by Mark Steyn
But Islam is not just a religion. Those lefties who bemoan what America is doing to provoke “the Muslim world” would go bananas if any Western politician started referring to “the Christian world.” When such sensitive guardians of the separation of church and state endorse the first formulation but not the second, they implicitly accept that Islam has a political sovereignty too. There is an “Organization of the Islamic Conference”: it’s like the EU and the Commonwealth and the G-8—that is, an organization of nation states whose heads of government hold regular meetings. It’s the largest bloc on the new UN Human Rights Council, which explains why that pitiful joke of a council does nothing for human rights. Imagine if someone proposed an “Organization of the Christian Conference” that would hold summits attended by prime ministers and presidents and voted as a bloc in transnational bodies. And Islam is also a legal code. There is no “Christian law”: indeed, English Common Law and France’s Napoleonic Code are very different philosophically.
So it’s not merely that there’s a global jihad lurking within this religion, but that the religion itself is a political project—and, in fact, an imperial project—in a way that modern Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism are not. Furthermore, this particular religion is historically a somewhat bloodthirsty faith in which whatever’s your bag violence-wise can almost certainly be justified. And, yes, Christianity has had its blood-drenched moments, but the Spanish Inquisition, which remains a byword for theocratic violence, killed fewer people in a century and a half than the jihad does in a typical year.
So we have a global terrorist movement insulated within a global political project insulated within a severely self-segregating religion whose adherents are the fastest-growing demographic in the developed world. The jihad thus has a very potent brand inside a highly dispersed and very decentralized network much more efficient than anything the CIA can muster. And these fellows can hide in plain sight. As the Times of London reported in 2006:
An American al Qaeda operative who was a close associate of the leader of the July 7 bombers was recruited at a New York mosque that British militants helped to run. British radicals regularly travelled to the Masjid Fatima Islamic Centre, in Queens, to organise sending American volunteers to jihadi training camps in Pakistan. Investigators reportedly found that Mohammad Sidique Khan had made calls to the mosque last year in the months before he led the terrorist attack on London that killed 52 innocent people.
Mohammad Junaid Babar, one recruit from the Masjid Fatima Islamic Centre, has told US intelligence officials that he met Khan in a jihadi training camp in Pakistan in July 2003. He claims that the pair became friends as they studied how to assemble explosive devices. Babar, 31, a computer programmer, says that it was at the Masjid Fatima centre that he became a radical.
And so it goes. The mosques are recruiters for the jihad and play an important role in ideological subordination and cell discipline. In globalization terms, that’s a perfect model. Unlike the Soviets, it’s a franchise business rather than owner-operated; the Commies had “deep sleepers” who had to be “controlled” in a very hierarchical chain. But who needs that with Islam? Not long after September 11, I said, just as an aside, that these days whenever something goofy turns up on the news chances are it involves some fellow called Mohammed. It was a throwaway line, but if you want to compile chapter and verse, you can add to the list every week.
A plane flies into the World Trade Center? Mohammed Atta.
A sniper starts killing gas station customers around Washington, D.C.? John Allen Muhammed.
A guy fatally stabs a Dutch movie director? Mohammed Bouyeri.
A gunman shoots up the El Al counter at Los Angeles airport? Hesham Mohamed Hedayet.
A terrorist slaughters dozens in Bali? Noordin Mohamed.
A British subject self-detonates in a Tel Aviv bar? Asif Mohammed Hanif.
A terrorist cell bombs the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania? Ali Mohamed.
A gang rapist preys on the women of Sydney? Mohammed Skaf.
A group of Dearborn, Michigan, men charged with cigarette racketeering in order to fund Hezbollah? Fadi Mohamad-Musbah Hammoud, Mohammed Fawzi Zeidan, and Imad Mohamad-Musbah Hammoud.
A Canadian terror cell is arrested for plotting to bomb Ottawa and behead the prime minister? Mohammed Dirie, Amin Mohamed Durrani, and Yasim Abdi Mohamed.
These last three represent a “broad strata” of Canadian society, according to Mike McDonnell, assistant commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and a man who must have aced Sensitivity Training class. To the casual observer, the broad strata would seem to be a very singular stratum: in their first appearance in court, all twelve men arrested in that Ontario plot requested the Koran.
When I made my observation about multiple Mohammeds in the news, Merle Ricklefs, a professor at the National University of Singapore and South-East Asian editor of the sixteen-volume Encyclopedia of Islam, remarked sarcastically, “Deep thinking, indeed.” Well, gosh, maybe it’s not terribly sophisticated. But then again, when you’re dealing with fellows who decapitate female aid workers in Iraq and engage in mass slaughter of Russian schoolchildren, maybe sophistication isn’t always helpful. Particularly when sophistication seems mostly to be a form of obfuscation by experts wedded to the notion that Islam is something that simply can’t be understood unless you’ve read all sixteen volumes of their Encyclopedia, or, better yet, written them. For those of us who aren’t professors of Islamic studies, the obvious course is to step back and try to work from first principles: What’s happening? Who’s doing it? The five-thousand-guys-named-Mo routine meets the “reasonable man” test: it’s the first thing an averagely well-informed person who’s not a multiculti apologist notices—here’s the evening news and here comes another Mohammed.
Sophisticates object that very few of the Mohammeds on the list above are formal agents of al Qaeda. But so what? There are no “card-carrying members” of this enemy: that’s what makes them an ever bigger threat. You don’t need to plant sleepers. The September 11 fellows were an official al Qaeda cell, Richard Reid the shoe-bomber had some loose al Qaeda connections, the Washington snipers and the LAX murderer were just ideological sympathizers who woke up one morning and decided to take a crack at freelance jihadism. If you’ve got a big pool of manpower and a big idea that’s just out there all the time—24/7, flickering away invitingly like a neon sign in the Western darkness—that’s enough to cause a big heap of trouble. As I mentioned earlier, Mohammed is the most popular boy’s name in Brussels and Amsterdam and many other places, so evidently only a tiny proportion of Mohammeds kill and bomb and fly planes into skyscrapers. Nonetheless, as a point of fact, Mohammed is:
(a) the most popular baby boy’s name in much of the Western world
(b) the most common name for terrorists and murderers
(c) the name of the revered Prophet of the West’s fastest-growing religion
It’s at the intersection of these statistics—religious, demographic, terrorist—that a dark future awaits.
One further point: there are minimal degrees of separation between all these Mohammeds and the most eminent figures in the Muslim world and the critical institutions at the heart of the West. For example, in 2003, Abdurahman Alamoudi was jailed for attempting to launder money from a Libyan terror-front “charity” into Syria via London. Who’s Abdurahman Alamoudi? He’s the guy who until 1998 certified Muslim chaplains for the United States military, under the aegis of his Saudi-funded American Muslim Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs Council. In 1993, at an American military base, at a ceremony to install the first imam in the nation’s armed forces, it was Mr. Alamoudi who presented him with his new insignia of a silver crescent star.
He’s also the fellow who helped devise the three-week Islamic awareness course in California public schools, in the course of which students adopt Muslim names, wear Islamic garb, give up candy and TV for Ramadan, memorize suras from the Koran, learn that “ji
had” means “internal personal struggle,” profess the Muslim faith, and recite prayers that begin “In the name of Allah,” etc. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals—the same court that ruled the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional because of the words “under God”—decided in this case that making seventh graders play Muslim for two weeks was perfectly fine, just an interesting exposure to a fascinating “culture” from which every pupil can benefit. Separation of church and state? That may be, but nobody said nuthin’ about separation of mosque and state.
Oh, and, aside from his sterling efforts on behalf of multicultural education, Mr. Alamoudi was also an adviser on Islamic matters to Hillary Rodham Clinton.
And it turns out he’s a bagman for terrorists.
Infiltration-wise, I would say that’s pretty good. The arthritic desk jockeys at the CIA insist, oh no, it would be impossible for them to get any of their boys inside al Qaeda. Can’t be done. But the other side has no difficulty setting their chaps up in the heart of the U.S. military, and the U.S. education system, and the U.S. political establishment, and the offices of U.S. senators and former First Ladies.
