America is Spreading ISIS Around the World

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog 

 “More than 70 repatriation missions have returned 1,500 fighters to their home countries, yet much work remains,” Adm. Brad Cooper told a UN conference in New York. “Today, I join you all in calling on every nation with detained or displaced personnel in Syria to return your citizens.”

The ‘citizens’ and ‘fighters’ in question are ISIS. And some are coming here.

Even while one arm of the Trump administration is trying to deport Islamic terrorists and their supporters, another is trying to import them into our communities and around the world.

While ISIS is rebounding in Syria, carrying out 117 attacks, the United States has adopted the position that the tens of thousands of ISIS ‘detainees’ left over from the previous defeat of the Jihadist group have to be distributed around the region and the world including to the U.S.

When an Al Qaeda group known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) seized control over Syria, with backing from the Islamist terror regimes in Turkey and Qatar, the Trump administration had a choice between opposing the move or supporting it as a way of getting US troops out of Syria.

The Trump administration dropped sanctions and a $10 million bounty on the head of former Al Qaeda leader and ISIS ally Ahmed al-Sharaa (formerly Abu Mohammed al-Jolani) who along with some of his former Al Qaeda associates was able to tour New York City. Widely reported attacks on Christians, Druze and other minority groups by Sunni Jihadists soon followed.

But the real and much less widely reported issue for the United States that hardly anyone was talking about were the tens of thousands of ISIS detainees being held by the Kurdish militias known as the Syrian Democratic Forces. Unlike the Sunni Jihadist groups that were touted as ‘democratic’ during the heyday of the Syrian Civil War, the SDF is non-Islamist, includes Christians and women, does have Marxist roots, but is the only non-Jihadist game in town.

Turkey’s Islamist regime is obsessed with suppressing the Kurds in its own country and in those areas that its ruler, Erdogan, wants to expand into to rebuild the Ottoman caliphate, like Syria. During the ISIS war, Turkey covertly backed Al Qaeda, ISIS and other Jihadist groups to attack the Kurds. Erdogan did not go to all this trouble just to leave the SDF intact and operational.

The ISIS camps contain at least 9,000 ISIS Jihadis and around 30,000 ISIS family members, who maintain their own mini-ISIS state within the camps, with mothers preparing their children for an endless war. They all pose a significant national security threat wherever they go.

The Trump administration might have insisted that Erdogan leave SDF alone enough to be able to control the camps and keep those inside from breaking out or detain ISIS inside Turkey.

But the man in charge of our Turkey and Syria policy is Tom Barrack, a major Lebanese Arab donor and Jeffrey Epstein associate (Epstein reportedly gifted Barrack an $11,000 watch) who had previously been in court for acting as an unregistered foreign agent of a Muslim oil country (he was acquitted) and whose speeches can be hard to distinguish from Turkish propaganda.

Barrack bemoaned that under Western colonialism, “Sykes-Picot divided Syria” by which Arab nationalists generally mean Greater Syria, but at the same time insisting that federalism for Kurds and Druze is a non-starter because “you can’t have independent non-nation states within a nation.” Barrack reportedly purged American diplomats supportive of the Kurdish militias.

Officially, the new Al Qaeda regime is supposed to take control of all the Kurdish areas, including the ISIS detention camps, but the deal hasn’t been implemented because no one trusts Al Qaeda, and meanwhile we’re pushing other countries to take their ISIS terrorists.

According to a “Syrian military strategist”, the push to export ISIS terrorists is about authorizing a “limited military operation against the SDF” by Turkey and the Al-Qaeda regime while “removing the detainee issue as a bargaining chip.” Once the ISIS terrorists are out, the Al-Qaeda-Turkey alliance is free to attack the Kurds without a mass ISIS jailbreak.

The problem is that we’re already engaging in a slow-motion ISIS jailbreak to enable Turkey’s tribal warfare against the Kurds and the centralization of an Al-Qaeda terror state in Syria.

While most of the ISIS terrorists and their families are staying in Syria or going to Iraq and other places in the region, possibly accounting for the surge in ISIS attacks, some are going to Russia and others to Western countries, including the U.S., which is a potential national security disaster.

Around 6,000 of the ISIS detainees are “third-country nationals”.

“These detainees in camps and prisons must be repatriated by their respective countries,” Turkey’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan insisted, and we’re rushing to obey him.

Not everyone is.

France rightly refused to import around 200 ISIS detainees. Other European countries, some of which previously agreed to accept a small number of ISIS people are balking at taking them all.

And while CENTCOM, which is heading up efforts to clear the ISIS detainees out to make way for a Turkish-Al Qaeda assault on the Kurds, describe them as “foreign citizens”, that’s only by the Arab Muslim definition of ‘citizenship’ that always follows the father, not the birth country.

Many of the so-called ISIS families include children who were born to one or both foreign parents a decade or more ago in Syria or Iraq and have no ties to any other country.

Over the summer, the State Department announced that the United States had “repatriated a U.S. citizen minor” from Syria and claimed that they had given “this child, who has known nothing of life outside of the camps, a future free from the influence and dangers of ISIS terrorism” and urged that “every country must take responsibility for its nationals in northeast Syria and not look to others to solve the problem for them.”

So why is America being expected to solve Syria’s problem by taking in ISIS minors?

Any ‘minors’ living in an ISIS camp were almost certainly born in Iraq or Syria, not in the United States, to a parent who abandoned their American citizenship to join an enemy force. These foreign terrorist minors have no claim on entering America: a country that they never lived in.

The name of this ‘child’ was not given, but in one previous example of “repatriation”, Abdelhamid, a Muslim immigrant living in Minneapolis, left as a teenager to join ISIS, married an ISIS widow, and had a baby with her. Abdelhamid also adopted her previous offspring. The two boys, one of whom was born in Iraq to an immigrant who had temporarily lived in Minneapolis, and the other who had absolutely no blood ties to America, were ‘repatriated’ here.

While children are born innocent, ISIS members trained theirs to hate and kill from an early age. Visitors to the ISIS camps encountered children chanting support for Jihad and violence.

Repatriation means taking in terrorist teenagers already trained to wage war on America.

While there were only 22 U.S. citizens listed in the ISIS camps, each one is a potential ticking time bomb so even one is too many. One single Islamic terrorist killed 49 people in a Florida nightclub. One single Islamic terrorist driving a truck killed 15 people in New Orleans.

“If I had a bowl of skittles and I told you just three would kill you, would you take a handful?” Donald Trump Jr. tweeted about Syrian refugees a decade ago. The advocates for ‘repatriation’ might want to recall that wisdom before they bring the next future terrorist to our community.

“Repatriating vulnerable populations before they are radicalized is not just compassion—it is a decisive blow against ISIS’s ability to regenerate,” Adm. Cooper claimed. The “populations” were long radicalized. And we’re safer with them in Syria than we are with them living next door.

Fighting ISIS by importing ISIS into America, Australia, Canada and Europe is a terrible idea.

The disastrous ‘repatriation’ campaign puts the Trump administration on the same side as the terror lawyers who have been fighting legal battles to force European countries to take in those terrorists, and the ones who want to bring Islamic terrorists into America. President Trump ran on keeping Jihadists out of America but parts of his administration are pursuing appeasement of foreign interests in a way that not only empowers Al Qaeda but imports terrorists into America.

