Jihad Denial Syndrome

From The Hill and Act! For America:

Jihad Denial Syndrome




By Guy Rodgers, executive director of ACT! for America

June 24, 2010



www.thehill.com
See no jihad. Hear no jihad. Speak no jihad.



This sums up the Obama administration's national security assessment regarding our ongoing conflict with global Islamic jihad. Unfortunately for us, it seems they have come down with a severe case of Jihad Denial Syndrome (JDS).



Americans were tipped off to this when the Pentagon released its report on the Fort Hood jihadist attack. The mountains of evidence, including Nidal Hasan screaming "Allahu Akbar" as he fired away, indisputably revealed that Hasan was motivated by the ideology of jihad.



Yet the body of the Pentagon report achieves the remarkable feat of avoiding a single mention of "radical Islam," "jihad" or any similar reference.



The recent National Security Strategy document affirmed that what happened in the Ft. Hood report was no accident or oversight. Stripped from the document were all references to radical Islam as a factor in the increasing number of terrorist attacks attempted against the United States.



Then came Attorney General Eric Holder's tongue-tied response to U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith's simple question about the recent spate of terrorist incidents asking if Holder "believe[d] these individuals might have been incited to take the actions they did because of radical Islam?"



As if affirming the obvious might instantly turn him into a leper, Holder couldn't bring himself to acknowledge that radical Islam might have ever been a part of the motivation behind these attacks.



When pressed, he referred to Anwar al-Awlaki's views as a "version of Islam that is not consistent with it..."



On June 4, Todd Rosenblum, deputy undersecretary for the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Intelligence and Analysis, made a similar argument at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.



According to a report in Congressional Quarterly, he "...defended the Obama administration's decision to avoid using terms such as `jihadist' or `Islamist' to describe the enemy in the war on terrorism, saying such descriptions legitimize the rhetoric of criminals and extremists while denigrating true Islam."



This echoed what Obama counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan said in a recent speech: "Nor do we describe our enemy as jihadists or Islamists."



There can be no doubt: The Obama administration has made it official policy to silence any reference to "jihad," "radical Islam" or any related term by officials in its justice, defense, intelligence and counterterrorism branches.



This goes beyond political correctness. This is Jihad Denial Syndrome, an obsessive denial of reality that will encourage more terrorism and put America at greater risk.



It is also the height of hubris.



What the Obama administration is asserting is that it understands the doctrines of historic political Islam better than the leading Islamic clerics in the world today; better than the Islamic scholars who developed the sharia law within the five Islamic schools of jurisprudence; and better than the Prophet Muhammed, whose years of engaging in jihad to purge or conquer non-Muslims is an indisputable historical fact.



If this approach actually worked, we would be seeing a decline in Islamic terror plots against the United States. Yet the very opposite is true. There has been a significant ramping up of Islamist terrorist activity since Barack Obama became president.



This is not a blip but a quantifiable trend. There is no evidence that the Obama administration's Jihad Denial Syndrome has made America any safer. There is also no evidence that the existence of JDS within the Obama administration has marginalized those they call "extremists," minimized their numbers or won us any increased approval in the Muslim world.



President Obama and his national security leadership have bought into a false narrative promoted by organizations and leaders with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, such as CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) and ISNA (Islamic Society of North America). Dozens of such individuals have been placed in his administration, including Dalia Mogahed, a top Mideast adviser to Obama who made the astounding assertion last October that most women in the world associate sharia law with "gender justice."



The false narrative being peddled to the Obama administration includes redefining "jihad" as merely a "personal struggle against sin," which denies the historical and doctrinal centrality of violent jihad to political Islam and as a means to advance sharia law.



This narrative is integral to the disinformation campaign emanating from Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated organizations. The motto of the Muslim Brotherhood is this: "Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur'an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope."



During the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing trial, at which organizations including CAIR and ISNA were named as unindicted co-conspirators, the Muslim Brotherhood's Strategic Goal for North America was entered into evidence.



It states in part: "The Ikhwan must understand that all their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging their miserable house..."



What better way to sabotage a nation from within than to dupe its leadership regarding the true nature of, and motivation for, the threat that is arrayed against it?



The results of this administration's arrogance and foolishness speak for themselves.



Guy Rodgers is the executive director of ACT! for America, the nation's largest national security grassroots organization dedicated to combating the threat of radical Islam.



Source: http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/homeland-security/105243-jihad-denial-syndrome

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