America's Hidden Jihad
|
|
|
|
Share:  
|
  Be the first of
your friends to like this.
The police and press did an impressive job of sleuthing into the lives
and motives of Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, the married couple
who massacred 14 people on Dec. 2, in San Bernardino, California.
We know about their families, their studies and employment histories,
their travels, their marriage, their statements, and their preparations
for the assault. Most importantly, the cascade of background work means
we know that the pair had jihadi intentions, meaning, they attacked in
their role as pious Muslims spreading the message, law, and sovereignty
of Islam.
We are all better off for knowing these facts, which have had a
powerful impact on the body politic, making Americans far
more concerned with jihadi violence than at any time since just after
9/11, as they should be. For example, in 2011, 53 percent told a pollster
that terrorism was a critical issue; that number has now reached 75
percent.
But what about the case of Yusuf
Ibrahim? In early 2013, when he was 27, this Egyptian-born Muslim
lived in Jersey City, when he allegedly shot, then cut off the heads and
hands and knocked the teeth out of two Coptic Christians, Hanny F.
Tawadros and Amgad A. Konds, then buried them in Buena Vista Township,
New Jersey.
|
Yusuf Ibrahim. There
are no publicly available pictures of his victims, who remain faceless
and featureless.
|
He is charged with two counts each of murder, felony murder,
kidnapping, robbery, desecration of human remains, and other crimes. In
addition, he has pleaded
guilty to a Dec. 22, 2011, carjacking and a Sep. 20, 2012, armed
robbery, both in Jersey City (in the latter, he shot his victim in the
foot), and early in 2015 he was sentenced to 18
years in prison for these later crimes.
The twin beheadings are spectacular, gruesome, and replete with jihadi
(or in police parlance, "terrorist") elements. Historian Timothy
Furnish explains that "ritual beheading has a long precedent in
Islamic theology and history," making it a distinctly Muslim form of
execution. A Muslim killing a non-Muslim fits the ageless pattern of
Islamic supremacism. It also fits a tragic pattern of behavior in the
United States in recent years.
Yet the police, politicians, the press, and professors (i.e.,
the Establishment) have shown not the slightest interest in the Islamic
angle, treating the double beheadings and amputations as a routine local
murder. Symptomatic of this, the police report about
Ibrahim's arrest makes no mention of motivation; on the basis of this
lack of mention, left-leaning Snopes.com
(which describes itself as the "definitive Internet reference source
for urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors, and misinformation")
goes so far as to dismiss as "false" the allegation that the
mainstream media "deliberately ignored" this incident. The
wagons have been circled.
Almost three years after the event, we know next-to-nothing about
Ibrahim, his motives, his possible connections to others, or his
institutional affiliations. We also do not know the relationship of the
accused attacker to his victims: Was he a criminal who fell out with his
accomplices, a friend who had drunk too much, a would-be lover knocking
off his rivals for the affections of a woman, a family member eliminating
aspirants for an inheritance, a crazy man randomly shooting passers-by?
Or was he perhaps a jihadi seeking to spread the message, law, and
sovereignty of Islam?
I cannot answer those questions because the case lingers in total
obscurity, popping up from time to time only in connection with some
technical procedural matter (such as the amount of Ibrahim's bail
or the admissibility of his confession)
that sheds no light on the motives for his alleged crime.
Nor is the Ibrahim case unusual. I have compiled long lists of other
potential instances of jihadi violence (here,
here,
and here)
in which the Establishment has colluded to sweep the Islamic dimension
under the rug, treating the perpetrators as common criminals whose
biographies, motives, and connections are of no interest and therefore
remain unknown.
This silence about possible jihad has the major consequence of lulling
the American public (and its counterparts elsewhere in the West) into
believing jihadi violence is far rarer than is the case. If the body
politic understood the full extent of jihad in America, the alarm would
be much greater; the percentage of those calling terrorism a critical
issue would rise much higher than the current 75 percent. That, in turn,
might push the Establishment finally to get serious about confronting
jihad.
Mr. Pipes (DanielPipes.org, @DanielPipes) is president of the
Middle East Forum. © 2015 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved.
This
text may be reposted or forwarded so long as it is presented as an
integral whole with complete and accurate information provided about its
author, date, place of publication, and original URL.
|
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment