No Immunity from Radical Islam

Naveed Haq has just been convicted of aggravated murder for killing one woman and injuring five others in a shooting spree at the offices of the Seattle Jewish Federation. He had pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, but at the trial the prosecution produced the recording of a telephone call from jail in which Haq told his mother, “You should be proud me. I’m a martyr now … I’m a soldier now, I’m a soldier of Islam.”

Haq’s conviction followed by only a couple of days the airing on CNN of the Fareed Zakaria documentary Terror in Mumbai that I wrote about a few weeks ago. Clearly, as Zakaria advertized on his GPS television show, the most chilling parts of the film were the recordings of the telephone conversations between the ten terrorists and their handler in Pakistan. Because of a stroke of sheer luck, the Mumbai police force, which, as the film clearly shows, was grossly incompetent during the crisis, was able to tap into the handler’s phone throughout most of the crisis.

The terrorists’ handler was able to get every terrorist to submit totally to his will. He was able to watch and hear each separate attack in Mumbai unfold on television and on his phone.  Continually, he ordered each of them to kill people indiscriminately — and to keep killing. Whenever one of the terrorists appeared hesitant to kill, or got distracted from this task, he was pressured into getting back to shooting or throwing grenades.  For instance, from their telephone conversations with the handler, it seems that two terrorists at Chabad House, a Jewish religious center, were reluctant to obey orders to kill their six hostages. The handler insisted that the hostages be lined and shot while he was on the line so that he could be certain that his orders were carried out. When their ammunition and their provisions ran out, each terrorist was supposed to either let himself be killed in a battle with police or commit suicide. At all costs, the terrorists were to avoid being captured.  In order to get the terrorists to summon the willpower to die, the handler tells them, “You are close to heaven.”

Zakaria devotes much of the commentary at the end of the film to the handler’s success in getting the terrorists to submit to his will. He argues that the terrorist leaders in Pakistan would not be able to recruit young Muslims to sacrifice their lives for their religion if they were not living desperate lives devoid of any hope of fulfillment. Zakaria made some comments on terrorism on this week’s GPS. He predicted that America would never have the same problem that Europe is now having with homegrown Islamic extremism because it has always taken a more tolerant attitude towards Muslim immigrants than Europeans. As an example of what the increased influence of the anti-Muslim “far right” could produce Zakaria cited the recent Swiss vote in favor of banning the minaret, the 20-foot tower that is sometime built alongside of mosques. Zakaria claimed that Americans have generally taken a more tolerant and inclusive attitude towards Muslims than Europeans, and therefore the radicalization of Islam is less of a threat on the western shore of the Atlantic.

Now Zakaria is probably right to speculate that the existence of genuine economic opportunities for the young in Muslim countries would significantly impair the ability of terrorist leaders to attract such youths to their struggle. Being busy working, and holding a significant stake in their society’s progress, would greatly reduce the attractiveness of radical Islam and of a terrorist career.

Yet economic opportunity is no panacea for the terrorist problem. Instead of being a consequence of terror, terror has sometimes been chosen at the expense of economic development.  For example, there is abundant evidence showing that Palestine’s Arabs have benefited greatly from the influx of Jews at the beginning of the twentieth century. But by choosing to oppose Jewish immigration and Israel’s establishment and existence, instead of joining in the Zionist enterprise, the Arabs sacrificed further economic development and improvement in their living standards to their efforts to kill Jews and destroy Israel.

Zakaria is also right to claim that the vote to ban minarets was overkill. Muslims make up a very small segment of Switzerland’s population, there are very few mosques, and only four of them have minarets. But Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes points out that the ban, even in the unlikely event that it would be enacted, would not have “any effect on the practice of Islam.” He points out that it would have neither prevented the building of new mosques nor require the dismantling of existing minarets.

Rather than being an indicator of the intolerance of the Swiss, or of the new influence of far-right anti-immigrant political parties, the popular support for the ban might be more a reaction to – rather than a cause of – Islamic militancy. Christopher Caldwell, the author of a new and highly-acclaimed book about the impact of Islamic immigration on Europe, Reflections On The Revolutions In Europe, claims that the Libyan government may have strongly influenced the outcome of the vote. The Swiss import 40,000 barrels of Libyan oil per day, and Caldwell writes that Muammar Qaddafi is rarely out of the Swiss headlines. In the summer of 2008, Qaddafi’s son was arrested in a Geneva hotel for beating up two servants. To retaliate, Qaddafi took two Swiss businessmen hostage. The price for their release was an apology from the Swiss government. The Swiss provided an apology, delivered personally to Qaddafi by a high-ranking Swiss statesman. But he returned home without the Swiss hostages.

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat provided another explanation for the Swiss support of the minaret ban.

Millions of Muslims have accepted European norms. But millions have not. This means polygamy in Sweden; radical mosques in Britain’s fading industrial cities; riots over affronts to the Prophet Muhammad in Denmark; and religiously inspired murder in the Netherlands. It means terrorism and the threat of terrorism from London to Madrid.

And it means a rising backlash in which European voters support extreme measures and extremist parties because their politicians don’t seem to have anything to say about the problem.

The assumption that radical Islam cannot make significant inroads in America is naive. It already has.  Attacks like those at Fort Hood and in Seattle are just the latest of a series in which the perpetrators were inspired by Islam. If North Americans are not generally aware that radical Islam has arrived, it may be because, as Jonathan Mark last week pointed out in the New York Jewish Week, these attacks are largely ignored by the mainstream media; and, when they are covered, they are dismissed as “instant jihad”, a manifestation of temporary insanity. But the Anti-Defamation League now claims that Haq’s attack is thematically linked to other incidents in Illinois, North Carolina, Arkansas, New York City, New Jersey, California, Virginia, Florida and Oregon.

The most serious plot uncovered so far – in Toronto, Canada – was documented by Drew Griffin on an episode of CNN’s Special Investigations Unit that aired last weekend immediately after Terror in Mumbai. The “Toronto 18” was a group of young Muslims who were plotting to simultaneously blow up three office towers in Canada’s largest city and financial capital. Potentially, their plot could have killed thousands. The plot would have succeeded had the group planning the attack not been infiltrated by a police mole and had the authorities not had the would-be terrorists under intensive surveillance.

The prospective terrorists were high-school friends, who played soccer together, and who apparently had bright futures awaiting them. They turned to terror, not because of anything lacking in their own lives, but because of what they perceived as injustices committed against Muslims around the world. The story of the “Toronto 18” shows again that against the individuals and the groups who deliberately take innocent human life randomly – be they in Toronto, Seattle, Mumbai, or Israel – only the application of violent force without mercy can be effective.