Islam vs Israel: Which Side are You On?

At age 19 in 1962 Howard Bloom discovered the depth of Islamic antisemitism after reading a series of Holocaust denial pamphlets printed by the Arab League:

The conclusion of chapter 2 of Robert Spencer’s newest book on the question of Judaism, Christianity and Islam as three “Abrahamic” faiths:

The Silent Tragedy of Child Marriage

Last Friday, an Afghan journalist named Mustafa Kazemi posted on Facebook a harrowing story about an eight-year-old girl in the Khashrood district of Nimruz province in Afghanistan, who was sold off into marriage to a mullah in his late 50s, and who bled to death on their wedding night.

It was one of many such tragedies in a land that little notes nor long remembers such deaths. An eight-year-old girl sold into marriage and dead after a brutal sexual assault that her body could not withstand is no more noteworthy than a pack animal that collapses under a too-heavy weight. It’s time and money wasted, that’s all. Forget about it. Get another one.

Indeed, the day after Kazemi posted his account, pro-Sharia lawmakers in Afghanistan blocked a proposed Law on Elimination of Violence Against Women, which would have set criminal penalties for child marriage. Pro-Sharia legislator Khalil Ahmad Shaheedzada denounced the law as un-Islamic, explaining: “Whatever is against Islamic law, we don’t even need to speak about it.”

That means that more girls like the eight-year-old in the Khashrood district will continue to suffer. For few things are more abundantly attested in Islamic law than the permissibility of child marriage. Islamic tradition records that Muhammad’s favorite wife, Aisha, was six when Muhammad wedded her and nine when he consummated the marriage:

“The Prophet wrote the (marriage contract) with Aisha while she was six years old and consummated his marriage with her while she was nine years old and she remained with him for nine years (i.e. till his death)” (Bukhari 7.62.88).

Another tradition has Aisha herself recount the scene:

The Prophet engaged me when I was a girl of six (years). We went to Medina and stayed at the home of Bani-al-Harith bin Khazraj. Then I got ill and my hair fell down. Later on my hair grew (again) and my mother, Um Ruman, came to me while I was playing in a swing with some of my girl friends. She called me, and I went to her, not knowing what she wanted to do to me. She caught me by the hand and made me stand at the door of the house. I was breathless then, and when my breathing became Allright, she took some water and rubbed my face and head with it. Then she took me into the house. There in the house I saw some Ansari women who said, “Best wishes and Allah’s Blessing and a good luck.” Then she entrusted me to them and they prepared me (for the marriage). Unexpectedly Allah’s Apostle came to me in the forenoon and my mother handed me over to him, and at that time I was a girl of nine years of age. (Bukhari 5.58.234).

Muhammad was at this time fifty-four years old.

When Slaves Choose Their Slavery

Some slaves prefer slavery: “A prominent Saudi female activist,” Emirates 24/7 reported last Thursday, has come out against Saudi Arabia’s lifting its ban on women driving cars.

Rawdah Al-Yousif complained that campaigns to give women the right to drive ,

“continue despite the clear response by the rulers of this country that any decision to allow women to drive cars is up to the community not to just 3000 people or to some articles in newspapers or online. I hope there will be no decision to allow women to drive at this stage because we have first to respect the wish of the people and the society…Women are also not ready yet to bear their responsibility and leave their homes at a time when news of blackmail against the women are widespread.”

Ah, yes. Women are not yet ready to bear their responsibility, just as we heard in the antebellum South that black Americans were not yet ready to bear the responsibilities of freedom, or in the Jim Crow South that they were not yet ready to bear the full responsibilities of citizenship. This is a common argument that oppressors make to justify oppression; it is unusual to hear it offered by one of the oppressed themselves.

Yet Rawdah Al-Yousuf is the prime mover behind a recent campaign in Saudi Arabia called “My Guardian Knows What’s Best For Me.” This involved, according to Emirates 24/7, “sending letters to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia in which women confirmed their full support for an Islamic approach in administering the Kingdom.” Al Yousif expressed her “dismay at the efforts of some who have liberal demands that do not comply with Islamic law (Shariah) or with the Kingdom’s traditions and customs” and railed against what she characterized as “ignorant and vexatious demands” to abolish the guardianship system.

