ROBERT SPENCER: THE 10 MOST IMPORTANT JIHAD STORIES OF 2014…..MUST READ
URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2015/01/01/the-10-most-important-jihad-stories-of-2014/
The 10 Most Important Jihad Stories of 2014
10. The abduction of the Nigerian schoolgirls
Abubakar Shekau, the leader of the Nigerian jihad group named the Congregation of the People of the Sunnah for Dawah and Jihad and better known as Boko Haram (“Western Education Is Sinful,” or “Books Bad”), disgusted and horrified the world last May, and even provoked a Michelle Obama hashtag, by abducting over three hundred schoolgirls and selling them into sex slavery. Shekau even published a video in which he gloats about the abduction, telling the girls’ grieving families:
I abducted your girls. I will sell them on the market, by Allah….There is a market for selling humans. Allah says I should sell.
Shekau had a point: the Qur’an really does allow for the owning of sex slaves. Muslim men can take “captives of the right hand” (Qur’an 4:3, 4:24, 33:50). It also says: “O Prophet! Lo! We have made lawful unto thee thy wives unto whom thou hast paid their dowries, and those whom thy right hand possesseth of those whom Allah hath given thee as spoils of war” (33:50). 4:3 and 4:24 extend this privilege to Muslim men in general, as does this passage:
Certainly will the believers have succeeded: They who are during their prayer humbly submissive, and they who turn away from ill speech, and they who are observant of zakah, and they who guard their private parts except from their wives or those their right hands possess, for indeed, they will not be blamed (Qur’an 23:1-6).
None – absolutely none – of the extensive international coverage of the abduction discussed the justifications for this practice within the Qur’an. This refusal to deal with the root causes only ensured that the practice would happen again, and it did later in the year, when the Islamic State pressed Yazidi and Christian women into sex slavery.
9. Britain’s capitulation on Muslim rape gangs
Britain’s Birmingham Mail reported in November that Birmingham’s City Council buried a report about Muslim cab drivers exploiting non-Muslim girls back in 1990.
A researcher, Dr. Jill Jesson, drafted a report on this issue. But, she explained,
the report was shelved, buried, it was never made public. I was shocked to be told that copies of the report were to be destroyed and that nothing further was to be said. Clearly, there was something in this report that someone in the department was worried about.
Authorities were worried because Jesson’s report illustrated that virtually all of the exploitative cab drivers were “Asians,” the British media euphemism for Muslims, and their victims were “white,” i.e., non-Muslim. The exploitation of these girls stems from Qur’an-based religious beliefs, but British officials were terrified because stopping this exploitation would appear “racist.”
Jesson elaborated:
There was a link between the sexual abuse of the girls and private hire drivers in the city. I thought at the time I did the work that there was an issue with race. Most of the girls were white. I was asked to take this link out, to erase it….Every time a news item has come on about sexual grooming of young girls and girls in care, and the link, too, between private hire drivers, I have thought “I told them about that in 1991 but they didn’t want to acknowledge it.”
“The sad part of this story,” Jesson concluded, “is not the suppression of evidence but that the relevant organisations have failed to address this problem.”
Indeed so – and that is because of its racial and religious aspects. British authorities persist in seeing this as a racial issue, when in fact these cabbies only preyed upon these girls because they were non-Muslims, and thus eligible to become “captives of the right hand” and used as sex slaves.
But the fact is they see it as a racial issue, and their anxiety to avoid “racism” led them to cover up these cases and allow thousands of girls to be victimized for 23 years. The officials responsible for this should be arrested, tried, and imprisoned. The race-mongers on the current British scene, such as far-Left smearmongers like Nick Lowles of Hope Not Hate and Fiyaz Mughal of Tell Mama UK, have been denounced by opinion-makers and policymakers from all points on the political spectrum — and should be tried also if their complicity in this behavior is found to have risen to criminal culpability.
Instead, British authorities looked for scapegoats. The BBC reported in November that “the police watchdog is to investigate 10 South Yorkshire Police officers over the handling of child sexual exploitation in Rotherham,” where 1,400 British non-Muslim children were gang-raped and brutalized by Muslims, and “several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so.”
These managers are the ones who are really responsible for this, along with opinion-makers such as Lowles and Mughal who created the culture in which people cower in fear at charges of “racism.” These ten police officers who were being investigated were just being set up to take the fall; they originated neither the police policies nor the cultural climate that led to the abandonment of these 1,400 abused children to their fate. Those who created the climate in which those who knew about this hesitated to speak out, for fear of being called “racist,” are the ones who ought to be put on trial — Lowles and Mughal and their ilk. These police officers, if they did cover up the activities of these rape gangs, are just the symptoms of the problem, not its cause.