The last thing we should be doing is risking American lives for Turkey’s national interests. And yet we’re risking the lives of our civilian population so that Turkey can expand into Syria.

ISIS repatriation is a bad deal for America and for the rest of the world. We should stop pressuring our allies to take in terrorists and their families. They’re Syria’s problem now.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

 

Iran Builds Its Own Online ISIS in America

Daniel Greenfield August 21, 2022 

The stabbing of author Salman Rushdie by a Lebanese Shiite Muslim from New Jersey may be the culmination of efforts by Iran to imitate Al Qaeda and ISIS by building its own online terror network to carry out attacks inside the United States of America. The latest reports indicate that Hadi Matar, Rushdie's attacker, had been in touch with members of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

The recent indictment of a member of the IRGC regime terror network for soliciting the assassination of former National Security Advisor John Bolton provided a window into how Iran has targeted former Trump administration members.

The IRGC operative struck up a relationship with an Iranian-American on social media by initially offering $10,000 for photos of Bolton. This is a familiar form of espionage tradecraft in which a foreign spy solicits an American to perform a seemingly harmless and legal act, often involving photography, such as taking photos of individuals or cars, that is then revealed to be espionage committed at the behest of a foreign power. The patsy is then told that he has a choice between committing more serious crimes or being turned in to the FBI as a spy.

The Russians and the Chinese routinely operated this way (which also helps account for the large number of Chinese spies in America, as their citizens coming to this country are compelled to sign papers agreeing to cooperate with their intelligence services that becomes a source of leverage and blackmail), and it now appears that Iran has picked up the same trick.

The IRGC operative promised that Iran would pay $250,000 for hitting Bolton with a car. Indicating that the Iranians had already had their own surveillance operation that they did not want to compromise, the IRGC claimed that Bolton often took walks alone in the park.

The indictment and the Rushdie stabbing cast light on some mysterious incidents including an Iranian woman from Berkeley who catfished an American on a dating site, met up with him at a Henderson, Nevada hotel room, and then stabbed him in the neck as, “revenge against U.S. troops for the killing of Qasem Soleimani". The death of the IRGC terror leader has been the pretext for assorted terror plots against military personnel and Trump administration members.

The media dismissed the March stabbing as oddball behavior. Media accounts suggested that the stabber was mentally ill. But Henderson is close to Nellis Air Force Base which hosts the MQ-9 Reaper: the same model that was used to take out Soleimani. The attack appeared to be a systematic effort to target a U.S. Air Force drone pilot, lure him to a hotel room, blindfold him, and then kill him. It was a terror plan that only looks ridiculous because it failed.

This is certainly not the first time that Iran has tried to pay for assassinations in the United States. A decade ago, IRGC operatives planned to kill the Saudi ambassador with a bomb at Cafe Milano, a prestigious D.C. resteurant patronized by senators, by employing an Iranian used car salesman from Texas in a plot that was arranged through meetings in Mexico.

A decade later, the internet eliminates any need for international travel. Iran’s terror operatives can solicit Shiite Muslims in this country to commit terror attacks for them with no risk.

At least to the IRGC.

The failure of Al Qaeda terror plots after 9/11 amid the invasion of Afghanistan led the terror group to abandon its founding premise of serving as “The Base” and to crowdsource terrorism through the internet. Myspace was created a few months before the invasion of Iraq. A year later, Facebook emerged. Terror 2.0 took longer to arrive than Web 2.0, but it was close.

The vast majority of Al Qaeda and ISIS terror attacks no longer required the expensive and dangerous travel and training arrangements that had undone so many previous operations. Most of the crowdsourced terror attacks failed when Jihadists contacted ISIS and Al Qaeda only to connect with the FBI, but a few, in Boston, San Bernardino, New York and Orlando succeeded spectacularly. The same crowdsourcing momentum that had made Uber and Airbnb into billion dollar companies also made Jihad risk-free and cheap for terrorist organizations. The perpetrators were dubbed “lone wolves”, but are really the Uber drivers of the Jihad.

Iran has been slow to get into the game. Shiite Muslims are a minority and the IRGC has relied on subsidiary terror groups like Hezbollah, the PMU’s in Iraq, or for that matter Sunni Islamists like Al Qaeda and Hamas, to do its dirty work. America, unlike Europe, still doesn’t have extensive terror networks beyond those of Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood. And Hezbollah utilizes its networks as a money train for smuggling drugs and cigarettes. The Lebanese Shiite Jihadist network may be conducting some of the surveillance, but it doesn’t want to threaten its cash flow from America that also buys it some independence from Iran.

Online crowdsourcing frees Iran from the need to risk the more profitable terror networks. There is evidence that the Islamic terror state is soliciting Iranians and Shiite Muslims in the United States over social media to do its dirty work while offering them sizable sums of money. It’s unknown whether the Rushdie attack came off this way, but the perpetrator’s social media was filled with Iranian Jihadist propaganda. That would have made him a likely recruitment target.

If Iran is working to duplicate its own version of the Al Qaeda and ISIS online training and recruitment system, the threat to Americans could be much more serious than the stabbing of one dissident writer in New York or a man catfished on a date in Nevada. The Islamic regime’s ideal scenario for nuclear weapons would be to detonate them with plausible deniability.

Iranian operatives have carried out direct assassinations of political dissidents in Europe, but have been cautious about putting boots on the ground inside the United States. Despite our weakness and their bluster, Iran still fears and respects us more than Europe. As America gets weaker and our society becomes more fractured, that may not last. For now, Tehran would prefer to carry out attacks by cultivating disposable foreign assets. And once such a capability exists and has been sufficiently tested, it could be used for mass casualty terrorist attacks.

Even nuclear ones.

The Biden administration is rushing to cut a deal with Iran that will legitimize its nuclear weapons program even as the IRGC continues to plot terror attacks in the United States. Obama’s “breakthrough” proposal to detach a nuclear deal from terrorism left us negotiating in bad faith with a regime that made no secret of its determination to kill Americans.

Crowdsourcing Jihad creates further distance between the state sponsors and funders of terrorism, the perpetrators and their victims. The Pulse massacre and the Boston Marathon bombings were traceable to individuals, and then only distantly to the Islamic terror groups providing information and training, and hardly at all to the governments behind them.

Iran would like to replicate this model knowing that America’s morale is much weaker than its military and intel capabilities, and that if there is enough plausible deniability, we will do nothing about even the worst kinds of attacks like September 11. Just ask Qatar and the Saudis.

The gradual uptick in Iran-linked domestic terrorism is a warning that Iran’s efforts to create its own cadre of Shiite ‘lone wolves’ over the internet may be working. And that worse may come.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles.   Thank you for reading.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s Favorite BDS Group Mourns an ISIS Terrorist

Daniel Greenfield July 14, 2022 @ Sultan Knish Blog

When Baraa Lahlouh, an Islamic terrorist, was recently buried, he was draped in what the Agence France-Presse (AFP) misleadingly described as "a flag showing the seal believed to have been used by Islam’s Prophet Mohamed".

The wire service neglected to mention that it was more specifically The Associated Press, as documented by CAMERA, distributed photos of the burial while neglecting to describe the ISIS flag. Along with burying a terrorist, they buried the lede.

The growing presence of ISIS in Israel and its overlap with the established Islamic terrorist groups like the PLO and Hamas has forced the media into new extremes of evasiveness.