Abraham, Part 4: Does Holiness Get Lost in the Fog of War?

Abraham, in becoming a patriarch in Canaan, also becomes a sort of political entity. He has “flocks, and herds, and silver, and gold, and menservants, and maidservants, and camels, and asses.” Like the restored political entity known as modern Israel — a distant descendant of that of Abraham — he has to conduct a sort of “international relations” with the surrounding peoples.

Israel’s conduct of its affairs, of course, seems to arouse more controversy than that of any country except the United States. The political Left — within Israel, in the larger Jewish world, and in the non-Jewish world — accuses Israel of immorality; the Right — mostly within Israel and the Jewish world — accuses it of weakness and cowardice. In fact, upholding a democracy while dealing with rough surroundings is not at all simple and requires a constant balancing act between moral standards and self-preservation.

It wasn’t so different for Abraham. On the one hand, God expresses confidence in him to “do justice and judgment”; on the other, he has to interact with tribal leaders and others who are sometimes decent and sometimes ruthless. Living in Zion, asserting independence, means being connected to the spiritual realm while at the same time having one’s feet firmly on the ground of the “real world.”

How Do Islam and Christianity Disagree About the Value of Human Life?

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How Mothers from Hell Raise Their Boys to Do Evil

“Peace will come,” Golda Meir once famously remarked, “when the Arabs start to love their children more than they hate us.” The obstacle to peace was not actually Arabs as such, but Muslims who had imbibed Islam’s doctrine of jihad and hatred of non-believers and primarily Jews — a hatred so intense that it drives people to prefer death (and murder) to life. And as we have seen recently with the monstrous grandstanding of Mama Tsarnaeva, this hatred is passed on in some Muslim families – and Zubeidat Tsarnaeva is by no means the only mother from hell.

Islamic supremacists avowedly and proudly love death. Jihad mass murderer Mohamed Merah said that he “loved death more than they loved life.” Nigerian jihadist Abubakar Shekau said: “I’m even longing for death, you vagabond.”

Ayman al-Zawahiri’s wife advised Muslim women: “I advise you to raise your children in the cult of jihad and martyrdom and to instil in them a love for religion and death.” And as one jihadist put it, “We love death. You love your life!” And another: “The Americans love Pepsi-Cola, we love death.” That was from Afghan jihadist Maulana Inyadullah.

Ultimately, this idea comes from the Qur’an itself:

“Say (O Muhammad): O ye who are Jews! If ye claim that ye are favoured of Allah apart from (all) mankind, then long for death if ye are truthful.” — Qur’an 62:6

This love of death is instilled in children. A Muslim child preacher recently taunted those he has been taught to hate most: “Oh Zionists, we love death for the sake of Allah, just as much as you love life for the sake of Satan.” This young man’s mother was probably much like the quintessential mother from hell, Mariam Farhat, or Umm Nidal (mother of Nidal), a Palestinian parliamentarian who died in March. No one more fully embodied the Hamas ethos — and the ethos of infanticide that permeates contemporary Palestinian culture as a whole — than Umm Nidal, a mother who willed the death of her own children and the children of others.

Whose Ideas Inspired the Tsarnaev Brothers To Hate America?

The Mohammed Code available here.

Howard Bloom’s previous book The God Problem available here.

Are Noam Chomsky and Edward Said Anti-American Terrorist Apologists?

Leave it to Salman Rushdie to bring back the Left’s favorite stratagem: moral equivalence. During the Cold War, leftists used to say the following: “Sure, the Soviets are doing bad things, but so is the United States.” Those a bit more to the left would advance the argument, and say: “The Soviets do terrible things, but the U.S. is responsible, since its leaders view them, as Reagan did, as ‘the evil empire.’ Since we won’t accommodate their just demands, they have to respond to us with hostility.” Those even further to the left would push the analogy even further, arguing: “The Soviets may do some bad things, but at least they stand on the side of progressive change. The U.S., on the other hand, oppresses Third World peoples and supports right-wing reactionary regimes all over the world.”