8. The Bergdahl trade
The British weren’t the only ones capitulating. When he announced on May 31 the exchange of five Guantanamo detainees for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who had been held by Islamic jihadists in Afghanistan since 2009, Barack Obama declared that the swap was “a reminder of America’s unwavering commitment to leave no man or woman in uniform behind on the battlefield.” However, as ever more damning information came to light about both the deal and Bergdahl himself, it became increasingly clear that the prisoner exchange was actually a reminder of Barack Obama’s unwavering commitment to appeasing and aiding jihadis.
The freed jihadis included, according to the Associated Press, “Abdul Haq Wasiq, who served as the Taliban deputy minister of intelligence”; “Khairullah Khairkhwa, who served in various Taliban positions including interior minister and had direct ties to Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden”; and “Mohammad Fazl, whom Human Rights Watch says could be prosecuted for war crimes for presiding over the mass killing of Shiite Muslims in Afghanistan in 2000 and 2001.”
What could possibly go wrong?
Even more disturbing were the questions swirling around Bergdahl himself. Former infantry officer Nathan Bradley Bethea, who served with Bergdahl, wrote in the Daily Beast that “Bergdahl was a deserter, and soldiers from his own unit died trying to track him down.” Refuting reports that Bergdahl got separated from his unit while on patrol, Bethea declared: “Make no mistake: Bergdahl did not ‘lag behind on a patrol,’ as was cited in news reports at the time. There was no patrol that night. Bergdahl was relieved from guard duty, and instead of going to sleep, he fled the outpost on foot. He deserted. I’ve talked to members of Bergdahl’s platoon—including the last Americans to see him before his capture. I’ve reviewed the relevant documents. That’s what happened.”
By the year’s end, the results of the investigation of Bergdahl’s conduct have – as the most pessimistic among us could have predicted – not been released.
7. The Islamic State beheadings
Bergdahl was one of the few captives of jihadis to come home alive. The Islamic State shocked and appalled the world as it carried out a series of beheadings of hostages and other prisoners, including Americans James Foley, Steven Sotloff, and Peter Kassig, and Britons David Haines and Alan Henning.
The White House response to these atrocities took on a clockwork predictability. Obama might as well have had a form ready for the next one: all he would have had to do would have been to fill in the blank and then take to the airwaves to say that the latest bloodshed had nothing to do with Islam.
In Kassig’s case, Obama seized on the hostage’s at-gunpoint conversion to Islam to assert: “ISIL’s actions represent no faith, least of all the Muslim faith which Abdul-Rahman adopted as his own.”
“Least of all”! As if it were possible that the Islamic State’s actions represented Buddhism, or Methodism, or Christian Science, or the Hardshell Baptists, or the Mandaeans, to greater or lesser degrees, but the most far-fetched association one could make, out of all the myriad faiths people hold throughout the world, would be to associate the Islamic State’s actions with…Islam. The Islamic State’s actions represented no faith, said the president, least of all Islam – as if it were more likely that the Islamic State were made up of Presbyterians or Lubavitcher Hasidim or Jains or Smartas than that it were made up of Muslims.
Yet anywhere that people read the phrase “when you meet the unbelievers, strike the necks” (Qur’an 47:4) as if it were a command of the Creator of the Universe, the fatuousness of Obama’s claim is revealed anew. The truth will out; indeed, it is already abundantly out. We can only hope that not too many more will have to feel the blade at their necks before Obama and the rest can no longer avoid taking realistic and effective action.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-fxAewrqTY
6. The Oklahoma beheading
On September 21, the Islamic State’s spokesman, Abu Muhammad Al-Adnani, urged Muslims to murder non-Muslims in the West. “Rely upon Allah,” he thundered, “and kill him in any manner or way however it may be. Do not ask for anyone’s advice and do not seek anyone’s verdict. Kill the disbeliever whether he is civilian or military, for they have the same ruling.” He also addressed Western non-Muslims:
You will not feel secure even in your bedrooms. You will pay the price when this crusade of yours collapses, and thereafter we will strike you in your homeland, and you will never be able to harm anyone afterwards.
Five days later, Jah’Keem Yisrael (formerly Alton Alexander Nolen) beheaded one of his coworkers and was shot while in the process of trying to behead another in Vaughan Foods, a food processing plant in Moore, Oklahoma. No one made the connection between his actions and al-Adnani’s call, despite the fact that Yisrael’s Facebook was full of admiring material about the Islamic State, the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The beheader even had a graphic photo of a beheading captioned with another Qur’anic beheading verse (8:12) on his Facebook page.