Former PLO official Hanan Ashrawi accused Israel of an "extrajudicial assassination".

The PLO's Foreign Ministry responded to the shooting of the ISIS terrorist by calling it a "hideous crime" It falsely accused Israel of "war crimes" against "defenseless Palestinian citizens."

WAFA, the PLO's news agency, charged Israel with "cold-blooded murder" in which, according to the terrorist outlet, the ISIS terrorist and his comrades were "ambushed and shot dead in cold blood".

The PLO’s support for ISIS terrorism against Israeli Jews is nothing new.

In March, an ISIS terrorist carried out an attack at a shopping mall in Beersheva that killed four Israelis including a rabbi who ran a soup kitchen and who left behind four children.

Mohammad Ghaleb Abu al-Qi’an, the Islamic terrorist, had previously tried to join ISIS.

Al-Hayat al-Jadeeda, the PLO's official paper, praised the ISIS terrorist as a "martyr" and PA TV featured a poster of the ISIS terrorist as a “martyr”. Hamas celebrated the attack as a "heroic operation" and an Al Jazeera personality, an arm of the Qatari regime which backs Hamas, posted a message, “Four [dead]. Blessed are your hands".

That same month, two Islamic terrorists opened fire at a bus stop, one of whom had previously tried to join ISIS. They released a video featuring an ISIS flag and pledging allegiance to the ISIS caliph.

After the attack, ISIS issued an official statement boasting of, “12 infidel Jewish forces killed and wounded in a sacrifice attack carried out by soldiers of the Caliphate in northern Palestine.”

Hamas praised the "valor and courage" of the attack. Another Al Jazeera personality, Ahmed Mansour, celebrated the ISIS attack for having “killed and wounded many occupation soldiers [and] was a painful blow in the heart of Israel and of its Arab Zionist allies."

The Palestinian Authority made no official statement, but is likely to make payments to the families of the terrorists under the ‘Pay-to-Slay’ program. That program was at the center of the debate over continuing foreign aid by the United States to the PLO and its Ramallah regime.

Even as ISIS is becoming part of this terrorist landscape in Israel, Biden is preparing to visit the terrorist-occupied territories inside Israel to meet with PLO dictator Mahmoud Abbas and assorted terrorist leaders.

The administration is already undermining israel by running a shadow consulate to the terrorists.

It has also poured hundreds of millions into PLO territories with official numbers topping $500 million. The unofficial numbers are likely to go well beyond that half a billion dollars.

And, as noted by Mark Goldfeder of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, the shadow consulate is "designed to help facilitate that aid... also illegal under the 2018 Taylor Force Act" which bans "any assistance that directly benefits the PA unless and until the PA stops paying terrorists to kill American and Israeli citizens". And the PA/PLO won’t stop doing that.

The growing presence of ISIS in Israel benefits from the ‘Pay-to-Slay’ program funding attacks against Israel as well as the larger infrastructure of terrorist media and organizations maintained by the PLO. And, much as the Biden administration continues to funnel nearly $1 billion in “aid money” into Afghanistan despite the Taliban takeover, the same is true of terrorism in Israel.

Unlike the PLO, Hamas, and the Taliban, ISIS remains so horrifyingly unacceptable that the Biden administration and the media can only handle its existence by entirely ignoring it.

The whitewashing of Baraa Lahlouh’s burial in an ISIS flag by evasively describing it as the seal of Mohammed has become typical. Pro-terrorist sites like Electronic Intifada denounced the death of the ISIS terrorist as an "extrajudicial execution". And they were not alone in spewing anti-Israel hate while refusing to even mention the ISIS elephant in the terrorist room.

The Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) mourned the ISIS terrorist and his comrades, “Laith, Baraa, and Yusuf“ as "young men with entire lives ahead of them.”

“They should be here today, but due to Israel’s relentless and deadly violence against Palestinians, their loved ones will never see or hold them again," IMEU complained.

The organization is a 501c3 non-profit. Propagandizing on behalf of a terrorist buried in an ISIS flag would seem to run counter to the non-profit regulations that never seem to be enforced against the enemies of this country, only against its patriots and its defenders.

IMEU has been funded in the past by the Soros network, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Tides Foundation, and the Foundation for Middle East Peace. Leading leftist funders are now kissing cousins with apologists for ISIS terrorists. And it does not just stop there.

IMEU was just cited by Rep. Rashida Tlaib in her Nakba resolution attacking Israel's existence.

Tlaib has a longstanding relationship with IMEU with both the BDS group and the anti-Israel politician promoting each other. And, in the process, Islamic terrorism, including ISIS.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.  

Click here to subscribe to my articles. 

Thank you for reading.

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About Daniel Greenfield

 
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Cente

 

Blast From the Past: Obama’s Words on ISIS Sound Good, Until You Think About Them

By Thomas Sowell November 24, 2015

https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/11/obama-isis-rhetoric-other-plausible-falsehoods/

It is amazing how many different ways the same thing can be said, creating totally different impressions. For example, when President Barack Obama says that defeating ISIS is going to take a long time, how is that different from saying that he is going to do very little, very slowly? It is saying the same thing in different words.

Defenders of the administration’s policies may cite how many aerial sorties have been flown by American planes against ISIS. There have been thousands of these sorties, which sounds very impressive. But what is less impressive — and more indicative — is that, in most of those sorties, the planes have not fired a single shot or dropped a single bomb.

Why? Because the rules of engagement are so restrictive that in most circumstances there is little that the pilot is allowed to do, unless circumstances are just right, which they seldom are in any war.

Moreover, the thousands of sorties being flown are still a small fraction of the number of sorties flown in the same amount of time during the Iraq war, when American leaders were serious about getting the war won.

Politics produces lots of words that can mean very different things, if you stop and think about them. But politicians depend on the fact that many people don’t bother to stop and think about them.

We often hear that various problems within the black community are “a legacy of slavery.” That phrase is in widespread use among people who believe in the kinds of welfare-state programs that began to dominate government policies in the 1960s.............To Read More....

When Daniel Greenfield Joined ISIS

Daniel Greenfield January 06, 2022 @ Sultan Knish Blog

They say that everyone has a twin somewhere in the world. Scientists, when they’re not calculating the amount of chocolate someone can safely eat a day, claim that everyone has six doppelgangers somewhere around the world. And some even have their own evil twins.

Mine was living in Australia all along.

I had spent the time since the attacks of September 11 writing about the dangers of Islamic terrorism. But somewhere in a suburb of Sydney, Australia, another Daniel Greenfield had decided to convert to Islam. One thing led to another and before anyone knew it, he had become a fan of ISIS and was arrested with police alleging he’d been planning an attack.

While one Daniel Greenfield had been investigating an Islamic terror plot, another Daniel Greenfield, some 7,500 miles away, was having his Islamic terror plot broken up.

The Aussie ISIS version of Daniel Greenfield is younger and balder than yours truly. When arrested, he was wearing Nike sweatpants, and the Daniel Greenfield you’re reading now would be as likely to wear anything with the Nike logo as he would be to convert to Islam and join ISIS.

Nevertheless, when Australian media and bloggers began doing rapid web searches for Islamic terrorism and Daniel Greenfield, they came up with the ten thousand articles, posts, tweets, and videos that I had been assembling since back when Australia still had freedom of speech.