A good example of the old moral equivalence was to equate the Gulag in the Soviet Union, in which hundreds of thousands were imprisoned, starved to death and executed in massive frame-ups, with McCarthyism in the United States. During the so-called McCarthy era, relatively few were imprisoned or lost their livelihoods, and many actually guilty of being actual Soviet agents portrayed themselves as innocents accused because of their political views. Yet the Left in America argued both were the same.

Now Salman Rushdie has a lot to be wary of. After the Iranian revolution, the late Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa along with a reward for anyone who murdered him. Because of his novel The Satanic Verses, Rushdie had to go into hiding in different safe houses for a number of years, while under the protection of the British government. Intellectuals and writers in the West rallied to his defense. Eventually, Rushdie came into the open, moved to the United States, and became a favorite in the celebrity world, as well as a best-selling novelist.

Straight-Arrow Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a Mama’s Boy

Editor’s Note: Starting today, Robert Spencer’s weekly PJ Lifestyle article analyzing stories on Jihad terror from a cultural perspective will appear on Mondays, our day focused on family, parenting, motherhood, fatherhood, and relationships. With this shift in publication date also comes a change in angle. A broader picture of the motives behind the 4/15/13 Boston terror attack is beginning to come into greater clarity. Who radicalized these once American young men? The picture that has emerged is one common throughout the Muslim world: sons drink in the hate and anti-Americanism as they would mother’s milk. The disturbing proclamations of mama and papa Tsarnaev make clear that these were not two sons led astray by malevolent outside influence.

So on Mondays Robert will explore the relevant Jihad stories of the week through a family-centric lens, considering male-female dynamics in the Muslim world and the Koran’s influence on defining the ideals of masculinity and femininity. What does Islam proscribe for how to raise children and maintain a family? What can Muslim parents in America do to make sure their sons do not become Tamerlans and Dzhokhars? And what are other parents like the Tsarnaevs secretly doing right now to prepare their children for the glory of martyrdom? How does one raise a future Jihadist who loves death more than Americans love life? I look forward to seeing Robert explore these subjects and hope you will join us each week at PJ Lifestyle.

- David Swindle

In the movie Prizzi’s Honor, Jack Nicholson plays mafia hitman Charley Partanna, who is known as “Straight-Arrow Charley, the All-American Hood” for dutifully and unquestioningly carrying on the family business in which he was raised. And as more details emerge about the family of Boston Marathon jihad bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, it’s increasingly clear that they, too, were just carrying on the family business: jihad.

Zubeidat Tsarnaeva is proud of her boys. She insists that they didn’t set off the bombs in Boston, and that in fact, the whole thing was staged. The bombings, she said, were just a “really big play” featuring “paint instead of blood.” Consistency is not her strong suit, for she also said: “What happened is a terrible thing but I know my kids have nothing to do with this. I know it, I am mother.” She claimed that her sons were targeted because they were Muslim, and said: “America took my kids away from me. I’m sure my kids were not involved in anything.”

The bombers’ father, Anzor Tsarnaev, struck a tone more of grief than accusation. He assured the world: “I am not angry at anyone,” although he hinted that he also accepted his wife’s conspiracy theory when he added: “I want to go find out the truth.” Go, that is, to the United States, although plans for the trip have since been scrapped due to the possibility that he and/or his wife could be arrested if they do come here. “I want to say that I am going there to see my son, to bury the older one. I don’t have any bad intentions.” He added reassuringly: “I don’t plan to blow up anything.”

Just as Hitler loved his dogs, Tamerlan Tsarnaev loved his mama. Just before getting into a shootout with police in Watertown, Massachusetts, he called her on his cellphone and gave her the news:

The police, they have started shooting at us, they are chasing us….Mama, I love you.

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No Matter How Evil a Soul Becomes, Can It Still Find A Way to Return to The Creator?