Richard Reid, the shoe-bomber, was converted to radical Islamism while in prison by a chaplain who came to Britain under a fast-track immigration program for imams set up by Her Majesty’s Government. They felt they had a shortage of Muslim chaplains, and not knowing much about the mullah business or where to look for ’em, felt it easiest to put up a big sign at Heathrow saying, “Hey, imams, come on down.” It all seemed to be working well until they noticed that these guys appeared to be the spiritual mentors of a lot of the wackiest terrorists.
The jihad’s marketing strategists singled out the prison populations of North America, Australia, and Western Europe as a ripe target demographic. Granted, a lot of religions seek to convert the fallen, but, to be honest, a wimp church like the Congregational crowd doesn’t have much appeal to the average jailbird. The salient feature about Islamism is that, if you’re a violent thug, embracing this particular religion doesn’t mean having to do anything icky like help with the church bazaar or be nice to gay people. As an Islamist, you can pretty much carry on doing all the things you like doing and the only difference is you’ll be doing them for your new religion: you can lie, cheat, steal, rape, kill women and children, and as long as you’re doing it for Allah and his victory over the infidels, it’s cool. So we have not just a global terrorist movement and a global political project but a global gang culture insulated within the West’s fastest-growing demographic.
If you’re thinking of profiling dodgy-looking fellows with beards and robes when you’re next on the subway, how are you going to spot Assem Hammoud? Arrested for plotting to blow up the Holland Tunnel, Mr. Hammoud said he had been ordered by Osama bin Laden to “live the life of a playboy…live a life of fun and indulgence.” That way he would avoid detection. Cunning, eh? Just to show how seriously he took his assignment, there was a picture of Assem with a trio of burqa-less hot-ties on a “mission” in Canada, looking like a traveling man who’s decided to blow the last night of expenses on the three-girl special. What a master of disguise. “I was proud,” declared Mr. Hammoud, “to carry out my orders”—even though they required him to booze it up and bed beautiful infidels all week long. But it’s okay, because he was nailing chicks for Allah. So he gamely put on a brave show of partying like it’s 1999 even though, as a devout Muslim, he’d obviously much rather party like it’s 799.
As religious fanaticism goes, that doesn’t sound to me like a movement that’s going to have recruitment problems.
In globalized terms, Islam is a unitary ideology with multiple appeals. For the likes of Zac Moussaoui and Richard Reid, it’s the ultimate global gang; for many European females, it’s a refuge from the slatternly image of post-feminist Western womanhood; for Assem Hammoud, it’s a great way to meet slatternly Western women; for impressionable types from John Walker Lindh to the Prince of Wales, its eastern exoticism has more appeal than the dreary occidental faiths; for a particular strain of old-school bigotry, it’s the current home for up-to-the-minute thinking about the international Jewish conspiracy; for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and the slaughterers of the Beslan schoolchildren and the death cultists of Hamas, it’s the ultimate in nihilist depravity. A while back I took my little girl to a science exhibition in Vermont and we spent a fun half-hour flipping balls into one of those big mechanical contraptions full of levels and runways and elevators. But no matter which corner of the table you tossed the ball in, eventually it dropped into a little bucket and was deposited in the hole in the center. That’s the way it is with the ideology du jour: you come at it from the Richard Reid or the John Walker Lindh or the Taliban end, but you all drop down the same big hole in the center.
We still have no strategy for dealing with the ideology. Indeed, for the first few years of the war on “terror,” our leaders declined to acknowledge there was an ideology. And, as the years roll on, groups with terrorist ties are still able to insert their recruiters into America’s military bases, prisons, and pretty much anywhere else they get a yen to go. How come? What gives the jihad its global reach? It’s not difficult to figure out: Wahhabism is the most militant form of Islam, the one followed by all nineteen of the September 11 terrorists and by Osama bin Laden. The Saudis, whose state religion is Wahhabism, export their faith and affiliated local strains in lavishly endowed schools and mosques all over the world and, as a result, traditionally moderate Muslim populations from the Balkans to South Asia have been dramatically radicalized.