The confusion was understandable. One of us was an Islam critic and the other an Islamic terrorist. Both of us, according to official dogma, had misunderstood the entirely peaceful theology of Mohammed, and therefore journalists felt free to contact me, eager to help me tell “my side of the story” about why I had plotted a terrorist attack against law enforcement.

This came as a surprise to me because the only terrorist attack I had been plotting was against a garbage can that refused to work. Adding to the confusion was that I had never been to Australia and it was two in the morning. I don’t know about you, but I’m not at my best at two in the morning and if there were anything that might incline me to plot a terrorist attack, it would be being woken at two in the morning to be accused of plotting a terrorist attack in Australia.

None of this stopped clickbait sites from embedding my tweets and articles in stories about the other Daniel Greenfield. It seemed to have escaped their attention that those tweets and articles about ISIS were not in favor of the Islamic terrorist group. Even assuming that no one in Australia knows who John Kerry is (an ignorance which can only inspire a profound envy), how exactly does an article titled, “Arrest Kerry for Collusion With Islamic Terror States” lead one to the conclusion that its author thinks that Islamic terror states are a very good thing.

While this Daniel Greenfield had never met his Islamic doppelganger, I could tell journalists inquiring that I knew all about him because his story is almost tiresomely familiar.

Daniel Greenfield, the one with all the ISIS materials and the knives, converted to Islam, came to the attention of the local authorities, and was diverted into a “deradicalization” program which true to form accomplished nothing except to possibly make him even more bent on violence.

For the last 5 years or so, Greenfield or Al-Greenfield allegedly continued to cheer for ISIS instead of Sydney FC. The police arrested him on Christmas Eve, an unusual time, but one that raises the possibility that he had been planning an imminent attack to coincide with Christmas celebrations. That sort of thing is favored by Islamic terrorists operating in Christian countries.

Local reports (the ones that don’t confuse me and him) allege that Daniel Greenfield claimed to be a member of ISIS. That would mean that he swore a Bayat, an oath of fealty, to whoever is still alive in the ISIS leadership. If he got in early enough on the ground floor, he might have even managed to swear an oath to Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a nerdy bearded cosplaying serial rapist, who blew himself up while trying to escape a dog named after retired talk show host Conan O'Brien. (Conan, the dog was alright, Conan O’Brien’s career has been better)

But it all goes to show that, like Conan and Conan O’Brien, or Daniel Greenfield and Daniel Greenfield, we all have unexpected doppelgangers out there. Some better than us and others worse than us. Some have things to teach us while others tell us what we already know.

The tale of the two Daniel Greenfields is a story of the doppler effect of Islamic terrorism passing around the world, transcending oceans and national boundaries, rallying some to oppose it and others to join in it. While I warned about the danger of Islamic terrorism, the other Daniel Greenfield allegedly promoted beheading and suicide bombing videos on social media.

These lost twins remind us not to take the choices that made us who we are for granted.

Perhaps life itself requires balance, so that for every Daniel Greenfield who opposes ISIS, another Daniel Greenfield must join it. Or, more likely, such things are meaningless coincidences. But meaningless or meaningful, the ISIS Greenfield did succeed in carrying out at least one successful terrorist attack, felt not so much in Australia, but in America.

Search for terrorism and my name, and his name will be the likeliest to come up. Over a decade and a half of writing about Islamic terrorism is all too easy to eclipse with one failed terror plot. The familiar moral of the story is that it’s difficult to create, but all too easy to destroy. As Daniel Greenfield, the one who joined ISIS and wears Nike sweatpants, works his way through the system, our names will be tangled together in the twisted infrastructure of the internet.

Apologists like to say that Islamic terrorists are driven to their crimes and while I generally tend to dismiss such asinine excuses, in this case there may be something to it. Imagine that you convert, yet whenever anyone at your mosque searches for your name, they come up with the less than pleasant remarks about Islam written by your American doppleganger.

Naturally they suspect you of being an un-Islamic plant, a spy, and an undercover operative.

How else can you possibly prove them wrong except by joining ISIS and then showing your sincere commitment by promoting the terror group and then plotting a terrorist attack.

If my doppelganger across the ocean accomplished nothing else, he distinguished his position on Islam from mine. No one is likely to confuse the two of us now, he must have thought. Instead the winds of confusion are blowing the other way with Daniel Greenfield being identified with a man whom the Sydney Morning Herald dubs the “aspiring jihadist Daniel Greenfield.”

Now when an Australian accent next wakes me up at two in the morning to ask about my involvement in a terror plot, at least I’ll have some dim inkling of what he’s talking about.

Before I hang up on him anyway.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. 

Thank you for reading.

The ISIS Propaganda to Kill Americans Was Coming From Near Portland

Daniel Greenfield January 04, 2021

The year that the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Trump administration's Islamic terror state travel ban, an Iraqi member of ISIS applied for American citizenship.

Hawazen Sameer Mothafar didn’t have much to worry about. Not only was he already living in the United States, but under political pressure, Iraq had been taken off the travel ban list.

And no one would have suspected Mothafar of being an ISIS terrorist. He was in a wheelchair.

When Mothafar was asked at his immigrantion interview this year whether he was involved with a terrorist organization, he must have thought it was a formality. But three months later, Mothafar was under arrest, charged with lying to a government agency, and aiding ISIS.

Mothafar not only managed to get through an immigration interview while denying any terrorist ties, but he spoke in court through an Arabic translator, suggesting a poor grasp of English.

Not only did our immigration system make an alleged ISIS member a citizen, but took an immigrant with nothing to offer this country, who doesn’t even speak the language, and who, according to his lawyer, has to be cared for by his family, and welcomed him in.

Over a thousand Iraqi refugees have been resettled in Portland, Oregon. The small city of Troutdale near Portland, once an all-American locale perfect for picture postcards, has absorbed some of the spillover. And there was nothing all-American about Mothafar.

Mothafar hadn’t come to Troutdale for the annual summerfest parade (cancelled this year because of the pandemic) or hiking past waterfalls. When he came into town under the great ‘Gateway to the Gorge’ arch that’s Troutdale’s claim to fame, he was coming for Jihad.

While Mothafar is disabled, he could still use a computer. And that’s what he did.

A senior ISIS official said that when the Islamic terrorist group needed new email and social media accounts, it was Mothafar’s job to get "new accounts when we needed new accounts as soon as possible."

But Mothafar was allegedly doing a lot more than just providing tech support for the Jihad.

Mothafar claimed that he had been an ISIS supporter since 2014 when the Islamic terror group first gained worldwide attention. Last year, he made the ba'yat pledge, an oath of allegiance to the Caliph of ISIS, who would be caught hiding out and killed by the Trump administration later that same year, binding him to full unquestioning obedience to ISIS and to its leader. Such oaths are often taken before its members make some larger commitment to the terror group.

Earlier that year, Mothafar had ambiguously told an ISIS supporter that he wouldn't use his real name because, "if published for the foundation, it could mean 4 terror."

But in 2015, Mothafar had already been working on the ISIS media operation. He initially ran ISIS chat rooms and channels, but he later began working on Al-Anfal's Jihadist propaganda.

Al-Anfal is an ISIS online media outlet, but literally means the spoils of war. That chapter of the Koran has been used as code for campaigns of extermination against non-Muslims and different Islamic sects and populations. ISIS, many of whose members and leaders had come out of the ranks of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, embraced Al-Anfal as a promise that its Jihad would echo the brutal Al-Anfal of Mohammed and of Saddam Hussein in his Anfal massacres.