No More Music for Muslims: The Spiritual Journey of Tamerlan Tsarnaev

PJ Lifestyle Editor’s Note:

This is Part 11, the conclusion, of Volume 1 of Robert Spencer’s Jazz and Islam series. Yes — Volume 1 does imply the intent for Robert to return to this subject again in the future so we can someday produce a Volume 2. As the Islamic War Against Freedom has intensified and arisen again into the foreground of public consciousness, Robert and I have decided on a new cultural angle through which he will seek to illuminate each week’s dark, confusing stories of jihad terrorism. I won’t reveal the secret yet of just what Robert’s new focus will be. But perhaps this astounding article today revealing the troubled story of a lost young man who poisoned his mind with deadly ideas will provide a hint of what’s to come…

– David Swindle 

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who along with his brother Dzhokhar murdered three people and wounded nearly 200 more with twin bombs at the Boston Marathon, was a musician. John Curran, Tamerlan’s boxing coach, recalled: “He also played the piano very well.” The Lowell Sun reported that “Tsarnaev also studied music at a school in Russia and played piano and violin.”

As late as 2010, according to Gene McCarthy of the Somerville Boxing Club in Massachusetts, Tsarnaev was still playing:

“I brought him to the registration” for a boxing tournament, “and while he was waiting in line, he saw a piano and was playing classical music like it was Symphony Hall.”

However, the Associated Press reported Wednesday that “in the years before the Boston Marathon bombings, Tamerlan Tsarnaev fell under the influence of a new friend, a Muslim convert who steered the religiously apathetic young man toward a strict strain of Islam, family members said.”

The Facebook Jihad of the Canadian Train Terrorist

via Shoebat Exclusive: Shocking Facebook of the Canada Train Terrorist | Walid Shoebat:

Not much is available regarding Chiheb Esseghaier, the man charged with conspiring to derail a VIA passenger train in Canada. That is, until we began researching the Arabic and discovered a Tunisian Al-Qaeda operative’s facebook page in Arabic, all with the chilling details.

From western sources, the man’s Internet activities are summarized thusly, via National Post:

“[His] professional networking site LinkedIn that is illustrated with the black flag of the Islamic State of Iraq, an umbrella group of Iraqi insurgent groups affiliated with al Qaeda.”

That’s hardly a dossier.

Yet, his facebook page which was deleted minutes after our discovery (and after we saved it) is a different story. At the top is a detailed flowchart on Al-Qaeda’s plans, command and control, and methodology – from leadership to cell creation.

His favorites include several links to some of the most notorious terror groups including a facebook dedicated for the famed Abu Mus’ab Zarkawi. On that facebook page, it gives a glimpse of the Al-Qaeda recruitment in the Levant (Syria).

Read the rest at Shoebat.com

The Tsarnaev Brothers and the Coming Savage Empire of Islam

By Theodore Shoebat and Walid Shoebat

**** WARNING: GRAPHIC VIDEOS INCLUDED IN THIS ARTICLE ****

The Boston Marathon bombing by the Tsarnaevs is not the first notable attack upon Americans by Eastern European Muslims. In 2007, a young Bosnian Muslim named Sulejman Talovic opened fire in the Trolley Square mall in Salt Lake City, killing five people and seriously injuring another four before being taken out by officers.

There will be more to come, as long as we keep observing the modern world’s sick obsession with multiculturalism.

As he was killing his victims, Talovic repeatedly proclaimed that Allah was great, and the night before the massacre he told his girlfriend that “something is going to happen tomorrow that you’ll never be able to forgive me about.” He also said that the day will be “the happiest day of his life and that it could only happen once in a lifetime.”

Prior to settling in America, Talovic had a hallucination in Bosnia of a white horse with “two beautiful eyes,” imagery which is emphatically Islamic.

Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev may be out of the way, but this should not make us believe that the Islamic threat is gone, or that the world is now safer.

Now is not a time to celebrate, but to study our enemy assiduously. The Tsarnaevs are from Chechnya, a nation of the Caucasus region. Now that the brothers are becoming household names, Americans should inquire into two of the most focal points of Islamic jihad: the Caucasus and the Balkans. Though much of the region remains Christian today, a sizable portion is Muslim, including Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, Dagestan, and, of course, Chechnya.

