ANDREW HARROD: FAITH, FICTION AND THE NEED OF KNOWLEDGE FOR FIGHTING TERROR
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/fact-fiction-faith-and-fighting-terror-the-need-for-knowledge?f=puball
“You’ll fold like a bad soufflé,” sharia scholar Stephen Coughlin wittily analogized in discussing the “main battle” by Islamists to undermine an enemy “in the preparation stage” before an attack. Coughlin was speaking in the Canon House Office Building at the panel “What Has Gone Wrong with American Mideast Policy?” hosted by the Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET) on the recent twelfth anniversary of Al Qaeda‘s (AQ) September 11, 2001 attacks.
Coughlin and his fellow panelists emphasized the need to know why and how Islamists fight for their aggressive agendas in a variety of ways in order to protect freedom properly. As EMET President Susan Stern said in opening the event, recent American involvement in the Middle East had often manifested the “Law of Unintended Consequences” and the “Law of Paradoxical Effects” in a region with “various shades of grey.” Panelist Debra Burlingame, sister of the pilot whose airliner AQ crashed into the Pentagon on September 11, similarly was interested not so much in the physical and personnel “infrastructure” of a group like AQ but more in intellectually “defining the enemy.”
Coughlin’s strategic analysis of Islamic warfare came from the 1979 book The Quranic Concept of War (available here online) by Pakistani Brigadier General S. K. Malik, later required reading in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan‘s army. Coughlin warned that failure to understand Islamic doctrine as expounded by Malik and others would allow Muslim Brotherhood (MB)-aligned groups to obtain their goals while military strikes against terrorists like AQ would remain “just one more tactical victory.” Indeed, MB and AQ had a “good cop/bad cop” relationship, with MB groups invoking the possibility of violent responses to opposition against Islamist demands as justification for their fulfillment. “Of course Al Qaeda won’t strike, you have submitted,” Coughlin analyzed. While many Muslims claim “Islam means peace,” he later elaborated, “peace in Islam means total submission.”
Rather than being distinct, “dawah entities” like MB in the “preparation stage” and “jihad entities” like AQ were interrelated. Al Qaeda’s founder was an MB member, Abdullah Azzam, and AQ’s current leader, Ayman al Zawahiri, was a member of the MB’s military wing in Egypt, Islamic Jihad. “Ummah entities” like the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), meanwhile, expressed Muslim state power.
Coughlin accordingly rejected calling terrorist groups like AQ “insane,” for this implied no need seriously analyze the ideological method to Islamist madness. “Green cheese” can be a “threat doctrine,” Coughlin observed, if someone actually believes in it. In the case of MB, AQ, and similar groups, they consistently and conscientiously quoted documents that could be “from the year 1000.” In particular, the MB insignia and AQ’s Lone Mujahid Pocketbook in the organization’s English-language Inspire magazine cited Qur’an 8:60, a verse containing the “T-word” of terror in its call to “prepare” for jihad.
Such documents gave jihadists in their view “summary judgment in a court of law” in defense of their violence according to Islamic doctrine. The authoritative fourteenth-century legal text Umdat Salik (Reliance of the Traveler), for example, calls for “every possible means” in “defense” of Muslims against non-Muslims. Accordingly, the OIC in 2002 rejected “any attempt to associate Islamic states or Palestinian and Lebanese resistance with terrorism. Likewise, Osama bin Laden’s February 23, 1998, declaration of war made a call “to kill the Americans and their allies-civilians and military” by “every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.” Defense is, the declaration additionally noted, an “individual duty” under Islamic law.
Nonviolent subversion, meanwhile, advanced Islamist agendas in free societies. Burlingame noted that MB “use the word ‘settlement’ for a reason” in the 1991 “Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Brotherhood in North America.” Coughlin hereby noted that “Islamic centers are not normal mosques,” but rather like the entities in Medina at the time of Islam’s prophet Muhammad serving both pious and political purposes. Usually this designation indicated a MB affiliation.
Key to MB efforts was a “Rolodex plan” to associate the MB with all societal groups as the unique authority on all issues Islamic. The Society of Professional Journalists’ October 6, 2001, pandering guidelines for reporting on Islam and violence was one example of such influence. Such efforts would also involve a “dislocation of faith” with subversive faux religious outreach efforts to confuse religious opponents about their own and Islamic religious beliefs.
