The Terrorist Next Door: How the Government is Deceiving You
About the Islamist Threat
By Erick Stakelbeck
(Regnery Publishing, 256 pages, $27.95)
THERE PROBABLY have been few more bafflingly stupid exchanges
between a government official and a congressional committee than
the May 2010 question-and-answer session between Attorney General
Eric Holder and members of the House Judiciary Committee. This took
place a few days after a would-be mass murderer, Faisal Shahzad,
was arrested upon attempting to set off a car bomb in New York’s
Times Square. Shahzad, a recent American citizen of Pakistani
birth, had traveled to remote Taliban-controlled regions of
Pakistan, which U.S. authorities knew even before his arrest. He
had been on a “no-fly” list since at least 2004, but, at the time
of his attempted bombing of Times Square, the U.S. government had
apparently no surveillance of him. Shortly after setting the bombs,
which mercifully malfunctioned, Shahzad boarded a plane to Dubai
and nearly got away.
At the hearing called to investigate how a dangerous terrorist
could have evaded almost all official efforts to protect the
country after 9/11, Congressman Lamar Smith of Texas asked the
attorney general if radical Islam might have been one of Shahzad’s
motivations. The following banter ensued:
Holder: There are a variety of reasons why
people—
Smith: But was radical Islam one of them?
Holder: There are a variety of reasons why
people do these things. Some of them are potentially
religious-based—
Smith: But all I’m asking is if you think among
those variety of reasons, radical Islam might have been one of the
reasons that the individuals took the steps that they did.
Holder: You see—radical Islam—I think those
people who espouse a version of Islam that is not—
Smith: Are you uncomfortable attribution any of
the actions to radical Islam? It sounds like it.
Holder: No, I don’t want to say anything
negative about a religion.
Obtuseness can be infectious. Before Shahzad’s arrest, Homeland
Security Secretary Janet Napolitano opined that the Times Square
incident had been a “one-off” event, as though a major bomb plot
were simply an example of road rage.
Even the terminally silly mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg,
speculated that the unknown perpetrator might have acted out of
irritation with the Obama health care bill. Fortunately, such
collective idiocy was given the coup de grâce by Shahzad
himself. He wore a white Muslim prayer cap at his sentencing,
shouted “Allahu Akbar!” and said he would “sacrifice a thousand
lives for Allah.” “War with Muslims has just begun….the defeat of
the U.S. is imminent, God willing.”
For the U.S. attorney general to deny that Islam had anything to
do with a dangerous mass murder plot by a known Islamist is
tantamount to a law enforcement official of the FDR administration
denying that saboteurs who had landed by German submarines in 1943
had anything to do with the Nazis. Mercifully, patriotic U.S.
government officials at that point in history were more clear-eyed
about the dangers America was facing.
Erick Stakelbeck’s book is an intriguing—but
frightening—illustration of two points of well-established fact: 1)
the extent to which Islamists have already penetrated American
society at many levels with an agenda totally inimical to the U.S.
Constitution and 2) how liberal political correctness has blinded a
huge component of American officialdom to the threat that America
faces.
First, it’s important to note that Stakelbeck displays not a
smidgen of animosity toward Muslims already within the U.S. He
praises many of them for their steadfast opposition to the “grand
jihad” of Muslim Brotherhood supporters who simply want to
undermine American constitutional democracy. The author notes how
much of the motives of MB operatives surfaced clearly during the
2007–2008 trial of members of the Holy Land Foundation, a secretive
and dishonest organization that collected money to support the
Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas. During the trial—after
which five men were sentenced to long jail terms—a 1991 memorandum
from one Mohammed Akram, member of the board of governors of the
Muslim Brotherhood, was read into the court record. The memorandum,
whose authenticity and provenance has never been challenged by the
Muslim Brotherhood worldwide, called for a “grand Jihad” aimed at
subverting Western societies from within. This would be done by
“sabotaging its miserable house [Western democracies] by their
hands and the hands of the [Muslim] believers so that it is
eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other
religions.”
Stakelbeck names a galaxy of American Islamic organizations
either founded directly by the Muslim Brotherhood or sympathetic to
their objective of a global caliphate that would impose
sharia, Islamic religious law, on the whole of mankind.