The Balkans and the Caucasus harbor by far the most fanatic of all Islamic fundamentalists. When they were under the Ottoman sultans, they proved to be the most loyal and fervent fighters for the cause of the caliphate’s universal expansion.

They are not entirely of the same nature as the terrorists Americans are used to — like those of Iraq or even Afghanistan. They are larger in stature, fiercer, and have a higher propensity for sadism and murder than their Islamic brethren in the Middle East.

They are now a part of the backbone of the Syrian revolution, assisting their fellow jihadists with their tenacity and ferociousness. One journalist describes the Chechens as such:

The Chechens were older, taller, stronger and wore hiking boots and combat trousers. They carried their weapons with confidence and distanced themselves from the rest, moving around in a tight-knit unit-within-a-unit. (1)

To help Americans recover from this cultural illness, here is a video showing just how sadistic, heartless, and sanguinary some Eastern European Muslims can be, and the type of mindset of the Tsarnaevs:

But why such cruel violence? This question takes us deeper into our inquiry into the jihadist mindset. For decades Americans have been used to the standard procedure of Islamic terrorism. It began with just planting bombs; then came suicide attacks and decapitations. All of these phases are not part of a cultural evolution, but a gradual revival back to original Islam. Now we are entering a newer phase in this awakening: human sacrifice and cannibalism.

The original state of Islam is not entirely what the West has witnessed these last few decades; it is actually more like what one sees in ancient Mexico or pre-Israelite Canaan. We are seeing this pagan savagery arise gradually, but soon it will be universally known.

10 Depressing, Morally Confused Reactions to 4/15/13, the Boston Jihad

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…

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Why So Many Jazz Musicians Converted to a Heretical Form of Islam

Jazz and Islam, Part 10

When jazz and drug use were in danger of becoming as closely associated a team as salt and pepper, a movement began of jazz musicians converting to Islam – for Islam, according to John Coltrane biographer C. O. Simpkins, “was a force which directly opposed the deterioration of the mind and body through either spiritual or physical deterrents.”

Islam may have saved many prominent musicians from the “deterioration of mind and body” stemming from drug and alcohol abuse, but paradoxically, many of them joined the Ahmadi sect, which is persecuted by Muslims who consider it heretical.

Jazz artists who became Ahmadi Muslims include pianists Ahmad Jamal and McCoy Tyner (a.k.a. Sulieman Saud); saxophonists Yusef Lateef and Sahib Shihab; and perhaps most notably of all, drummer Art Blakey, who after his conversion styled himself Abdullah Ibn Buhaina. He didn’t use his Muslim name professionally, but it was well known among his musician colleagues, who often called him “Bu.”

The Men Responsible for Starving Egyptian Families

Egypt’s pound has fallen by 40% since last December, from 6 to the dollar to 8.25 to the dollar on the black market. The prices of basic food items like beans and milk have risen by more than that, pricing all forms of protein out of the range of the half of Egyptians who live on less than $2 a day. And the worst is yet to come: according to the U.S. embassy, the Muslim Brotherhood government has vastly inflated its estimates of this year’s wheat harvest in order to keep export orders down — because it doesn’t have the money to pay for them. Egypt reportedly got $5 billion in emergency loans from Libya and Qatar (although it is not clear how much of that can be spent), but that barely covers the government’s arrears to oil companies operating in the country. I published an update on Egypt’s economic free fall in Asia Times Online this morning.

Mohammed Morsi’s Islamist government is living hand to mouth, stiffing suppliers and exporters, and cadging emergency loans, but it hasn’t ordered a shipload of oil or wheat since January. When things get this bad, everyone who can get dollars out will. The ship is sinking, and the cry is, “Women and children last!”

Here’s an example.

