Image via JanTrust.org
Another “known wolf” attack has come, and still the first worry from the guardians of Political Correctness (also known as the enforcers of Propaganda Compliance) is what this might mean for the backlash against Muslims.
It’s been said too many times to count, yet it does not sink in, that while not all Muslims are terrorists, terrorists turn out to be Muslim. As someone quipped on Twitter (I can’t recall who), the gay bars in Iraq didn’t go on heightened alert from outsider Jews or Christians seeking to kill gay people. Of course that bitter gallows humor only works if you know that there are no gay bars in Iraq because Islamic militants execute gays as a matter of course and Jews and Christians—who do not throw homosexuals off buildings—have themselves long been terrorized out of the region.
Many people deny this, however. Still, with the terror attacks against the West in general, and against atheists, gays, women and Christians in particular, at some point even the thickest commentators must recognize that the problem is Islamic terrorism.
Evidence keeps leading us to the truth: acts of terrorism are committed in the name of Islam. We might call Islam a religion of peace, but too many of its members declare otherwise. And too many others keep silent.
I’ve met a woman who does not.
Sajda Mughal was on the Piccadilly Line the morning of the London Tube bombing. The trauma of surviving a bombing in London was enough trauma for a lifetime, but she also had to come to terms with the knowledge that the bombing was perpetrated in the name of her religion, Islam. Whether the terrorists were proper Muslims or not was beside the point. Terrorists were using Islam to recruit and radicalize young British Muslims to the cause.
Sajda Mughal set out to do something about it. She researched how the terrorists reach young Muslims. They use online propaganda. They groom vulnerable young people through social media and YouTube and turn them into radical terrorists.
Think of all of the articles about the dangers of pornography and the accompanying articles about how parents must protect their children from the material. To do this we must be knowledgeable about technology and social media. We must be vigilant over our children’s use of the Internet.
This is a relatively simple thing in cultures where mothers are just as educated as anyone else about technology and social media (and I think I can speak for a vast majority of U.S. mothers in saying that monitoring our children’s online use is only relatively easy).
Sajda knew that just as no mother would want to see her son lost to pornography, no mother would want her children lost to radicalization. Only Muslim mothers did not know how to monitor technology and social media. So she started a charity to teach them.
“Women are key anchors in our homes. If we equip, educate, and empower them, they make that difference,” she said. The JAN Trust in the UK has been fighting online radicalization by teaching mothers how to monitor their children’s internet use and look for the signs of grooming.
I met Sajda back in February. This is her whole story. It seems fitting to share it now. She is a rarity whose example should be followed.
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