Authorities did not classify his action as terrorism.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyWgM9LbmN0
5. The Canadian jihad strikes
In October, Canada experienced two murderous jihad terror attacks in three days. Ahmad Rouleau, a convert to Islam, hit two Canadian soldiers with his car, murdering Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent. Then he led police on a high-speed chase, during which he called 911 and explained that he was doing it all “in the name of Allah.” The chase, and Rouleau’s jihad, ended when he flipped his car and then, brandishing a knife, charged police, who shot him dead. One of Rouleau’s close friends said:
It was a terrorist attack and Martin died like he wanted to. That’s what happened….He did this because he wanted to reach paradise and assure paradise for his family. He wanted to be a martyr….The caliphate called all the Muslims on earth to fight. He listened to what they had to say and he did his part here.
Two days later, another Muslim, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, went on a shooting rampage in Ottawa, murdering military reservist Corporal Nathan Cirillo and engaging in a gun battle inside Canada’s Parliament building. He had threatened to strike “in the name of Allah in response to Canadian foreign policy.”
Islamic State spokesmen Al-Adnani told Muslims in September to murder non-Muslims with any weapon at hand, or anything that could be used as a weapon: “If you are not able to find an IED or a bullet, then single out the disbelieving American, Frenchman, or any of their allies. Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car, or throw him down from a high place, or choke him, or poison him.” Zehaf-Bibeau found a bullet. Rouleau found a car.
In reality, what motivated him was blazingly obvious, but it was the one thing most Western government officials and all of the mainstream media have determined to ignore, and so the search was one for some other remotely plausible motive that could be sold to a public that is increasingly suspicious of what the government and media elites are telling them. Toronto’s Globe and Mail quoted a friend of Zehaf-Bibeau saying, “I think he must have been mentally ill.” It was a refrain we would increasingly hear in connection with jihad attacks as the year went on.
Meanwhile, the denial and unreality regarding the jihad threat took other forms as well:
4. The Australian chocolate shop jihad attack
On December 15, a Muslim cleric, Man Haron Monis, took hostages inside the Lindt Chocolate Café in Sydney, Australia’s central pedestrian mall, Martin Place. He forced some of the hostages at gunpoint to hold up the black flag of Islamic jihad against a window of the café. The flag says in Arabic, “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet” – the Islamic confession of faith. Ultimately, he and two hostages were killed.
Man Haron Monis was on bail for involvement in the honor murder of his ex-wife. He was charged with sexual assault. He had pleaded guilty to sending harassing letters to the families of Australian servicemen slain in Afghanistan. He had also pleaded guilty to sending offensive letters to the families of Australian soldiers killed in Afghanistan.
But none of that rose to any significant level of concern for Australian authorities — he was not on the terror watch list. After all, Australian officials knew Islam to be a Religion of Peace, and too much scrutiny of its more unsavory adherents could well be “Islamophobic.”
3. The New York City cop killing
When Ismaaiyl Abdullah-Muhammad, aka Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley, murdered NYPD Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu as they ate lunch in their patrol car on December 20, the only people who could possibly have been surprised were those who have not realized how assiduously leftist and Muslim activists have worked – long before the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner — to demonize the NYPD and law enforcement in general. The advent of the killer was only a matter of time.
It has been only lightly reported that Brinsley was a Muslim, and generally when it was mentioned it has been dismissed as a motive in favor of his statements about wanting to kill police officers to avenge Garner and Brown. But these two motivations – revenge for the perceived racist killings of two black men and Brinsley’s Islamic faith – are not mutually exclusive. Brinsley’s Facebook page featured a photo of the Qur’an open to the eighth chapter, where Allah exhorts the believers to “strike terror into the hearts of the enemies of Allah” (8:60).
Brinsley may have thought, what better way to strike terror into the hearts of the enemies of Allah than to kill a couple of infidel, racist police officers? Investigative journalist Patrick Poole found an additional sign of Brinsley’s attachment to Islam on his Facebook page, where Brinsley wrote at one point that he was heading to “Al-Farooq Tomorrow inshallah.” Poole notes: “If this reference by the cop killer was from Brooklyn (which is hard to discern since his Instagram account has been taken down), it may indicate that he was going to visit Masjid Al-Farooq in Brooklyn.”
Explains Poole:
Al-Farooq’s long history of terror support goes back more than 20 years, when the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was hatched by members. One imam from the early 1990s, when Al-Farooq was a hub of the nascent Al-Qaeda and was hosting Al-Qaeda co-founder Abdullah Azzam, was Fawaz Damra, who was charged, convicted and later deported for lying to immigration officials about his terror ties when he applied for U.S. citizenship.