Just after I filed the story, Al Ahram reported that the country’s cotton exports had dropped 40.6% between September-November of 2012 and the same period of 2011 (hat tip: Daniel Pipes). According to the Egyptian daily, the drop is due to much larger domestic purchases of cotton by local textile companies:

Egyptian textile companies bought 415.8 thousand metric quintals of the local cotton in the period September-November 2012, a whopping increase of 326 percent compared with the corresponding quarter a year before.

That makes no sense, because Egyptian textile exports also fell by a big margin.

As Long As Governments Exist for the Purpose of Murdering Muslim Apostates We Are All Enslaved

Click to submit book suggestions for the new daily feature at PJ Lifestyle. Friday book excerpts focus on history, philosophy, and ideas. The next 13 weeks will focus on exploring Marxism.

The Questions Nobody Wants to Ask About ‘Moderate Islam’

Tarik Shah is a formidable jazz bassist who has recorded with a number of luminaries, including Pharoah Sanders and Abbey Lincoln. He is also prisoner number 53145-054 at the medium security Federal Correction Institution in Petersburg, Virginia, where he is serving a fifteen-year sentence for plotting to provide combat training to al-Qaeda jihadists. His sad and tragic case points up again lingering questions about Islamic moderation that have never been answered.

In 2004, Shah made the acquaintance of a man he thought was an al-Qaeda member, but who was actually an FBI informant. Shah, a martial arts expert as well as a jazzman, offered to help train jihadis. He made no mistake of his intentions, asking the informant:

You really want to learn how to rip somebody’s throat out? I’m talking about damage to the inside so they drown on their own blood. You give them internal bleeding. It fills their lungs with blood.

Nor did Shah make any secret of his allegiance. Tapes that the FBI informant made of his conversations with Shah show the bassist full of complaints. He disliked having to pay “taxes to infidels.” He was angry with the United States for toppling the Taliban, the “only Islamic government of Afghanistan.” He claimed that non-Muslim Westerners “have been killing Muslims on a consistent basis for almost 200 years. They have been at war with us, which means we are at war with them.”

An Islamic Crossword Puzzle for the Aspiring Jihadist

Freelance writing is a financially precarious career – you’ve always got to be on the lookout for new opportunities, or you’re screwed. So when I found out recently about a relatively new online magazine called Inspire, my first thought was: hmm, what can I come up with that they might want to use?

Now – and hey, here’s a tip for you kids looking to move into the fast lane of the media game – the first thing you do in situations like this is to study the publication in question and try to determine its worldview, its style, its tone, its intended audience, and so on. Inspire, as it happens, is published by an organization called al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Not al-Qaeda itself, mind you, but a branch of al-Qaeda with a similar but longer and more geographically specific name. It’s published in English and is apparently aimed at jihadist fanatics and aspiring jihadist fanatics.

A Fox News writer helpfully noted in 2010 that the magazine is “designed to encourage would-be terrorists into acts of violence,” and quoted Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institution as saying that it’s “clearly intended for the aspiring jihadist in the U.S. or U.K. who may be the next Fort Hood murderer or Times Square bomber.” Useful info for an aspiring contributor! A while back Inspire ran an article titled “I Am Proud to be a Traitor to America” by an author who, not long afterward, was taken out by a U.S. drone in Yemen. For a freelancer, this sort of thing is great news: when a publication’s regular contributors are being systematically decimated in anti-terrorist strikes, it’s more likely that there’s always going to be room for fresh blood.

Blues for Sayyid Qutb

The defense of the free world against jihad and Islamic supremacism is a war for joy, a war for happiness, against regimentation that stomps on the human spirit — just as unmistakably as was the war against National Socialist Germany. That makes it also a war for music.

Take it from none other than the Ayatollah Khomeini, who once declared:

Allah did not create man so that he could have fun. The aim of creation was for mankind to be put to the test through hardship and prayer. An Islamic regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious.

This kind of attitude, not unexpectedly, leads Islamic supremacists to take a dim view of music, and particularly joyful music. The renowned Muslim Brotherhood theorist Sayyid Qutb shared the disdain for jazz that was brutally manifested by the Nazis with whom so many Islamic supremacists collaborated. That disdain was wonderfully satirized in the Schickelgruber Lambeth Walk, a wartime-era film short (made during the days when one could still mock the enemy) that provoked in Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels a towering rage. The devil, as Thomas More noted, cannot endure to be mocked.

