Editor’s Note: This article was first published in on April 19 of 2013 as “10 Depressing, Morally Confused Reactions to 4/15/13, the Boston Jihad” It is being reprinted as part of a weekend series at PJ Lifestyle collecting and organizing the top 50 best lists.
Reuters reported at 11:54 AM EST on the ideology inspiring the terrorists who murdered and butchered Americans in Boston on Monday:
His “World view” is listed as “Islam” and his “Personal priority” is “career and money”.
He has posted links to videos of fighters in the Syrian civil war and to Islamic web pages with titles like “Salamworld, my religion is Islam” and “There is no God but Allah, let that ring out in our hearts”.
He also has links to pages calling for independence for Chechnya, a region of Russia that lost its bid for secession after two wars in the 1990s.
The page also reveals a sense of humor, around his identity as a member of a minority from southern Russia’s restive Caucasus, which includes Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia and other predominately Muslim regions that have seen two decades of unrest since the fall of the Soviet Union.
…
“I don’t have a single American friend,” one caption quotes him as saying. “I don’t understand them.” [emphasis added]
****
I will state my position about what has happened this way:
Al Qaeda’s Attack on America on September 11, 2001 = the beginning of World War 1
Two NON-ARAB, WHITE, WHOLLY AMERICANIZED Homegrown Millennial Jihadists Take America Hostage And Launch a New Template for How to Wage A DIY, Low Budget-Download-The-Instructions-Off-The-Internet Terror War = the beginning of World War II.
We are now entering a new phase of the Islamic war to replace liberal societies with Sharia law. This is World War IV, a multi-decade conflict that will be for our generation what the war against Nazism and Fascism was for our grandparents. Except it will probably be worse.
As such, I would like to primarily address those who have not yet given up progressivism, moral relativism, and the Democratic party — the three idols I grew up worshiping for the first two decades of my life. (I realize now that the reason I abandoned progressivism is simply that I didn’t go to graduate school whereas most of my friends did. My brainwashing gradually wore off after I got out into the real world and had to try and survive.)
This is not an oppressive, Corporate Imperial war waged against harmless Muslims. It is a war that Islam has declared against Enlightenment-based societies. The problem is not the Koran or Islam. The problem is radical (as in going to the root of the idea) Islam or Islamism, or Orthodox Islam, or the traditional Islam of history that requires the marriage of mosque and state accompanied by full implementation of chop-your-hands-off-style Sharia. Muslims who reject Koranic literalism and affirm Enlightenment philosophy are A-OK. (See Robert Spencer’s article this morning to see the great Jazz music some of them have made. And note Roger L. Simon today — Islam is not a race.) Muslims who embrace America instead of demanding American submission can enjoy the riches of Liberty just as every immigrant who has come to this land throughout the centuries to worship their God and work hard.
We need to stand with genuine Muslim liberals against both the terrorists and stealth (non-violent) jihadists rebelling against the Modern world.
That requires identifying those in the political and media classes who sabotage these efforts. Here are 10 examples of those whose ideas undermine the safety of Americans and the twin projects to nurture political liberalism in the Muslim mind and Enlightenment values in the Islamic soul.
1. Progressive Filmmaker Michael Moore:
“They know nothing.” It’s very important for Moore to try and undermine the credentials of anyone who can affirm that Sharia is a real threat. In Moore’s world Global Warming is more dangerous and cigarettes and car accidents cause more deaths per year than Islamists. Corporations have killed plenty more people than this “one teenager.”
“I guessed correctly. the bombings were not carried out by women.”
There will be more Jihad Janes, Mike…
2. MSNBC Host and Progressive Writer Toure:
The narrative begins to paint the Islamists who perpetrated this revolutionary new terror act as “losers.” No, I’m sorry Toure, here’s a more accurate description of what these two murderers have accomplished. Osama bin Laden was the Bill Gates of terrorism. These two are the Mark Zuckerbergs of terror and this is their Social Networking Jihad. There will be copycats. Just as there will be many more James Holmes style shooters.