The Koranic chapter of Al-Anfal contains some of the most brutal verses in the Koran, including its call for beheading,

“I will cast dread into the hearts of the unbelievers. Strike off their heads,” one verse declares.

When Al-Anfal launched in the fall of 2017, Mothafar "edited, produced, published, and disseminated" the Jihadist publication with its call for the mass murder of non-Muslims.

That included Americans.

The first issue featured a chart of the best places to stab victims in the "sensitive areas of the body". “Effective Stabbing Techniques,” like the other Al-Anfal Jihadist propaganda, was coming through a publishing process that took it, not through Baghdad, but through Oregon.

The December issue featured an article titled, "How Does a Detonator Work", and a picture of a burning Statue of Liberty with the caption, "Soon in the Heart of Your Lands."

Next year, Mothafar was assembling pictures of explosives and western cities, messaging, "the images of destroyed infidel cities will be useful." Propaganda like this played a crucial role in the alarmed responses to sophisticated ISIS posters threatening attacks on America.

Some of these posters warned that the ISIS terrorists were among us. What they did not mention was that one of these terrorists was in a wheelchair and living near Portland.

And was waiting to apply for American citizenship.

Right after the hearing, Mothafar was set free on the condition that he doesn't "disseminate any information in support of any designated terrorist organization", or leave Oregon.

And so the same system that allowed Mothafar to spread his hate set him loose again.

Removing Iraq from the list of travel ban countries was made for political reasons to avoid offending its government. Iraq is the epicenter of ISIS and of Islamic terrorism. The countries with the most Muslim refugees are also generally the ones with the worst terrorist problems.

Mothafar’s immigration paperwork, mentioned in the indictment, meant filling out a form that asks prospective citizens whether they've ever been associated with the Communist Party (to my knowledge, no one has recently been indicted for lying about this), any "totalitarian party" (a dubious category), or a "terrorist organization".

There are repeated mentions of Nazi Germany: a laudable if belated move that began long after most of the Nazi war criminals were already living here, and one that is no longer relevant because few Nazi war criminals are likely to be moving to America at this late date.

There is still no mention of ISIS or any Islamic terrorist group. The immigration paperwork hardly required Mothafar to lie because its questions are dated, some to the 40s or 50s, others with their obsession with guerrillas and paramilitary units to the Latin America of the 80s.

A generation that has made Islamic terrorism into the scourge of the free world is hardly reflected in our immigration system which is still screening for Communists, Nazis, and Latin American guerrilas and paramilitary units. It's a failure that sums up our failed response to 9/11.

There is only one single mention of terrorism in the form and it doesn’t reference Islam.

The only reason Mothafar got nailed for, among other things, making false statements in his immigration form and his citizenship interview, is that the authorities were already watching him. And based on the use of FISA surveillance in his case, it’s likely that he was accidentally swept up while the United States was monitoring ISIS members operating in Iraq and Syria.

Our immigration system hasn’t adapted to dealing with Islamic terrorism. And it’s not acting in the best interests of Americans. If it were, Mothafar, in a wheelchair, cared for by his parents, would never have been a candidate for immigration or citizenship in the United States.

Americans felt sorry for Mothafar. And, as usual, they paid the price.

Now, after, no doubt, spending a small fortune on caring for Mothafar over the years, the taxpayers will spend an even larger fortune on his trial, and then, probably, on his imprisonment, at which point he’ll become a full-time burden on the taxpayers, and then on his life after prison.

None of this would have been necessary if the United States would stop taking in Muslim refugees from terror states and then putting them through an immigration process that hardly even recognizes that we’ve spent a generation fighting Islamic terrorism from abroad.

“This defendant is a legal permanent resident of the United States who abandoned the country that took him in and instead pledged allegiance to ISIS and repeatedly and diligently promoted its violent objectives” US Attorney Billy Williams declared.

Were we really expecting anything else?

In the previous decade, Samir Khan, a Pakistani, had been churning out Jihadist propaganda for Al Qaeda's Inspire magazine from Queens, New York, and then Charlotte, North Carolina. Inspire's fare included, "Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom", which may have been used by the Boston Marathon bombers.

One of his articles was titled, “I Am Proud to Be a Traitor to America.”

When he was taken out alongside Al Qaeda leader Anwar Al-Awlaki, the Obama administration offered a condolence call to the Khan family, and, along with Al-Awlaki, Khan became a cause celebre for lefties and libertarians, and his family who accused the United States of "assassinating" him. The Mothafar case shows how little we’ve learned since then.

They can’t take pride in being traitors to America if we don’t let them in.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

 

Tags: immigration, Islamic terrorism, Portland, recent

 

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About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center

The Latest U.N. Horror Show: Christian Refugees Ignored

By Uzay Bulut|  August 4th, 2019|Tags: Religious Liberty

Since the 2014 invasion and genocide by the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq, at least 16,000 Assyrian Christians from Iraq have become refugees in Jordan. Most are still suffering economically and psychologically there, under extremely difficult circumstances.

These Assyrian Christians are in Jordan on a temporary basis with plans to emigrate to a third country. However, as they have not been given official work permits by the Jordanian government, they largely rely on their savings, remittances sent by relatives abroad or aid from charity organizations and churches. Jordan is supposed to be their transit country; they are seeking resettlement in other countries via the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Australian Special Humanitarian Program.........To Read More.....

Heavy fighting flares between Taliban, Islamic State in Afghanistan

KABUL (Reuters)

Afghan Taliban insurgents are battling fighters loyal to Islamic State over control of territory in eastern Afghanistan in some of the heaviest clashes over the past year between the rival militants, officials said on Wednesday.

The fighting erupted on Monday in two districts of the eastern Afghan border province of Nangarhar, when Islamic State fighters attacked villages under Taliban control.

"Islamic State fighters have captured six villages in Khogyani and Shirzad districts but the fighting has not stopped," said Sohrab Qaderi, a member Nangarhar's the provincial council.
About 500 families had fled from the fighting, he said..............To Read More...

My Take - What's the philosophical differences between the Taliban and the Islamic State? Probably darned little, but this is the essence of Islam.  A festering sore of greed and violence.  Recommended reading: Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West : Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West by Raymond Ibrahim

Debate Over Isis Bride’s Citizenship Not About Trump

By Debra J. Saunders February 24, 2019

In 2014, Hoda Muthana, then 20 years old, left Alabama to become an ISIS bride in Syria. When she left the United States, she posted her passport on her Twitter account and implied she was about to burn it.

Now Muthana wants to return to the U.S. with her 18-month-old son, but President Donald Trump doesn’t want to let her back in the country. Here’s the TV news take on her case as laid out by the Today show’s Craig Melvin: “This is the Alabama woman who left four years ago to join ISIS. She has a son. She said that she wants to come home now; she was radicalized, she made a big mistake.”..........To Read More....

My Take - She made a big mistake?  A mistake is adding 2 and 2 and getting 5.  A mistake is getting up on Sunday morning and driving to work thinking it's Monday and wondering if it's some holiday because there's no traffic. 

Committing treason isn't a mistake, it's a crime. 