Today in 1965 A Rival Gang Murdered the Career Criminal Detroit Red

Today I am inaugurating a new tradition. From now on whenever there is a Malcolm X-related anniversary I am going to do a blog post dedicated to telling the truth about who he really was and what cruel values he actually dedicated his life to promoting. Malcolm X was not a “black pride advocate” or a “civil rights leader” as the postmodern Marxist grad student teaching your undergraduate will claim. He was a career criminal, pathological liar, racist, black nationalist, and antisemite. He’s not just a hip Martin Luther King Jr but with guns the way Spike Lee’s films try and mythologize him. He was an evil man who lived a life of racial hatred, the polar opposite of the Christian love and color blind unity preached and lived by King.

Here’s an excerpt from an article I published here at PJ Lifestyle in November, The 15 Best Books for Understanding Barack Obama’s Mysterious Political Theology, regarding books to read to discover the reality of Malcolm Little, the  man behind the Myth of Malcolm X:

5. The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley

6. Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable

7. Dreams from my Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama

8. Barack Obama: The Story by David Maraniss

Why do so many Democrats insist on giving Islam the benefit of the doubt? Even amongst many Republicans, the establishment narrative, set by George W. Bush, endures: Islam is “a religion of peace,” Al Qaeda is a fringe group of misinterpreters, Allah is the same god worshiped by Jews and Christians, and the Koran is just the Bible in Arabic, teaching universal love and compassion.

I bought this Big Lie about Islam for years. And looking back I wonder how much of it had to do with how my progressivism led to an unquestioning embrace of the mythology of Malcolm. In high school I loved The Autobiography of Malcolm X and watched Spike Lee’s film adaptation multiple times. Recall the ending: Malcolm doesn’t fully reject racism and become complete as a human being until he escapes the Nation of Islam, takes his hajj to Mecca, and renames himself El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. Once outside of the evil, racist America Malcolm can see that within Islam whites could gain their humanity and become his brothers. Islam really could bring peace. Just look at Malcolm.

But multiple authors have debunked The Autobiography as fictional. (See my friend David Forsmark’s review of Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention and Bruce Perry’s Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America.)

Once one learns the truth about who Malcolm X really was, what the Nation of Islam preached then (and still does today), and the contents of the orthodox Islam Malcolm believed at death, then the only moral response is shame. And that’s what I feel today as I reflect back on the fact that for years a poster of an antisemitic conspiracy theorist hung tacked to my walls like a religious icon.

But Barack Obama never felt that embarrassing epiphany of realizing he’d based his life on a lie. According to Dreams from my Father, Obama discovered The Autobiography as a teenager. He then used the myth of Malcolm during his community organizer days as a symbol:

“Power! X Register to Vote Here”

“It’s a POWER thing! X Vote Tues Nov. 3″

That’s what the symbol of Malcolm X means and Obama knew how to use it: the misunderstood, oppressed proletariat can take power away from the corrupt conspiracy at the top that’s enslaved everyone. It’s a message that appeals to both the impoverished in the ghettos, and the spoiled, angsty, idealistic, upper-middle class high schooler growing up in white suburbia. And it too was a Big Lie. Power doesn’t come through voting in politicians who will give you healthcare and other free stuff.

The 5 Biggest Insults to American Manhood by the Rules of Engagement in Afghanistan

America’s muddle in Afghanistan is not merely an unwise policy. Two prominent American authors — one a serious analyst (and former badass warrior), the other a bestselling novelist (who created one of our biggest badass heroes) — worry that it is an affront to American manhood as well.

For years Bing West has argued that our carrot with no stick approach to counterinsurgency and nation building in Afghanistan is sapping the “martial spirit” of our armed forces. Recently, he even wrote a column titled “We’re Too Nice to Win in Afghanistan,” detailing how a wimpy approach to a truly savage enemy is making victory impossible.

