“So potent was religion in persuading to evil deeds.” -Lucretius, 99-55 B.C. In his recent op-ed in the New York Times, ISIS Heads to Rome, Thomas Friedman writes, “The U.S. keeps repeating the same mistake in the Middle East: overestimating the power of religious ideology and underappreciating the impact of misgovernance.” He goes on to […]
Brooklyn Borough President plans Muslim outreach after arrests of Muslims plotting to join Islamic State, kill Obama
Like virtually all other authorities in the West, Eric Adams is assuming that if young Muslims from the West want to join the jihad, it’s our fault. He assumes that the U.S., or New York City, or the Borough of Brooklyn, or all of those and more, have not done all that they could have […]
Forbes: Five reasons the fight against the Islamic State isn’t about Islam
As I said yesterday, the Western intelligentsia is very, very anxious that you have a positive view of Islam. Thus we see a steady stream of articles in the mainstream media assuring you that the Qur’an is benign, the U.S. Constitution is Sharia-compliant, and the Islamic State is not Islamic. This goes for nominally “conservative” […]
FBI: NY jihadis “violated the true tenants of their faith”
“The defendants violated the true tenants of their faith in pursuit of their radical, violent agenda,” said FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge Diego Rodriguez. They violated some tenants? So apparently they are landlords? Have they been charged with rape? Seriously, what difference does it make if an FBI agent doesn’t know tenants from tenets? He’s paid to […]
Juan Cole: The Islamic State is not Islamic
The Western intelligentsia is very, very anxious that you have a positive view of Islam. Thus we see a steady stream of articles in the mainstream (and in this case, the far-Left, but the distinction between those two is increasingly fine) media assuring you that the Qur’an is benign, the U.S. Constitution is Sharia-compliant, and […]
Robert Spencer in FrontPage: Why Obama Won’t Call the Jihadis Islamic
An attempt to explain the mystery, over at FrontPage: Barack Obama aroused controversy over his affinity with Islam yet again in February 2015, when a photo surfaced from the U.S.-African Leaders’ Summit in August 2014, showing Obama passing by a group of African delegates with his right index finger raised in a gesture strongly reminiscent […]
Robert Spencer in PJM: My Heart-to-Heart with Obama
My imaginary dialogue with the President, from PJ Media: The world is on fire with Islamic jihad, and last Wednesday, after his Countering Violent Extremism summit, the President called me in to talk it over. Here is the dialogue we had:* OBAMA: Most recently, with the brutal murders in Chapel Hill of three young Muslim […]
Islamic State jihadis complain that “the Syrians do not know anything of the Islamic religion”
DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson just said that to call the Islamic State Islamic would be “dignifying them as occupying some form of Islam.” And so here we see the cognitive dissonance clearly: the Islamic State is impatient with Syrians whom they claim know nothing about Islam, and non-Muslim authorities in the West (and Muslim authorities […]
DHS Secretary: To call the Islamic State Islamic would be “dignifying them as occupying some form of Islam”
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson was reduced to stammering tautologies when George Stephanopoulos asked him why the Administration won’t call the Islamic State Islamic: “Now I have to say, when I travel around the country and meet with Muslim leaders in this country in these engagements that I have, they all tend to say pretty […]
Obama: “We are not at war with Islam. We are at war with people who have perverted Islam.”
The world is on fire with Islamic jihad, and so Obama holds a summit on “Countering Violent Extremism” and once again refuses to name the enemy. Remember when he was first elected, and the mainstream media was filled with confident predictions that he would reach out in such warm friendship to the Islamic world that […]