Meanwhile, Muslim activists in New York City – with willing help from their leftist allies — have long cultivated a sense of grievance, claiming that they have been unfairly singled out for NYPD surveillance and monitoring. Mayor Bill de Blasio quickly acceded to their demands, dismantling the legal NYPD Muslim surveillance program in April 2014 – thereby validating the Muslim activists’ claims that the program was racist, discriminatory and unjust. But the end of this program did not end the Muslim and Leftist sense of grievance, which was only fueled by the Brown and Garner incidents. Leftist and Muslim groups continued to fuel the perception that police were “racist” and “Islamophobic.”
The Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has repeatedlyexhorted Muslims to contact a lawyer and the nearest CAIR office if contacted by the FBI, and to “Know Your Rights” and say as little as possible. CAIR would, of course, hotly deny that they have given this advice to Muslims to protect those engaged in terror activity from detection and prosecution, but then the only other alternative is that CAIR wants Muslims to believe that law enforcement officials are engaged in an ongoing campaign to entrap and persecute innocent Muslims.
That message, of course, coincides perfectly with that of race-baiters such as Al Sharpton, who have labored so long to foster among black Americans the same idea. In Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley, these dual and interrelated grievances came together, and two policemen are dead. There will be more.
2. The vilification of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Bill Maher
Brandeis University had planned to award an honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali at its commencement ceremony this year, but after a smear campaign led by the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and other Islamic supremacist groups last April the university issued a statement announcing the predictable result: the honorary degree would not be given.
As I show in my book Arab Winter Comes to America, CAIR routinely blindsides officials and places them on the defensive by its attacks, and so simply to avoid controversy they usually gave the “civil rights group” what it wants: the cancellation, demonization and marginalization of every speaker who is remotely critical of Islam. The cancellation of Hirsi Ali at Brandeis demonstrates yet again that there is no one who opposes jihad terror who is acceptable to CAIR and its allies.
This was demonstrated anew in October. Bill Maher was scheduled to give the fall commencement address at the University of California-Berkeley, but Muslim students there have begun an ultimately unsuccessful petition drive to get him canceled. Berkeley student Marium Navid explained:
It’s not an issue of freedom of speech, it’s a matter of campus climate. The First Amendment gives him the right to speak his mind, but it doesn’t give him the right to speak at such an elevated platform as the commencement. That’s a privilege his racist and bigoted remarks don’t give him.
The campaign against Maher was called “Free Speech, Not Hate Speech.”
“Free Speech, Not Hate Speech”: this is the mechanism that today’s leftist and Islamic supremacist authoritarians are using to shut down any free and open discussion of how Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and oppression. This slogan was thrown at me last May when I spoke at Cal Poly; I responded (as you can see toward the end of this video) by pointing out that “hate speech” is in the eye of the beholder, and the one who is granted the power to determine what is or isn’t “hate speech” has been given extraordinary control over the public discourse, such that any opinions disliked by the ruling elite can be stigmatized and ruled out of bounds by means of this label.
The fact that this happened to Bill Maher, despite his impeccable leftist credentials, shows that it can and will happen to anyone who dares to criticize Islam.
1. The Islamic State’s declaration of the caliphate
The biggest jihad news of 2014 came when the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) renamed itself as the Islamic State and declared that it constituted the restoration of the caliphate.
The restoration of the caliphate has for decades been the central goal of jihad groups worldwide. The caliphate (khilafa) was from the beginnings of Islam until the early twentieth century, at least among Sunnis (who constitute eighty-five to ninety percent of Muslims worldwide), the center of the supranational unity of the global Muslim community (umma). The caliph, who was theoretically chosen from among the most pious and capable men of the community, was considered to be the political, military and religious successor of Muhammad as the leader of the Muslim community. He ruled according to the dictates of the Sharia (Islamic law), implementing Allah’s decrees of justice on earth.
The caliphate was abolished by the secular Turkish government in 1924. The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 partly as a reaction to the end of the caliphate, and from the beginning a central part of its program has been the need to work toward restoring it and then recovering lands that had been lost to Islam. Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna explained:
We want the Islamic flag to be hoisted once again on high, fluttering in the wind, in all those lands that have had the good fortune to harbor Islam for a certain period of time and where the muzzein’s call sounded in the takbirs and the tahlis. Then fate decreed that the light of Islam be extinguished in these lands that returned to unbelief. Thus Andalusia, Sicily, the Balkans, the Italian coast, as well as the islands of the Mediterranean, are all of them Muslim Mediterranean colonies and they must return to the Islamic fold. The Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea must once again become Muslim seas, as they once were.
The Islamic State’s claim of restoring the caliphate has proven so compelling that thousands of Muslims from the West have gone to Iraq and Syria to join it, and others in Western countries have heeded its calls to wage jihad against non-Muslims right at home.
Meanwhile, Western government and media elites persist in denying and ignoring the problem. That only means that 2015 promises to be even bloodier than 2014.
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