West proposes we change from a counterinsurgency protocol (winning hearts and minds in order to recruit allies against the terrorists while building a civil society) to a counter-terror strategy (kill them whenever and wherever we can find them and let the Afghan government build its own society).

Vince Flynn, in his new book The Last Man, has his fictional alter ego, Mitch Rapp, take a very direct approach. Upon being introduced to a former Taliban official the CIA has recruited to be part of the Afghan security infrastructure as America prepares to leave the country, and who is certainly playing both sides, he sees only one incentive structure that can work:

Pistol-whip the sneaky bastard and threaten to kill him if he doesn’t cooperate.

So, based on West’s superb book on the war in Afghanistan, The Wrong War, and Flynn’s best thriller to date, here are 5 ways that Obama’s approach to Afghanistan is an affront to American manhood.

Why Did Lenin and Muhammad Hate Music?

Editor’s Note: “Politics is downstream from culture” has been one of PJ Media’s mantras in response to the election. It’s with this direction in mind that I’ve invited my friend, the courageous writer-scholar-activist Robert Spencer, to contribute regularly to PJ Lifestyle. Since May of last year Robert has written a weekly article for PJM, bringing his deep understanding of Islam and Jihadist terrorism to analyze current events. Robert is an exemplary polemicist, but the time has come to reach out and bring his ideas to new readers. And so we introduce today a new Friday feature: Jazz and Islam. Each week Robert will explore the culture, history, values, and philosophy of both, some weeks focusing on Islam, others more on jazz, and often, as with today’s article, a juxtaposition of both. Reader feedback and suggestions are very much encouraged as we continue to develop this new feature.

- David Swindle, PJ Lifestyle Editor

Ultimately, the war between the forces of jihad and the free world is a conflict between individualism and collectivism. Nothing shows that more vividly than each side’s attitude toward music.

“I cannot listen much to music,” Lenin once said. “It excites my nerves. I feel like talking nonsense and caressing people who, living in such a filthy hell, can create such beauty. Because today one must not caress anyone; they will bite off your hand. One must break heads, pitilessly break heads, even if, ideally, we are opposed to all violence.”

Another totalitarian man of peace, Muhammad, is quoted as saying: “Allah Mighty and Majestic sent me as a guidance and mercy to believers and commanded me to do away with musical instruments, flutes, strings, crucifixes, and the affair of the pre-Islamic period of ignorance.”

President Obama, Would You Send a Drone to Cuba to Kill the Weathermen?

“Hello. This is Bernardine Dohrn. I’m going to read A Declaration of a State of War. This is the first communication from the Weatherman underground. All over the world, people fighting Amerikan imperialism look to Amerika’s youth to use our strategic position behind enemy lines to join forces in the destruction of the empire….Tens of thousands have learned that protest and marches don’t do it. Revolutionary violence is the only way…”

“…We fight in many ways. Dope is one of our weapons. The laws against marijuana mean that millions of us are outlaws long before we actually split. Guns and grass are united in the youth underground. Freaks are revolutionaries and revolutionaries are freaks. If you want to find us, this is where we are. In every tribe, commune, dormitory, farmhouse, barracks and townhouse where kids are making love, smoking dope and loading guns—fugitives from Amerikan justice are free to go…

“…Within the next fourteen days we will attack a symbol or institution of Amerikan injustice. This is the way we celebrate the example of Eldridge Cleaver and H. Rap Brown and all black revolutionaries who first inspired us by their fight behind enemy lines for the liberation of their people.”

“Never again will they fight alone.”

With that announcement, broadcast on radio stations across the country on July 31, 1970, the Weather Underground, which included Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd, and others, split from Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and declared war on “Amerika.” This group already had a string of bombings, arsons, and other terrorist activities under its belt; two months before the announcement three members of the core group had  been killed building a bomb in a Greenwich Village townhouse. An FBI report later stated the group possessed enough explosives to level both sides of the street.

In the two years after the “Declaration of a State of War,” there would be two more high-profile bombings — a New York City police station and the Pentagon.