That kind of operation doesn’t come cheap. So who pays for it?
You do. After September 11, George W. Bush told the world, “You’re either with us or with the terrorists.” In fact, much of the world is with neither, and much of the rest is with both. And why should anyone take the president’s demand to choose sides seriously when America itself refuses to: the United States is both “with us” and “with the terrorists.” American taxpayers are in the onerous position of funding both sides in this war. In the five years after September 11, the price of oil rose from $12 per barrel to hit an all-time high of $70—so, if you sell oil, your revenues are five times what they were. And there’s nothing like bigger oil windfalls to drive powerful despots down ever crazier paths. “Looking at it another way,” wrote Frank Gaffney in his book War Footing, “Saudi Arabia—which currently exports about ten mbd [million barrels of oil a day]—receives an extra half billion dollars every day.” Where does that extra half-bil go? It goes to the mosques and madrassas that the Saudis fund in every corner of the planet. Oil isn’t the principal Saudi export, ideology is—petroleum merely bankrolls it.
How could the federal government be so complacent as to subcontract the certification of chaplains in U.S. military bases to Wahhabist institutions?
Well, because they didn’t notice it until it was too late—like SARS in that Toronto hospital. If your idea of globalization is a McDonald’s in Belgrade or a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Lahore, who’s running the imams in British and American jails doesn’t seem terribly important. The Saudis fund mosques that radicalize distant Muslim populations from Indonesia to Oregon, and schools that turn out terrorists on every continent on the face of the Earth. They set up Islamic lobby groups that put spies in our military bases and terror recruiters in our prisons. They endow think tanks that buy up and neuter the massed ranks of retired diplomats, and assistant secretaries of state, and national security advisers: as the journalist Matt Welch remarked, if you close your eyes, America’s ex-ambassadors to Saudi Arabia sound like they’re Saudi.
Oh, and the wife of the Saudi ambassador to America “accidentally” funded the September 11 killers: Princess Haifa makes monthly payments of several thousand dollars by cashier’s check from the Riggs Bank in Washington to Majeda Ibrahim, an allegedly financially strapped woman in Virginia she supposedly doesn’t know, and Majeda Ibrahim signs at least some of those checks over to a friend of hers who’s mar
ried to a guy in San Diego who’s paying the rent for Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhamzi, who subsequently fly Flight 77 into the Pentagon. Pure coincidence, say the smooth-talking Saudi princelings put up on the talk-show circuit when the story breaks. Could happen to any kind-hearted princess. And Barbara Bush, wife of the first President Bush, and Alma Powell, wife of Colin, call the princess to commiserate at all this unnecessary publicity.
For a bunch of ramshackle Bedouin, the Saudis got the hang of global networking quicker than the Canadians and Scandinavians.
GLOBAL TAKE-OUT
Which globalization is shaping the world? The movies or the madrassas? Burger King or Burqa King? Big Macs or Big Mo? A friend of mine recalled a Londoner asking him, a few weeks before the first McDonald’s opened in Britain, what exactly one of these American “fast-food restaurants” was. So my chum explained. “You eat the hamburger out of a polystyrene carton?” marveled the Englishman. “Good grief, they’ll lose their shirts. That’s never going to catch on.” Americans think nothing of changing the world’s dining habits or entertainment tastes but recoil at the notion that cultural imperialism might cut a little deeper, and extend to, say, theories of government and liberty. Whether or not you can “give” people freedom, all over the world Middle Eastern Islamists have given millions of Asians and Africans and Europeans (and, yes, North Americans) an ideology and identity that hitherto they never knew they wanted. And it’s hard to argue it kinda snuck up on us. In 1871, John Norman, the acting chief justice of India, was stabbed to death by a Wahhabi called Abdullah. The following year, the viceroy, Lord Mayo, was also fatally stabbed, by a Wahhabi named Shere Ali. He declared that Allah was his “shereek” (accomplice) and, at the gallows, was reciting verses from the Koran as the trap fell.