President Obama's Ayatollah Explains Islam to the Muslims

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
28 May '10
Posted before Shabbat

The president’s advisor on terrorism, John Brennan, who I’ve dubbed the worst foreign policy official in the Obama Administration, has made a new statement that is very interesting and deserves serious debate, not just dismissal or endorsement.

You can see his basic line as it has developed, with full administration support, over the last year:

“Nor does President Obama see this challenge as a fight against jihadists. Describing terrorists in this way, using the legitimate term `jihad,' which means to purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal, risks giving these murderers the religious legitimacy they desperately seek but in no way deserve. Worse, it risks reinforcing the idea that the United States is somehow at war with Islam itself. And this is why President Obama has confronted this perception directly and forcefully in its speeches to Muslim audiences, declaring that America is not and never will be at war with Islam.”

Brennan also said that the United States is not at war with “terror,” which is merely a tactic, but only with al-Qaida.

There are two issues here:

1. Should U.S. strategy be to make a theological judgment about the relationship of Jihad and Islam, deciding what is the "proper" Muslim stance?

2. Should U.S. strategy be to declare that there is a war only with al-Qaida and not with terrorism or anyone else?

Regarding the first point, for Ayatollah Brennan to define jihad as peaceful and for “a moral goal” is ludicrous.

(Read full post)

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Obama’s Anti-Israel Jihad

Robert Spencer
Frontpagemag.com
06 April '10

Greg Sheridan, Foreign Editor of The Australian, recently wrote that “Barack Obama’s anti-Israel jihad is one of the most irresponsible policy lurches by any modern American president.” This is true not solely because Israel has been a reliable and loyal American ally, and is the only free society in the Middle East. Obama’s animus toward Israel and bullying of our longtime ally is irresponsible because the President is simultaneously ignoring the steep rise in jihad activity by Muslims in the U.S. and U.S-born Muslims since he took office.

“Jihad is becoming as American as apple pie and as British as afternoon tea” – so said the American-born Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaqi recently. Al-Awlaqi, who was in contact with Nidal Hasan, the jihadist who murdered thirteen Americans at Fort Hood in November 2009, and with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the jihadist who tried to bring down an airplane as it landed in Detroit on Christmas day, had plenty of reason to claim that “jihad is becoming as American as apple pie”: evidence of U.S. Muslims engaging in terrorism grows every day.

Last week a Chicago-based Muslim, David Headley, a.k.a. Daood Gilani, pled guilty to going on a reconnaissance mission to find targets for the devastating 2008 jihad attacks in Mumbai, in which over 150 people were murdered. Gilani also participated in a plot to bomb a newspaper in Denmark that published cartoons of the Muslim prophet Muhammad. Also last week, Sharif Mobley, a Muslim from New Jersey, was arrested in Yemen over his ties to Al-Qaeda and his murder of a guard in an escape attempt.

The week before that, two American Muslim women, both of whom are converts to Islam, were arrested for their involvement in a plot to murder the Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks for his cartoon of the Muslim prophet Muhammad as a dog. One has since been released, although her mother and stepfather have voiced concerns about how she is teaching her six-year-old son to hate Christians and believe that Muslims must wage war against them.

(Read full article)
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