Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America (36 page)

The denial and disbelief that I sense in the politically correct crowd, particularly those who come from New York, where there is a big hole in the ground in lower Manhattan, sometimes makes me feel that they think a Muslim extremist is a mythical invention of Jews and Christians. We are fighting an enemy that doesn’t wear a uniform, an enemy that lives in our midst, an enemy that strives to die just to kill us. We are fighting an army in disguise. This army doesn’t work independently but is supported and protected by a community and a neighborhood. It is suicidal to label any Islamic community moderate, because it is this same community that protected, supported, and shielded the extremists and made their suicide operation possible. I know the Middle East, Middle Eastern culture, and how Middle Eastern communities are connected. The Muslim Arab community is not an American community on American soil. It is a minority community that just changed geography yet still practices Middle Eastern customs. Nothing can go on in a vacuum, because there is no vacuum. Everyone knows everything about everyone. Walk into any city in the USA and go straight to the Arab grocery store and ask about anyone in the Arab community, and he or she will know the person you are asking about and know details about them that will shock any American. The Islamic community in the United States knows a lot and has a lot of information to give to authorities about the numerous terrorist cells that exist inside our country. I challenge the Muslim American “moderates” to stand up and be counted. Prove me wrong, and take back and redeem your heritage as it was before Islam sidetracked Muslim countries from becoming one of the great civilizations of the world and became instead one of the most backward, barbaric, unproductive, and uneducated parts of the world. If we don’t wake up and challenge our Muslim community to take action against the terrorists within it, if we don’t believe in ourselves as Americans and in the standards we should hold every patriotic American to, we are going to pay a price for our shortsightedness.

We have been seeing and reading stories from around the world about Muslims who do not have loyalty to whatever country they have emigrated to. In France, Britain, Denmark, and here in the United States, Islamic extremists are declaring their loyalty foremost to Islam, not to their host nations. Just listen to world news on any network and hear about Muslims from different Western countries on different continents who have been arrested and convicted for having ties to jihadists and for supporting terrorist organizations and ideologies.

Let’s look at three recent examples, Denmark, Britain, and the U.S.

In Denmark a Muslim imam and Danish citizen, Imam Ahmad Abu Laban of the Islamic Belief Society, started a letter-writing campaign, went to Egypt and Syria, and riled up Muslim nations about the controversial Muhammad cartoons published in the Danish newspaper
Jyllands-Posten.
He even invented some phony over-the-top cartoons and passed them off as the product of the same newspaper. The result
was an inflamed
Islamic world, the burning of Danish embassies in Muslim countries, protests and deaths in the hundreds, a boycott by Iran and several members of the Arab League of Danish products, and suppression of free speech via intimidation that reached all the way to the U.S. And this from a Danish citizen who enjoyed the free speech and social welfare benefits given him as a citizen by that generous country.
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In London, Egyptian-born British citizen Imam Abu Masri al-Masri was at the center of the infamous Finsbury Park Mosque; undercover video led to his conviction by a British court on February 9,2006, for inciting hate and murder against Christians and Jews, while urging suicide terrorism on British Muslim citizens. The Finsbury Park Mosque— described by antiterrorist police chief Peter Clarke as a “honeypot for extremists"—was attended by both September 11 plotter Zacarias Moussaoui and failed “shoe bomber” Richard Reid and has been linked to several other suspected terrorists.
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Ahmed Abu Ali, a twenty-three-year-old U.S. citizen and honors grad from a local high school in suburban Fairfax, Virginia, was caught in Saudi Arabia, where he was in terrorist training, and deported to the U.S. and tried for his part in a purported al Qaeda plot to kill President Bush. He has been sentenced to thirty years in U.S. Federal Court.
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Or take the case of the Islamic Thinkers Society in Jackson Heights, New York. Demonstrating on a street corner in exercise of their “protected” speech rights, society members stomped on and tore the U.S. flag. Using bullhorns, they publicly laughed at Americans for being dummies while they used and abused our free speech rights to argue that our Constitution should be replaced with Sharia law overseen by a new caliphate. The Islamic Thinkers Society is considered an offshoot of Al-Muhajiroun, which has ties to al Qaeda.
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The ball is in the Muslims' court right now. They must control and turn in to the authorities the “extremists” in their midst, the scholars, the imams, the operatives who meet in the coffeehouses to sway recruits. It is not our duty to show how tolerant, open-minded, and loving we are toward a community that harbors people who want to kill us. The responsibility is theirs. Until we can be convinced that they have shaped up, we should watch them like a hawk. Every mosque, every imam, every Islamic charity that gives money or receives it from suspected terrorists, every madrassa in America funded by the Saudis, every Muslim working in every section of our government, even the janitor—all should be suspects. The louder CAIR shrieks, the more we should investigate. If they don’t like our scrutiny, they can stop being part of the problem and start becoming part of the solution.

The term “political correctness” has evolved out of the Marxist and Freudian philosophies of the 1930s to become a tool for multicultural-ism, multisexualism, multitheism, and multi-anythingism. It was created to discourage bias and prejudiced thinking that discriminates against an individual or group. It has become society’s way of not offending anyone, whether it is an individual, a group, or a nation. In many instances, however, it is a simple, disarming way of ignoring or deflecting the truth about a situation. Today, the use of political correctness has become so abused that anyone who voices his or her opinion contrary to “politically correct think” is immediately tagged with some form of disparaging label, such as racist and bigot. This exploitation has gotten so out of control that this name-calling accusation is used as a simple and mindless means to manipulate academic, social, or political discussion. The result is a social paranoia which discourages free thought and expression. It’s like living in a totalitarian state in which you are afraid to say what you think. Now who wants to suffer that? So people keep quiet. Their opinions are held captive to fear. How handy for the Islamo-fascists, the American-hating, Jew-killing, Israel-destroying, women-abusing, multireligious-intolerant Muslims. Oh! Excuse me. Did I say something not quite PC?