She knew what was going on with ISIS and all their crimes against humanity.  Atrocities she not only knew about but promoted in tweets such as this:

Americans wake up!  Men and women altogether.  You have much to do while you live under our greatest enemy, enough of your sleeping!  Go on drivebys, and spill all of their blood, or rent a big truck and drive all over them.  Veterans, Patriots, Memorial, etc day ... Kill them!

So now that ISIS has been virtually exterminated she's all alone, even after marrying three of these lunatics, and now that she's in deep trouble she's become enlightened.  She has the same kind of enlightenment as all the big shot Nazis did after WWII who never knew Hitler.   

Well, she made her bed and now she can lay in it, and if her parents want to help her, maybe they should join her, back in the stone age. Or she and her family can appeal to Sweden for sanctuary,

I keep wondering.  Why aren't all these Muslims moving to a country where they share the same social paradigms?  Why is it all these Muslims are migrating to a country they hate so badly?

Is This Really a Mistake?

By Rich Kozlovich

Recently the Gatestone Institute published an article by Malcolm Lowe entitled, "Is Trump About to Repeat Obama's Worst Mistake?" , saying if America leaves Syria, Turkey would be unopposed in dealing with the Kurds, ISIS would be back, and massacres will be common place. And the emotional hook is this would be repeating mistakes Obama made in withdrawing troops too soon.

Here's one example the author points to:

"As a result of Obama's mistake, ISIS was able to capture a vast area of northern Iraq with -- initially -- hundreds rather than thousands of militiamen. It happened because the Iraqi army officers in Mosul, bereft of their American advisors, panicked and fled, rendering their leaderless servicemen helpless victims of the smaller but well-led ISIS force."

So the self serving cowardice of the Iraqi officer corp was America's fault?  How about they weren't serious about fighting in the first place, and did they really abandon their troops, or did they reasonable recognize their troops didn't want to fight either and would have readily fled the battle leaving them to face the consequences of failure? 

There is no real national identity in any of these Muslim run crap holes and no loyalty to the nation by their army or their officer corp.  As a result there's nothing to unite and band these people together.   These military "leaders" have no emotional bond with their nation or their people.  All these Muslim countries are nothing short of Medieval tribal societies with modern weapons, transportation and communications, and their only loyalty is to their tribe, their family and whatever Islamic ideology their group has adopted.  The only binding force in any of these countries is the embrace of a particular Islamic ideology, and that transcends everything.  . 

All these "radicalized" Muslim groups like ISIS are not made up of one national identity. They're an amalgamation of nationals with a singular religious ideological identity attempting to create their own nation by killing anyone who disagrees with them.   And these groups are like the mythological Hydra.  If you cut off one head two grows in it's place.  It never ends!

Which brings me back to the main points.  When will leaving be the right time?  How much of our national treasury should we waste on these crap holes?  What is America's end game?  Where's the goal post?  What objective are we attempting to achieve?  No one seems to be able to definitively answer any of those questions!

So, if Trump did bring our boys home, would this really be a mistake?

There is no end in sight to this Middle East quicksand that's cost us trillions and probably tens of thousands of American lives. What have we gained from this? Nothing! It’s a never ending crisis we can no longer afford and no vision to attain any final solution.

The only reason for our involvement in the Middle East in the first place was oil.  And that was in order to keep the world’s economy functioning. Neither of which we need any longer as we can survive without either.

This is the end of the Bretton Woods era and Trump's perception on this is exactly in line with that clear historical fact.   We can't be the world's police force any longer.  Ending America's involvement in any nation's internal affairs is exactly the right direction we should be going.  If there's no direct benefit for America we need to stay out of their affairs.  If they butcher each other it's a terrible moral tragedy, but it's not our tragedy. 

We can’t afford Bretton Woods or the Middle East any longer and I wouldn’t spend one more American dollar or one more American life to save the entire Middle East, and I would take any restraints off Israel and let them do whatever they see fit.

These people who are criticizing Trump haven’t a clue as to what’s to be our end game scenario in the Middle East and keep insisting we keep doing the things that have failed to produce a positive result over and over again. That’s insanity!

I don’t care what happens to the Kurds, Syrians, Iraqi’s, Iranians, the Turks or any of these Muslim crap holes.  They own this mess, let them clean it up.   History has shown that as allies they are totally self serving and unreliable even to their Muslim "brothers".  And no amount of self-righteous moralizing will change that.

Why should we believe they would be different dealing with America, whom they all consider the "Geat Satan"?

When any one of these groups become ascendant they do what every other Muslim “ally” has done. Turn on us when it becomes convenient and butcher their enemies.

Let's mind our own business! let them butcher each other to their heart's content, ignore the emotional appeals and moralizing because they just want us to help in butchering their enemies!  That's who they are.  That's who they've always been.  That's who they will always be as long as they continue to embrace Islam.

We need to go home and tell them, the EU, the UN and anyone else who keeps insisting we do something to shove it.

My solution? Keep them poor, keep them unarmed as much as possible and keep them over there.

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If the Islamic Republic is Falling, It’s Because of Trump

When one strong individual stands up, others follow.

January 1, 2018  Robert Spencer  21 

In 2009, Iran was swept by demonstrations, just as it is now. But at that time, the protesters were shouting “Allahu akbar,” and there was no indication that they wanted anything but reform of the Islamic regime, not the end of the regime itself. This time, however, the protesters have been chanting: “We don’t want an Islamic Republic!” “Clerics shame on you, let go of our country!” Some have even chanted: “Reza Shah, bless your soul!”

What has changed? Donald Trump.

Reza Shah was the Shah of Iran from 1925 to 1941 and the father of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the Shah who was overthrown in the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Reza Shah admired Turkey’s Kemal Ataturk and set Iran on a similar path of Westernization and secularization. In chanting this, the protesters are emphasizing that they do not just want economic reforms, as has been the line of the establishment media in the West. Nor do they want an Islamic Republic that is less corrupt. They don’t want an Islamic Republic at all.........To Read More....

Islam Means Submission: Really, It Does - And They Really Mean It!

By Rich Kozlovich

On November 23, 2017 Reuters posted the article, Islamic State beheads 15 of its own fighters, saying:

Islamic State beheaded 15 of its own fighters due to infighting in Afghanistan’s eastern province of Nangarhar, officials said, while a separate suicide attack on Thursday tore into a crowd in the provincial capital, Jalalabad, killing at least eight.

As for the suicide attack, apparently there was a "meeting of supporters of a police commander who was sacked for illegal land grabbing" and someone didn't like it - so he blew himself up and took a bunch of people with him. 

There are a couple of things about this I think are obvious - and telling. 

First - this area of the world has always been a disaster - economically, philosophically, militarily and politically.  No one is going to go in there and explain to them the wonders of American style republican Democracy and have them really believe it or want it, that simply is not part of their historical and societal paradigm.  They understand the only way to pacify and bring order to this area is to kill everyone who disagrees with you.  That is a basic tenet of Islam practiced by Muslim controlled societies making them nothing short of savage Medieval tribal societies with modern weapons, transportation and communications.

Second - Islam isn't a religion.  Islam is a criminal, political system that's managed to masquerade as a religion.  The fact they've been able to do so for 1400 years is immaterial. While the of level civil discord may be higher in Afghanistan than many Muslim controlled countries, it's far more prevalent in Muslim controlled areas of the world than those controlled by societies with Judaic/Christian values and principles.  In point of fact - much of the discord in those countries is being caused by Muslims....and their allies....western socialists.  Both have one underlying moral foundation to which they're completely committed - get and hold power by any means necessary.

