Jihad's campus collaborators

By Caroline B. Glick      
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | The general tendency of Westerners
is to view global jihad as a foreign policy issue. But today it is
clear that it is also a domestic policy issue.
Over the weekend The Sunday Telegraph reported that a recently
circulated British intelligence report warned: “The terrorist threat
facing Britain from home-grown al-Qaida agents is higher than at any
time since the September 11 attacks in 2001.”
After foiling the jihadist plot to down US-bound British passenger
aircraft last summer, MI5 director Eliza Manningham-Buller claimed that
there are some 1,600 British Muslims actively involved in plotting
attacks against Britain. According to the intelligence report cited in
the Sunday Telegraph, today that number exceeds 2,000. As one senior
British political source told the newspaper, “The Security Services
have constantly warned that the task of countering Islamic terrorism is
a daunting one. There will be more attacks in Britain.”
It is not surprising that Britain faces the specter of mass attacks
carried out by its own citizens in the name of Allah. Repeated exposes
of the goings-on in British mosques and in supposedly “moderate”
British Muslim communal organizations have shown unequivocally that
they are being used as indoctrination centers for jihad.
A poll published last month by Britain's Policy Exchange think tank
bore out the poisonous impact this indoctrination has had on young
Muslims in the country. Thirty-seven percent of British Muslims between
the ages of 16-24 would rather live under Shari'a law than under
British Common Law; 36 percent think Muslims should be killed if they
convert to another religion; 13 percent admire al-Qaida and similar
terror groups; and a whopping 74 percent of young British Muslims
believe women should wear veils.  
WHILE IT is true that in the US the danger of home-grown jihadists to
national security is lower than it is in Britain, it is also true that
there is a growing phenomenon of jihadist violence being perpetrated by
Muslim men against American civilians in the name of jihad.
Ten days ago, the Investors Business Daily published an editorial
enumerating a partial list of acts of terrorism carried out by Muslim
men against their fellow Americans since the September 11 attacks. Most
recently, Sulejman Talovic entered a shopping mall in Salt Lake City,
murdered five and wounded four unsuspecting shoppers before being
killed by an off-duty police officer.
As was the case when Derrick Shareef, another Muslim male, was arrested
in early December for plotting to carry out a similar attack at a
shopping mall in Illinois just before Christmas, the media and the law
enforcement agencies covering the Salt Lake City massacre have made
light of the fact that the perpetrator was a Muslim.
While Talovic is dead and so cannot explain his motives to authorities,
Shareef was arrested after telling an FBI informant of his plans to
murder Jews specifically and Americans in particular for Allah. As
Shareef told the informant, “I swear by Allah man, I'm down for it too.
I'm down for the cause. I'm down to live for the cause and die for the
cause, man.”  
SHAREEF'S protestations of jihadist ardor made little impression on
either federal authorities or the media. Upon announcing Shareef's
arrest, US Federal Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald insisted that he was
acting on his own and that he had no outside inspiration for his
decision to commit mass murder for Allah. As was the case with Talovic
and with Naveed Afzal Haq, who murdered one woman and wounded five
during his shooting rampage at the Seattle Jewish Federation last July,
the media and federal authorities have hushed up and failed to
investigate the jihadist motives for the Illinois attacker or link him
to any larger phenomenon.
The Investors Business Daily editorial ran under the headline “Sudden
jihad syndrome.” The term, which has been bandied about by law
enforcement officials in both the US and Britain in recent months,
encapsulates the view that Muslims can be incited and then move to
commit acts of murder in the name of Allah and jihad instantaneously.
The attractiveness of the “sudden jihad syndrome” explanation for
violent Islamic crime is clear. By arguing that the jihadists are
acting on their own after being mysteriously inspired by no one, law
enforcement officials and the media are relieved of the thankless task
of investigating mosques, Muslim advocacy groups and Islamic centers,
where the jihadist indoctrination is conducted on a daily basis.