3. Michael Tracey, a writer for The Nation, The Huffington Post, and The American Conservative:
I responded to Tracey, who is a way-too-naive but otherwise decent guy I really hope grows up soon:
4. Chris Hayes, an MSNBC host and editor at The Nation:
I’m not sure that this distinction really is that important. The new era anointed today is this: two largely incompetent 20-somethings can inflict as much or more damage than an Al Qaeda cell.
Al Qaeda is obsolete. The future of terror is this — one or two homegrown, radicalized white guys who figure out ways to massacre as many people as possible before killing themselves.
5. Arianna Huffington, the Founder of The World’s Most Popular Political Blog and Celebrity Gossip News Aggregator:
More than a decade after 9/11 the fear still persists in the imagination of Baby Boomer Liberals: ignorant redneck Tea Party Americans going nuts and lynching people that look different are a more probable threat than Jihadists taking the Koran literally.
6. Adam Serwer, a Progressive Blogger and Journalist for Mother Jones:
Indeed that is factually true. And The fact that a man yells Allahu Akbar as he blows himself up doesn’t mean religion motivates what he is doing. We don’t know for absolute certain what’s going through his head. Perhaps he’s actually a conservative just posing as a terrorist trying to rile up anti-Muslim hysteria in order to sabotage Obama’s gun control bill? I mean, the fact is we don’t know that for certain. From someone else’s perspective that might be correct.
7. Democrat Contrarian and Daily Beast Columnist Kirsten Powers:
Wow. “Crazy” abortion clinic bomber? Or evil abortion clinic bomber? When you plan out to murder people that makes you evil.
The desperation — Powers and other decent-minded liberals long for the bomber to have been some schizophrenic who thought they were setting bombs against aliens or demons. Anything to avoid having to consider the conservatives’ analysis of Islam which even people like the late Christopher Hitchens could come to embrace…
8. Ana Marie Cox, the Influential Progressive Blogger who Founded Wonkette:
Yes, it would be a win for progressives if they could legitimately make the case that corporations and the bigoted, theocratic, “Religious Right” are the most evil forces threatening America and the human race. But they can’t. Terrorists and evil people are not losers. They are individuals who have been warped by a soul crushing slave ideology that has transformed them into avenging losers. The gun and the bomb are the equalizers, making the loser the winner. As I write these words (4:25 PM PST) they have the suspect cornered. And I fear that he will have killed himself — if he does he wins…
(UPDATE 5:58 PM PST: AMERICA WINS THIS ROUND. USA TODAY REPORTS THE SUSPECT HAS BEEN CAPTURED ALIVE.)
9. MJ Rosenberg, the Ex-Media Matters Fellow Fired after Jewish Democrats Objected to His Habit of Using the “Israel firster” Antisemitic Slur:
No. But feel free to try again, MJ.
Updated: Here’s how MJ celebrates the capture of a Jihadist, by making a moral equivalence to “neocons” and calling for Republican executions.
10. Finally, the Influential Obama advocate and New Media Pioneer Andrew Sullivan:
That’s what I mean by a religious war. It’s war between the extremes of fundamentalist Islam and the free, secular West. That war can exist inside the mind of a single young fanatic who, merely with access to the web and guns and pressure cookers, can stop the world in its tracks. Or it can take the form of sectarian violence in Iraq.
My reader is correct that this is not reducible to Islam in all its breadth and complexity and history. But it cannot be understood at all without grasping the fundamentalist Jihadist mindset. The uncle of the two Jihadists could not be more emphatic that he as a Muslim feels utterly violated and offended by what these losers did. He says he feels ashamed. He is a Muslim as well. And he is an American through and through.
We have to make a simple distinction: between being a Muslim and being an apocalyptic self-proclaimed Jihadist. But the latter exist, are very real, and are inspired by a toxic distortion of Islam.
Is this really what we are all experiencing right now? A “toxic distortion” of Islam? Or is it just Islam that has not been filtered through the idol-slaying power of the Enlightenment?
*****
images courtesy shutterstock / ollyy
Join the conversation as a VIP Member