Third - we see these terrorist militant groups will work together today and happily kill one another tomorrow as the need arises.  And what's that need?  The need to be in control.  The difference between religious concepts of Islam of ISIS and that of the Taliban isn't much more than an eyelash - except for one thing - who has the power.  Who controls the riches and the people, and make no mistake about this - these decisions aren't made by a democratic vote of the group.  Even if they have some kind of committee that's supposed to do the deciding - there's only one man who makes the decisions and the rest all obey or die. 

That's what's occurring in Saudi Arabia right now and that's been overdue for a Muslim state.  Saudi Arabia is the center of Wahhabism thinking - which is ultraconservative, fundamentalist founded by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab , in short - true Islam as is prescribed in the Koran.  And the Saudis supported them financially for decades.  That's now coming back to bite them, because of fracking. 

They need the civilized world because they're surrounded by Islamists of a different persuasion, who want their oil and riches, hate the Saudis and desire to destroy them.  Since the advent of American fracking their income is dropping radically.  They can no longer afford their internal corruption and arrogant disregard for civilized behavior.  We don't need them they need us.  Now we'll see how Muslim leadership really functions - obey or die - and it's not going to be nicer than whatever unpleasantness the Shah of Iran may have imposed on his people - a rich and prosperous, far more free society than what the Ayatollahs imposed, and not a peep out of the left about that. 

How do you reason with them?  You don't!   They only understand power, and the expression and application of that power. You crush them and go home.  Muslims will never honor any agreement with anyone outside their particular group, including other Muslims, because the Koran made it clear it was perfectly acceptable to do so in the name of Islam.  And of course they would determine if what they were doing was in the name of Islam.

Islam means submission. Islam teaches submission.  Islam demands submission, or you die.  Islamists practice that concept within their group and against those outside their group. 

That's history and that history is incontestable. 

So, what do we see on American university and college campuses?  Americans demanding, we support the PLO and crush Israel - the only stable patch of ground in the Middle East.  This group, at least 50% of them - AKA Millennials - believe socialism is the perfect government and America should become a socialist state.  This is a group who wears t-shirts with Fidel Castro or Che Guevara's face on them - two of the greatest mass murders of the 20th century - and condemn America for every infraction of their values, which is the philosophical flavor of the day.  This is a group that's not only stunningly stupid - they're arrogant in their stupidity.  And why?  Because we've allowed leftists to take over and corrupt America's education system from Kindergarten on.  But that corruption is most obscene in America's universities.  It's high time we stop funding American universities and kicked the federal government out of education entirely. 

And its high time we come to grips with history - Islam and leftism are cancers that destroy every society they infest. 

We Didn't Beat ISIS, It's Here

by Daniel Greenfield 8 Comments Wednesday, November 01, 2017 @ Sultan Knish Blog

ISIS has been beaten. It's been forced out of city after city. Its fighters are dying or have run away. Its resources are exhausted.

It's over.

And yet once again, there's blood on the pavement and screams filling the air of a Western city. And the note in the bloodied truck links the attack to ISIS.

We didn't beat ISIS because it's not just an army or an alliance. It's an idea. The idea is Islam.

By declaring a Caliphate, ISIS made its existence interchangeable with Islam and its manifest destiny. Losing so many battles has weakened that identification, but there are still plenty of Muslims willing to kill for it. And it isn't because ISIS has radicalized them with some brilliant internet memes, but because it promised to fulfill the ideas and beliefs of their religion. 

ISIS is popular because it appeared to have come closest to doing what no other Islamic group had been able to do in a century, resurrect the Caliphate. ISIS was popular because it was Islamic.

It was popular to the degree that it was Islamic. It was popular because it brought back Islamic institutions from slavery to mutilating thieves without any apologies or concessions. 

That is the simple truth that our leaders refuse to deal with.

What causes an Uzbek immigrant, along with Pakistanis, Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans, Tunisians and American converts to Islam, to be willing to kill and die? They aren't killing and dying for ISIS. But the Ummah, the global Islamic tribe that embodies their honor, for the virgins of paradise, and for the cry that accompanied their atrocities. The cry of, "Allahu Akbar."

And until we understand that, we won't beat ISIS. Because ISIS is Islam.

We beat ISIS twice before. Once in its previous incarnation as Al Qaeda in Iraq and in its even earlier incarnation as Saddam Hussein’s regime whose Sunni Baathists went on to play a crucial role in ISIS.

Each time it was reborn as another murderous monstrosity.

We beat Saddam, Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Islamic State. But it keeps coming back because we don’t understand what it is. And we don’t get it because we don’t understand what Islamic terrorism is.

Critics who accuse the US of creating ISIS by bombing Iraq miss the point. ISIS is the latest embodiment of Sunni supremacism and historical nostalgia for the Abbasid Caliphate. Both Saddam and the Caliph of ISIS capitalized on that nostalgia the way that Hitler did on Charlemagne. 

We’re not just fighting a bunch of ragged terrorists. We’re fighting against the sense of manifest destiny of a large Muslim population, not just in Iraq and Syria, but in London, Paris and every state in America.

The Islamic terrorist groups of the Middle East are especially dangerous because, as ISIS did with its Caliphate, they can closely link themselves to crucial epochs in Islam. Al Qaeda leveraged its Saudi face to form a visceral connection with Muslims worldwide. ISIS repeated the same trick with its Iraqi link. And large numbers of non-Arabs and converts to Islam rallied from around the world to the Jihad.

ISIS is now the new Al Qaeda. It may not be able to hold on to its Iraqi or Syrian conquests, but it has become an international terrorist organization that is even more dangerous than Al Qaeda. And that may be what it wanted.

Why settle for some dirty and dusty kilometers in Syria or Iraq, when you can have the world?

Like the Palestinian Authority, Hamas and other Islamic terrorist groups, the Islamic State was never very good at running things. The PA won’t make peace with Israel for the same reason that Hamas won’t make peace with the PA: statehood is a compelling imperative, but requires hard work in reality. It’s much easier to send off a few useful idiots to blow themselves up and then collect the Qatari checks.

Civilizations manage societies. Barbarians have more fun destroying things than taking out the garbage or cleaning the streets.

The original Islamic conquests wrecked the societies and cultures they overran the way that barbarians always do. They wouldn’t have succeeded if civilization had not been in a state of collapse. Today’s Islamic conquests are a similar reaction to our civilizational decline. 

ISIS claimed that it could win a military showdown: it was wrong.  The Muslim Brotherhood’s strategy of political and demographic invasion, sneered at by ISIS, may be less glamorous, but the demographic conquest is going very well. Just ask the frightened natives of Paris and London. 

The challenge for Islamic terrorists is turning that demographic growth into military strength. ISIS emerged as the Uber of Islamic terrorism by unlocking the key to turning Muslims anywhere into terrorists with no training or recruitment. While Al Qaeda had pioneered the strategy, ISIS made it work.

Dismissing the terrorists who have been killing for ISIS in the West as “lone wolves” misses the point.

The Islamic terrorist who goes on a stabbing spree in London or a shooting spree in Orlando is no more a “lone wolf” than an Uber driver who picks up a passenger is just some random eccentric. They’re parts of a distributed network that is deliberately decentralized to better fulfill its central purpose.