This social paranoia is similar to the attitude that developed in the late 1980s and 1990s, when people became so concerned about children’s self-esteem that failure could not be acknowledged or misbehavior corrected. “Now, let’s not hurt their feelings” was the standard approach. This degree of concern led to teachers giving passing grades for poor performance and youth sport activities where no one kept score. And what has been the fallout of all that psychobabble? High school kids who can’t read their diploma or make change for a dollar, internationally embarrassing scholastic performance scores, and young adults ill equipped to face the competitive lifestyle the world has to offer. They are left watching the television show
The Apprentice,
not competing to be an apprentice. America got itself into a mess by not upholding the high standards and expectations it once had, instead giving in to mediocrity; and we’re getting into a mess now with political correctness.

The radical Islamic movement has availed itself of the PC mentality to convince good-hearted people around the world that the Jews, Israel, and the “fascist government of the United States of America” are responsible for the ills of the Muslim people, and that their daily suffering is because of them. The PC crowds label anyone who disagrees with this notion a bigot. Human rights groups such as Amnesty International and the like have picked up on this phenomenon. Their adversarial attacks against America and Western powers have become scary and foolish. They have gone so far out of their way to protect the “rights of the underdog” that they are actually promoting dangerous radical Islamic views that may indirectly put you in peril. Anyone who disagrees with radical Islamic propaganda is being attacked in the media, on college campuses, and at rallies countering events that promote the Islamic cause.

The West is not failing the expectations of terrorists worldwide. The constant apologizing, the appeasement, the sensitivity training, and our destructive ignorance from not studying and evaluating our enemy are masking the threat we face and hastening our defeat. Every public instance of political correctness is dragged through the Arab world media as an example of just how wrong America is and how right the terrorists are. The terrorists have been watching and learning from our reactions over the last thirty years, and they have learned that they have a better chance of defeating us in Washington, D.C., and through the media than on the battlefield. Meanwhile, our politicians have forgotten the World War II lesson that appeasement never works, and the principle of warfare, Know your enemy.

Former deputy homeland security secretary Admiral James Loy testified before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that recent information showed that al Qaeda has calculated plans to infiltrate the Southwest border of the United States.
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It’s open. It’s easy. The Mexican government and pro-immigrant organizations even give out maps. And if you get caught, it’s no problem. Come back later. Just like what the UN forces did in Lebanon to the terrorists trying to infiltrate into Israel. Catch them, let them go, and they can try again. A notorious Latino street gang, which refers to itself as MS-13, is being recruited by al Qaeda for help. This gang is based in Mexico and Los Angeles and is helping the terrorist group penetrate our borders.
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There are more than three thousand MS-13 gang members in Washington, D.C., alone.
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It is comforting to know that there are so many potential terrorists residing in our nation’s capital ready to work for a payoff. A growing number of people categorized as “other than Mexicans” (OTMs) are citizens from other countries that are aggressive to the United States: Iran, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, and Afghanistan.
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Calling these infiltrators OTMs make it sound as if they are some miscellaneous group of the “other” category, when in fact most of them are terrorists looking for a way into our country.

Think about the Roman Empire, the greatest civilization of its time. What brought down the Roman Empire? It was decay from within. What brought down the Greek Empire? Decay from within. You are seeing the beginning of the demise of the greatest nation in the world, the United States of America, because of a cancer that eats and devours from within. Neither the Islamo-fascists nor any nation can ever defeat us militarily; we are the one and only superpower. But if we allow them continued, unabated access, they can definitely wound us with terror tactics and strategically placed weapons of mass destruction. We are giving them the tools and allowing them to let us commit suicide. They are watching as divisions among us in the press, across the nation, and in the government on policy and the war on terror are destroying us from within.

While elements on the extreme left, both private and elected, are attacking our troops' morale and constricting our intelligence agencies, our media are demonizing and destroying America’s image throughout the world. Al Jazeera loves what is being handed them on a silver platter. The radical Muslims laugh watching our government bend over backward, trying to appease the critics by constantly defending itself for protecting us from those who wish to do us harm. They love the press in America unwittingly doing such a good job doing their bidding digging up classified information such as our prisons in Europe that the Arab press can sling around.

They smirk because the stupid Americans have demonstrated how weak and spineless they are by caving in to stories about maltreatment of Guantánamo detainees or who hurt whose feelings at Abu Ghraib. They are watching our critics in this country and counting on them to embolden the radical Islamic cause and weaken our resolve. The more we stumble over ourselves questioning our goals and tactics, the more they think we are weak and easy to defeat.

Americans bashing America has become so fashionable that some people are wearing their anti-Americanism on their arms as a badge of honor. Politicians and Hollywood stars speaking against our government here and abroad have become the norm. Every critical word they utter is immediately transmitted via satellite and the Internet throughout the world. It will air on Al Jazeera before most Americans have seen it themselves. When Democratic senator Dick Durbin criticized America for its policy at Gitmo, for example, the story spread around the world like lightning. It was the most downloaded story on Al Jazeera within hours of his statements. Title 18 of the U.S. Code defines “treason” as follows: “Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death.” Someone agreeing with and providing words that encourage and support the goals of our enemy is a traitor in my book. Under the legal definition of treason there are grounds to indict virtually the entire Democratic leadership of the United States of America and most of the allegedly “free press.” I would apply it immediately to media outlets that reveal secret programs we are using to protect our country such as the NSA spying program.