But he also illustrates during visits to remote locations, often in
the rural South, how well established Islamists have become in the
American countryside. The pattern is by now well known: An Islamic
group, often funded generously by money from Saudi Arabia,
establishes a mosque in the middle of nowhere, then attracts to the
neighborhood Muslims, often recent immigrants, from far and wide.
Gradually, the character of the locality is altered. Muslims
sometimes become a majority of the local population and begin to
ask for changes in how life is lived. Sometimes they demand the
replacement of American holidays like Labor Day by Muslim calendar
holidays. In Murfreesboro, Tennessee, for example, county
authorities readily gave in to demands that a Muslim cemetery be
created near the recently established Islamic center, even though
the number of Muslims in the area was still slight.
The sheer dishonesty of many of the pro-Islamist Muslims in the
U.S. is breathtaking. Imam Rauf, for example, a prominent Muslim
associated with the plan to establish an Islamic center close to
Ground Zero in Manhattan, has consistently refused to condemn
Hamas, even though that organization is in its own documents
hell-bent on destroying America’s close ally Israel. That
dishonesty is altogether matched, however, by the obtuseness of
U.S. officials who refuse to recognize that Islamism is a political
ideology, not just a religion, and that its followers in the U.S.
have dangerously hostile political agendas. In one of the most
glaring examples of political correctness becoming quite lunatic,
Stakelbeck cites the U.S. Army’s official report on Major Nidal
Hassan, an American Army officer who gunned down 13 soldiers and
civilians at Fort Hood in November 2009. Even though the major had
made clear to fellow officers in his medical unit that he believed
violent jihad against non-Muslims was justified by the Koran,
printed the letters SOA (“soldier of Allah”) on a business card,
and even exchanged e-mails with Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born
jihadist ultimately killed by a drone strike in Yemen, the official
Pentagon report of the murders completely omitted any references to
the connection between Hasan and Islamist ideology.
It might, of course, be argued that the U.S. government bends
over backward to forestall any possible popular backlash against
American Muslims. Yet not only is there absolutely no evidence of
such a backlash existing or even starting, but many American
Muslims, including Imam Rauf, have testified how many Americans
have expressed friendship and support for American Muslims.
WHAT, THEREFORE, EXPLAINS the intellectual dishonesty and myopia
about Islamism on the part of so many U.S. government officials?
Stakelbeck points out how far up the chain of American military and
congressional establishment American Muslims sympathetic to the
Muslim Brotherhood agenda have penetrated. The already mentioned
Anwar al-Awlaki, for example, actually conducted a prayer meeting
for Muslim staffers on Capitol Hill in 2002. Other senior American
Muslims sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood were White House
guests during both the George W. Bush and the Obama
administrations. Stakelbeck attributes American obtuseness toward
the ideology of Islamism not entirely to malice, but to basic
American ignorance. How many American officials in any U.S.
department or agency, he asks, have ever read the Koran or obtained
any basic background about Islamist ideology? How many of them
understand that Islam has never been “just” a religion—like Zen
Buddhism for example—but has embraced an often triumphalist view of
all contending religions and political systems? How many of them
even know that Europe was barely saved from Islamic domination when
the Ottomans besieged Vienna in 1683 by a brave Polish king, Jan
III Sobieski, whom the pope then dubbed the savior of Western
European civilization?
With disturbing accuracy, Stakelbeck identifies the great divide
between moderate Muslims—those who wish to live without challenging
the American constitutional system—and the Islamists as being
located in the attitudes toward the existence of Israel. He cites
verses from the Koran and the hadith (anecdotes about Mohammed’s
life often considered as authoritative as the Koran itself) which
are close to Nazi-like in their hostility toward the Jews of the
world. If an American Muslim doesn’t accept the validity of
Israel’s existence, Stakelbeck observes, it is a dead giveaway that
he is almost certainly a Muslim triumphalist and an Islamist.
Stakelbeck’s bold and intelligent reporting makes
The Terrorist Next Door an essential source for
understanding the Islamist threat to the U.S.—and for comprehending
why the U.S. political establishment is so woefully unprepared to
meet it.