CVE and other efforts to tackle “online extremism” fight messaging wars that ignore the demographics. But our targeted strikes on ISIS ignore demographics in the same way. We keep looking at the trees while missing the forest. But the forest is where the trees come from. Muslim terrorists emerge from an Islamic population. They aren’t aberrations. Instead they represent its religious and historic aspirations.

ISIS and Islamic terrorists aren’t going anywhere. Defeating them through patronizing lectures about the peacefulness of Islam, as Obama’s CVE policy proposed to do, was a futile farce. Bombing them temporarily suppresses them as an organized military force, but not their religious and cultural origins.

As long as we go on seeing Islamic terrorism as an aberration that has no connection to the history and religion of Islam, our efforts to defeat it will be pinpricks that treat the symptoms, but not the problem.

Only when we recognize that Islamic terrorism is Islam, that the crimes of ISIS and countless others dating back to Mohammed were committed to achieve the goals of the Islamic population, will we be ready to face the war that we’re in and to defend ourselves against what is to come not just in Iraq or Afghanistan, but in America, Australia, Canada, Europe, India, Israel and everywhere else.

We are not fighting a handful of Islamic terrorists. We are standing in the path of the manifest destiny of Islam. Either that manifest destiny will break against us, as it did at the Gates of Vienna, or it will break us. The attacks were once yearly. Now they are monthly. Soon they will become daily.

Every attack is a pebble in an avalanche. A pebble falls in Brussels, in Fresno, in Dusseldorf, in New York, in Munich, in London, in Garland, in Paris, in Jerusalem, in Mumbai, in Boston and in more places than anyone can count. We are too close to the bloodshed to see the big picture. We only see the smoke and hear the screams. We see the boats bringing armies into Europe. We see refugees fill our airports.

Those are the trees, not the forest: the pebbles, not the avalanche. Those are the battles, not the war.

The Islamic State is not going anywhere. It’s not a name. It’s an Islamic imperative. And it’s here.

What Will Replace ISIS?

Posted by Daniel Greenfield 11 Comments @ the Sultan Knish Blog

Before long the same administration that declared the fighting in Iraq over several times will claim victory over ISIS. The timetable for its push against the Islamic State appears to have less do with the victimized Christians and Yazidis who have been prevented from coming here as refugees in favor of Syrian Muslims than with the Clinton presidential campaign. Like Obama’s declarations that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were over, the announcement that ISIS has been defeated will be premature.

It is based on a profound misunderstanding and misreading of Islamic terrorism.

Long before its current string of defeats, ISIS had begun evolving into another Al Qaeda; a multinational alliance of Jihadists scattered around the world. Bombing Mosul isn’t hard, but try bombing Marseille, Brussels or London. There is no doubt that the ability of ISIS to temporarily establish a caliphate allowed it to build a network that could carry out terror attacks from New York to Miami to Nice to Munich. But it would be dangerous to assume that losing Iraq and Syria will stop ISIS.

ISIS doesn’t matter. The idea of ISIS does. And the idea of ISIS is Islamic supremacism.

The organization we think of ISIS has transformed and rebranded countless times. Even now our leaders vacillate between calling it ISIS, ISIL or, more childishly, Daesh, while it dubs itself the Islamic State. We have been fighting it in one form or another for over a decade. It would be unrealistically optimistic to assume that the war will end just as this old enemy has shown its ability to strike deep in our own cities.

The bigger error though is to think that we are fighting an organization. We are fighting an idea. That is not to contend, as Obama does, that we can debate it to death. It is not the sort of idea that argues with words, but with bullets, bombs and swords. But neither does it just go away if you seize a city.

Al Qaeda in Iraq not only survived the death of Zarqawi, but it became even more dangerous under Baghdadi. It would be risky to assume that ISIS will die with him. Instead it may very well grow into a new phase of Al Qaeda, one that ties together some of the world’s deadliest Islamic terror groups into a network that is decentralized enough that it will not suffer from Al Qaeda’s leadership fatigue.

The rise of Islamic terrorism has been an incremental process in which new groups learn from the mistakes of the old and supersede them. If ISIS does recede into a localized oblivion, reemerging only on occasion to suicide bomb something or someone in Baghdad, then a deadlier and even more effective group is likely to take its place. Each group will move one step closer to realizing the caliphate.

To break the cycle, we must confront the idea of the caliphate at the heart of Islamic terrorism.

ISIS is not un-Islamic. It is ruthlessly and uncompromisingly Islamic in that, unlike its predecessors in the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, it makes the fewest compromises to civilizational sensibilities. Its goals are the same as those of every Islamic political organization, including those dubbed moderate. It seeks to restore and enforce an Islamic system in every part of the Muslim world before moving on to conquer and subjugate the non-Muslim world. If this were merely some fringe belief held by a tiny minority of extremists, then it could be bombed to pieces in some Syrian or Iraqi backwater.

But it’s the driving force of Islam. That’s why it won’t go away. No amount of appeasement will banish it.

Taking in more Muslim settlers, pressuring Israel and letting the Muslim Brotherhood colonize our foreign policy won’t do it. We’ve tried it and it actually makes Islamic terrorism much worse.

When the announcement is made, the usual suspects will pat themselves on the back for having defeated ISIS by mobilizing a Muslim coalition. But it wasn’t Obama who mobilized a Muslim coalition. The coalition, such as it was, mobilized them. Obama provided useful support to Islamic state sponsors of terror, such as Iran and Turkey, assorted Islamic Jihadists on the ground, some blatantly associated with Sunni and Shiite terror groups in their internal Jihadist conflict with ISIS over who will fight us.

The “allies” we are aiding today will be the ones bombing us tomorrow.

And that is why claiming credit for beating ISIS accomplishes nothing. ISIS is an expression of an Islamic impulse encoded in the Koran. Islamic groups differ in the tactical expression of that impulse. ISIS was nastier and uglier than most of the Islamic terror groups we had dealt with before this. Though even it found its Boko Haram affiliate in Nigeria occasionally a little too much to stomach.

If ISIS vanishes from the world stage, Islamic terrorism will be easier to dismiss. Or so the thinking goes. The Islamic State was better at viral videos than the media that tried to whitewash Islamic terror. It was hard to ignore. But a scattering of Islamic terror groups around the world will be forgotten by the public.

History suggests that’s wishful thinking.

Islamic terrorism has shown no signs of receding. Growing Muslim populations, both at home and in Muslim settlements in the West, and the increase in travel and communications, the infrastructure of globalism, spread it from the most backward to the most advanced parts of the world. Wealthy and unstable Muslim countries, rich in oil but poor in power, finance its spread through mosques and guns.

These are the ingredients that give us ISIS or any other combination or letters that stands for Islamic terror. To do anything meaningful about it, we would have to reverse the decline of the West.

Islam originally spread into a vacuum created by civilizational decline. Civilizational decline is why it is rising once again. An obscure local terror group eventually turned into ISIS by filling a power vacuum. Even as Obama performs another touchdown dance, some other group will be making that same journey. Its mission will be the familiar one of replacing our civilization with its own.

Until we come to terms with this civilizational struggle, we will go on fighting endless wars in the sand and coping with endless terror attacks in our own cities because we have failed to recognize the nature of the enemy. We are not fighting an acronym, whether it’s ISIS or ISIL; we are fighting an Islamic State.

This is a war to determine whether the future will belong to the West or to Islam