IT IS hard to know what to make of this view. Perhaps there is
something to it. Perhaps the message of jihad is so strong that young
Muslim men can be inspired to shoot pregnant women in office buildings
after the notion of murder for Allah enters the transoms of their minds
independently of other outside factors — through vapors or spontaneous
generation perhaps.
What is clear enough is that since this is the view that is informing
policymakers, law enforcement officials and the media in handling a
clear trend of jihadist murder, it requires serious empirical study.
The obvious place for that research to take place is in the
universities.
Unfortunately, there can be little hope that universities in the US or
in the West in general will devote any serious consideration to this
most important sociological, psychological and national security trend.
Far from being willing to study the most central issue of our times,
universities are leading the charge in either ignoring it, or
apologizing for it.
On February 15, the Iraqi Ambassador to the UN, Hamid Al Bayati, spoke
at New York's Fordham University. During the course of his remarks,
Bayati doubted the fact that the Holocaust had occurred. In his words,
“I'm not aware of any dictator who used chemical weapons against his
own people. Some academics or diplomats would say Hitler used chemical
weapons, but I am sure he didn't use them against his own people — his
German people.”
When pressed by law professor Avi Bell on the fact that several hundred
thousand German citizens were gassed to death by Nazi Germany, Bayati
still refused to take the point.
Fordham University is far from alone in providing a platform for
Holocaust deniers. Last Thursday the Dean's office at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology co-sponsored an event on the Arab-Israel
conflict called, “Foreign Policy and Social Justice: A Jewish View, a
Muslim View.” The man invited to provide the Jewish view was Dovid
Weiss, a member of the crackpot Neturei Karta sect. Weiss rose to
prominence when he traveled to Teheran last December to participate in
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial conference.
While MIT and Fordham were hosting Holocaust deniers in the name of
intellectual freedom, their fellow universities were hosting “Israel
Apartheid Week.” As part of their efforts to criminalize the Jewish
state, Arab and Jewish speakers at “Israel Apartheid Week” events refer
to Israel as “1948 Palestine” and show propaganda films portraying IDF
soldiers and Israeli civilians in Judea and Samaria as murderers.
The events are generally sponsored by the International Solidarity
Movement. In addition to their campus outreach, the ISM sponsors the
weekly riots against the security fence in Bil'in and in Hebron, where
its protesters throw rocks at IDF soldiers. Given the violent content
of their actions in Israel, it should come as no surprise that their
events on US campuses also breed violence.
At an “Israel Apartheid Week” event at City University of New York,
after watching a propaganda film, 19-year old Binyamin Rister rose and
politely asked the ISM presenters if they supported terrorism. When he
received no reply he politely repeated the question. Rather than wait
for an answer, CUNY security guards dragged Rister from the room and
then repeatedly banged his head against the wall of an elevator and
threw him head first down the stairs. Rister's injuries from the
assault by campus security required him to be evacuated by ambulance in
a neck brace to the hospital.
In an almost identical case at Georgetown last year, Bill Maniaci a
65-year-old retired Jewish American police officer was brutalized by
Georgetown security guards after he asked ISM spokesmen if they
supported terrorism. He is currently suing Georgetown for $8 million in
damages for the assault. According to Lee Kaplan's report of the CUNY
event in Frontpage Magazine, there were seven witnesses to the
unprovoked attack against Rister. He too has filed a multi-million
dollar lawsuit against CUNY.  
EVEN THOSE propounding the view that jihadist murderers in the US and
Britain are inspired to kill after being brought under the spell of the
“sudden jihad syndrome” cannot deny that the root of the jihad is
ideas. Similarly, it is self-evident that the key to beating the global
jihad is victory in the battlefield of ideas. Unfortunately, as the
pro-jihadist trend on US and Western campuses, and its impact on idea
consumers in law enforcement, the media and policy circles throughout
the free world shows, to the extent that those charged with engaging in
the battle of ideas are engaged, they fight on the side of the enemy.
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