threat came from violent militia extremists and from “lone wolves” with a range of different ideologies.
FBI data shows that every year since 1991, Jews have been the most frequent victims of religiously motivated hate crimes. Yet Biden’s strategy for tackling epidemic Jew-hatred was to establish the Interagency Policy Committee on Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and Related Forms of Bias and Discrimination.
Since identifying Jew-hatred correctly as a disproportionate threat among Muslims is stigmatised as “Islamophobic,” such a strategy of false moral equivalence effectively prevents the authorities from recognising one of the principal threats to Jews.
The refusal to acknowledge the nature and extent of Islamic extremism has led Britain’s counter-extremism programme Prevent to concentrate on far-right extremists, even though more than 80 per cent of those being monitored by the security service are Muslim radicals.
In America, the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which was blacklisted in 2009 by the US Justice Department because of its close involvement with the terrorism-financing Holy Land Foundation, has over the years advised the FBI and Department of Homeland Security.
This myopia derives from a refusal by the western establishment to acknowledge that Islamic radicalism is rooted in Islamic theology. Western elites parrot the claim that Islam is a “religion of peace”. In fact, its history identifies it as a religion of war and conquest.
The verses in the Quran promoting war supersede those promoting peace. The faithful who interpret these words literally regard it as a religious duty to conquer and Islamise the non-Islamic or not-Islamic-enough world.
This political interpretation of Islam is called Islamism. It’s important to acknowledge that many Muslims living in the west are entirely signed up to western values. However, the aggressive literalist interpretation is dominant among the faithful.
Polling has shown that 52 per cent of British Muslims want to make it illegal to display a picture of Islam’s founder, Mohammed; almost half say Jews have too much power over government policy; and one-third favour implementing Sharia law and declaring Islam as the national religion.
In the United States, a survey by the Heritage Foundation found that 39 per cent of American Muslims believe “Hamas did not commit murder and rape in Israel on October 7” while 43 per cent said: “Israel does not have a right to exist as a Jewish homeland.”
Islamism is spread throughout the world by the Muslim Brotherhood. While this has been banned by several Islamic states, neither London nor Washington has proscribed it.
Western nations also refuse to acknowledge that the Palestinian cause is an Islamist front not just against Israel but also against them. The hostility of the Palestinian Arabs to the existence of a Jewish state has always been at the core a jihadi cause. That’s why the Palestinians persistently make the false and hysterical claim that Israel intends to destroy the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.
Hamas and Hezbollah say openly that the war against Israel is part of their war against the west. In New York and elsewhere last month, anti-Israel demonstrators attacked Christmas trees. Hours after the New Orleans atrocity, a mob chanted in Times Square: “There is only one solution — intifada revolution!” “Resistance is glorious, we will be victorious!” and “Gaza, you make us proud.”
Israel and the west are umbilically linked as the targets of Islamic jihadi conquest. Yet for decades, it has been impossible to say any of this without being denounced as “Islamophobic” and singled out for attack.
Islamists have taken full advantage of the west’s refusal to defend an identity it no longer understands while telling itself it’s not worth defending. This myopia has extended across the political spectrum.
During Trump’s first administration, although he banned Muslims from certain countries from entering America he didn’t recognise the full extent of the threat.
As Sam Westrop pointed out on the Middle East Forum in 2021, his administration handed out more federal money to domestic Islamic organisations than any previous administration, with more than half going to groups with some degree of Islamist influence. “In other words,” wrote Westrop, “under Trump, America has served as a leading state sponsor of nonviolent Islamism”.
Americans have told themselves that the war between Jews and Palestinian Arabs is over the division of the land. They’ve told themselves that ISIS has been defeated, that leaving Afghanistan and Iraq has meant the United States is no longer a target, and that Iran is a threat solely to Israel. They’ve told themselves that the Islamic world is not their problem.
As New Orleans has so horribly demonstrated, they couldn’t be more wrong.
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