Urooj Rahman is a housing attorney for Bronx Legal Services who is currently in legal trouble for tossing a Molotov cocktail at a NYPD cruiser during the recent riots in New York City. She is also a committed activist for the Palestinian jihad, having published agitprop spreading false claims of Palestinian victimhood. Despite the hot water she is in now, however, she has a bright future as an ideological leader of both the Left and the Islamic jihad. In an interview before her attack, she enunciated the common goal of both movements: “This s–t won’t ever stop unless we f–kin’ take it all down.”
In both the interview and during her attack, Rahman kept a Palestinian keffiyeh close to her face. Her sartorial choice was not incidental. With her attempted torching of the police cruiser (her Molotov cocktail didn’t light), she brought Palestinian jihad tactics to the riots in the U.S. She also revealed the congruence between the ideology of the Left in America today and that of jihadists, not just the Palestinians, but all over the world.
Regarding Israel, the goal of the Palestinian jihad is and always has been to “f–kin’ take it all down.” That is the meaning of the increasingly common slogan “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free.” If “Palestine” must be “free” from the Jordan River all the way to the Mediterranean Sea, the Palestinian cause is not about ending “occupation,” or stopping “settlements,” or anything that the establishment media tells us about it. It is, rather, about destroying Israel altogether, as The Palestinian Delusion documents in detail. Until that goal is attained, as Urooj Rahman elegantly put it, “This s–t won’t ever stop.”
The same thing can be said of the jihad all around the world. As The History of Jihad shows, for 1,400 years the goal of Islamic jihad activity has essentially been “This s–t won’t ever stop unless we f–kin’ take it all down.” While there were occasional periods in which jihad violence against non-Muslim states grew less active and virulent, these pauses were not occasioned by a general rejection in the Islamic world of the idea that jihad must be pursued, or by reform of Islamic doctrine. The doctrine always remained; the wherewithal to put it into practice ebbed and flowed.
Although non-Muslim scholars and analysts routinely insist that Islam is a religion of peace and jihad is a spiritual struggle, Islamic scholars have stated otherwise throughout the history of Islam. In his book War and Peace in the Law of Islam, Majid Khadduri, an Iraqi scholar of Islamic law of international renown, says this about jihad: “The state which is regarded as the instrument for universalizing a certain religion must perforce be an ever expanding state. The Islamic state, whose principal function was to put God’s law into practice, sought to establish Islam as the dominant reigning ideology over the entire world….The jihad was therefore employed as an instrument for both the universalization of religion and the establishment of an imperial world state.”
Or more succinctly and pungently: “This s–t won’t ever stop unless we f–kin’ take it all down.”
This is not a new idea. The twelfth-century Maliki jurist Ibn Rushd stated: “Muslim jurists agreed that the purpose of fighting with the People of the Book…is one of two things: it is either their conversion to Islam or the payment of jizyah.” Imran Ahsan Khan Nyazee, assistant professor on the Faculty of Shari’ah and Law of the International Islamic University in Islamabad, states that Ibn Rushd “leaves no doubt that the primary goal of the Muslim community, in the eyes of its jurists, is to spread the word of Allah through jihad, and the option of poll-tax [jizya] is to be exercised only after subjugation” of non-Muslims.
Or here again, “This s–t won’t ever stop unless we f–kin’ take it all down.”
Meanwhile, the Left’s anti-Americanism, and determination to “f–kin’ take it all down,” has been on abundant display in the recent riots. In Urooj Rahman, this Leftist and jihadist aspiration is embodied in a single person.
When she was arrested, Rahman was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan “THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES REGARDLESS.” The Arabic word for “struggle” is, of course, jihad.
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 19 books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book is The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.
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