RUTHFULLY YOURS

Muhammad, the self-proclaimed prophet of Allah, died in 632 AD. As historian James Carroll notes in his forthcoming book about Jerusalem, “The next year, only two years after the Byzantine Christians had reconquered Jerusalem…a mounted force of Bedouin fighters who revered the Prophet’s memory invaded the Byzantine-controlled territory of Palestine, near Gaza.” They called themselves Muslims.

Only five years after Muhammad’s death, Umar ibn al-Khattab, his successor “led tribal bands as one army, quickly taking control of lands from Iraq to Egypt.” In 637 AD, “Muslim forces laid siege to Jerusalem.” With the exception of a brief period in the twelfth century, Muslim rule of Jerusalem, a city sacred to Jews and Christians, “would last one and a third millennia until 1917.”

A recent survey taken in Islamic countries by the Pew Research foundation revealed that a majority in the Muslim world still favor cutting off hands for theft, stoning people to death for adultery, and insist that Islam play a major role in politics. What many in the West still fail to understand is that the grip of Islam and its seventh century mindset remains fully intact for many of the more than a billion Muslims worldwide.

The resurgence of a militant Islam threatens to drag the entire world back to an era of barbarity and ignorance banished by Western civilization, the enlightenment, and the spread of Democracy. The brief period of tolerance for other faiths exhibited during the Islamic conquest of Spain was the exception, not the rule.

In our era it was George W. Bush who thwarted Muslim dreams of world domination. Following 9/11 it was his resistance that protected Americans against further attacks during his two terms in office.

In a November commentary, Dr. Walid Phares, a senior fellow with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and author of “Future Jihad: Terrorist Strategies Against America”, noted that “Throughout the summer and fall, U.S. authorities witnessed a significant rise in jihadist activity, using increasingly sophisticated operational strategies.”

“According to open-source reports, between 2001 and 2008, U.S. agencies stopped one or two terror attempts a year. However, from 2009 until today, the government has been uncovering one or two cases a month, a troubling growth in jihadist activities.”

It should be lost on no one that the increase coincides with the advent of the Obama administration and his absurd claims that America is not a Christian nation or that Muslims played any role in its history other than as Barbary pirates.

Largely unreported, on a weekly basis throughout the Middle East and elsewhere, Islam’s holy warriors continue to kill Muslims and Christians. In the West, they have perpetrated terrorist attacks in London, Madrid, and on 9/11 in New York.

On December 9, federal officials arrested a Maryland man and charged him with plotting to blow up an Army recruiting center near Baltimore. Antonio Martinez, a 21-year-old Muslim convert who calls himself Muhammed Hussain, wanted to kill as many U.S. soldiers as possible.

Earlier, in Portland, Oregon, Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a Somali youth, was thwarted from killing Americans during a Christmas tree lighting celebration. Farooque Ahmed, a Virginia man, was arrested in connection with a plot to attack the Washington, D.C. subway system; Ahmed, a native of Pakistan, had been granted U.S. citizenship.

Only the failure of his car bomb prevented Faisal Shahzad, also formerly of Pakistan and a U.S. citizen, from killing and injuring Americans in New York’s Times Square. A trial is set for Najibullah Zazi, the father of Mohammad Wali Zazi who pled guilty to a terrorist plot involving the New York subway system.

It is folly to think that America will not continue to be subject to terror attacks, but the Obama administration has largely refused to publicly confront this reality except in the form of the intrusive and objectionable airport pat-downs and scans. If a commercial airliner is bombed, it will surely have begun its flight in a foreign airport.

Incredibly, Janet Napolitano, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security recently announced that Ari Alikhan, who DHS identified as “a devout Muslim”, as the Assistant Secretary for Policy Development and swore in Kareem Shora, another “devout Muslim” born in Damascus, Syria, as a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council.

How crazed is this? Or are we meant to wait until President Obama is voted out of office until we can begin to feel safe anywhere in America?

© Alan Caruba, 2010