These influence operations showed that MB was willing to work with anyone for its goals. The MB, for example, worked with the Nazis during World War II against the British rulers of the MB’s country of origin, Egypt. MB also worked with Western countries against Communism during the Cold War. Unity in Islam between various Muslim groups like Shiites and Sunnis of MB, Coughlin observed, is at times “greater than oppositional forces.”
The panelists and audience members discussed the linkages between leftist and Islamist groups, both in America and abroad such as with Iranian-Venezuelan cooperation. Yet Coughlin stated that “conservatives are coopted” as well, in part due to financial considerations. While Stern said that it is “very hard to get into a leftwing journal” with an anti-Islamist message, Coughlin called Republicans like John McCain and John Boehner Democrats’ “caboose to the train.” Referencing his January 2008 firing as a Pentagon Islam specialist, something that made Stern call Coughlin “one of the first American casualties” of MB, Coughlin mentioned that “I got in trouble under the Bush Administration.”
Panelist Kyle Shideler, EMET’s Director of Research and Communications, similarly said that Islamism “is not a partisan issue,” and, in terms of concern, should not be. In this respect Schideler cited the case of the neoconservative Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and its pro-Syrian intervention analyst Elizabeth O’Bagy. ISW fired her for her falsely claiming a doctoral degree (ISW’s stated justification) and after her association with the Islamist-linked Syrian Emergency Task Force became known.
Burlingame focused on Islamist influence in the media. While MB groups are “so effective in implementing narrative” that they can overcome factual realities, with respect to Islamism the “people reporting it know nothing.” Coverage of the Ground Zero Mosque (GZM) controversy was particularly “disgraceful.” Here a “sharia embracing imam” Faisal Abdul Rauf was supporting “no ordinary building” in “no ordinary place.” “We knew it would become radicalized,” Burlingame said of the GZM, “literally across the street from where body parts were collected.” While Burlingame’s meeting with GZM developers went unreported, a Lisa Miller article on the controversy was “entirely emotional,” merely contrasting the opposing views of two ordinary individuals.
In response, Burlingame demanded “calling out and shaming” of the press. “We refuse to be called Islamophobe,” she insisted in discussing hostile reactions to people like her while acknowledging that “Islam is a difficult subject.” Burlingame in this respect supported working with Muslims interested in interpreting their faith as a personal, and not a political, matter, people who “are small in number, but they do exist.” With Coughlin’s concurrence, Burlingame noted that “you can hound a reporter” who has engaged in biased and poor journalism. Journalists “do not want to be embarrassed” and they “are really thin-skinned.”
Burlingame similarly criticized government reaction to Islamism. President Barack Obama’s May 23, 2013, National Defense University speech, for example, referenced jihad and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing “in the same breadth” as if Timothy McVeigh were a “transnational terrorist.” Nihad Awad, meanwhile, a board member of the Hamas offshoot Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), served in 1997 on Vice President Al Gore’s Civil Rights Advisory Panel to the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security. Later, Awad stood behind President George W. Bush as he said in the days following September 11, 2001, at Washington, DC’s Islamic Center that “Islam is peace” (video here).
Shideler decried MB groups’ interaction with the American government in advising officials and training chaplains. At times in the past the “enemy’s best and brightest” were “not in some cave in Waziristan” but “were here” in America. Louay Safi, for example, “transitioned seamlessly” from working with the Pentagon to Syria’s Islamist dominated rebels. If “guys in suits and ties” among Syria’s rebels have “terror connections,” Shideler wondered about rebel combatants shouting “Allahu Akbar.”
American interventions in Libya and Egypt were likewise “to the benefit of some really shady characters.” “Who are these guys,” Shideler asked of the February 17 Martyrs Brigade in Libya assigned security for the Benghazi consulate attacked by an AQ affiliate on September 11, 2012. “How did the US government end up in bed with these guys?” Assessing claims of the United States winning the war on terror, Shideler concluded that “you’re fooling yourself.”
Yet Shideler remained hopeful. Tsarist security forces had “completely penetrated” the pre-Soviet revolution Russian Bolsheviks, he noted, “but they still won.” “We can move forward and we can still win.” In warning against any militant Muslim menace, Coughlin optimistically observed, “the facts are on your side.”
Andrew E. Harrod is a freelance researcher and writer who holds a PhD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a JD from George Washington University Law School. He is admitted to the Virginia State Bar. He has published over 110 articles concerning various political and religious topics at the American Thinker, Daily Caller, FrontPage Magazine, Faith Freedom International, Gatestone Institute, Institute on Religion and Democracy, Mercatornet, and World, among others. He can be followed on twitter at @AEHarrod.
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