by Robert Spencer
A nineteen-year old Somali Muslim named Mohamed Osman Mohamud was arrested Friday in Portland, Oregon, just as he was trying to blow up a van loaded with explosives at a Christmas tree lighting ceremony. The explosives were fakes that agents who were tracking Mohamud’s activities supplied to him; as they moved in to arrest him, he kicked at them and shouted, “Allahu akbar!”
Although the explosives were fake, “the threat was very real,” according to Arthur Balizan, special agent in charge of the FBI in Oregon. “Our investigation,” said Balizan, “shows that Mohamud was absolutely committed to carrying out an attack on a very grand scale.” Mohamud himself had told undercover agents: “I want whoever is attending that event to leave, to leave either dead or injured.” Yet as more details have come out about Mohamud’s jihad plot, the response from government and law enforcement officials, the Muslim community in Portland, and the mainstream media has been drearily familiar.
I. Mohamud’s Islamic motivations
Mohamed Osman Mohamud’s own statements make it unmistakably clear that he was hoping to commit mass-murder in the name of Islam, in what he saw as an Islamic jihad attack. For a video he made explaining his motives, he dressed in a white robe with a red and white headdress, telling undercover agents whom he thought were his accomplices that he wanted to dress “Sheikh Osama style.” He began the video by repeating traditional Islamic prayers and invocations: “I take refuge in Allah from Satan the accursed; in the name of Allah, the merciful, the compassionate; all praise be to Allah, we praise him, we seek his assistance and forgiveness.”
He then warned Americans that “a dark day is coming your way,” for “as long as you threaten our security, your people will not remain safe.” He asked: “Did you think that you could invade a Muslim land, and we would not invade you,” and boasted that “Allah will have soldiers scattered everywhere across the world.” He challenged Muslims living in the United States: “What has stopped you from fighting in the cause of Allah?” And he predicted that “you will see the victory of Islam.”
All this is perfectly consistent with the Islamic doctrine that jihad warfare becomes obligatory (fard ayn) upon every Muslim if a Muslim land is attacked by infidels.
As long as four years ago, when he was only fifteen, Mohamud had already attracted the attention of law enforcement agents, and he told undercover agents at that time that he was praying about “whether I should…go, you know, and make a jihad in a different country or to make like an operation here.” He wrote for an online magazine called “Jihad Recollections” about how jihad warriors must “train as hard as possible in order to damage the enemies of Allah as much as possible.” They should, however, not go to gyms and train with weights, he wrote, because gyms were decidedly un-Islamic places, with their “music, semi-naked women [and] free mixing.”
II. The local mosque: Mohamed who?
Yet despite Mohamud’s avowedly Islamic motivations, the Imam Yosof Wanly of the Salman Al-Farisi Islamic Center in Corvallis, Oregon, followed a predictable and oft-repeated pattern when he downplayed Mohamud’s connection to the local Muslim community. Every jihadist who has ever lived for any time in the United States has been simultaneously a devout and informed Muslim by his own account, and by the account of the local mosque leaders, someone they seldom saw and who was at odds with the larger community when he did show up. It raises a large question that no journalist ever has the wit or courage to ask: if these jihad terrorists really had little or nothing to do with their local mosques, and if their understanding of Islam differs so sharply from that of the area Muslims, where did they learn the version of Islam that impelled them to attempt mass-murder of infidels?
In the course of various media interviews, however, Wanly did end up revealing that he had more of a relationship with Mohamud than he would be likely to have with a peripheral member of his congregation whom he seldom saw. He said that he and Mohamud had “average teacher-student” discussions, and characterized Mohamud, a dropout from Oregon State University, as, according to the Associated Press [1], “a normal student who went to athletic events, drank the occasional beer and was into rap music and culture.” Even though this statement seems calculated to give the picture of anything but a devout, observant, serious Muslim, it also shows that Wanly knew Mohamud better than one might expect a busy imam in a major city to know a sometime college student who attended his mosque only occasionally.
III. Unsupported assertion that Islam forbids such attacks
Wanly said [2] of Mohamud: “He seemed like he wants to do something to change something. That’s what he thinks in his own mind and he took that initiative.” But he declared: “In my humble opinion, there wasn’t anything that would prompt me to think he would plan this. It’s completely, clearly, textually denounced in the Islamic religion.” He offered no texts from the Qur’an or Hadith to back up that assertion, and continued: “He took that initiative without seeking any advice from anybody and he went overboard.”
This all followed a familiar pattern also. No reporter, of course, asked Wanly if Mohamud could have been inspired by such texts as “kill the idolaters wherever you find them” (Qur’an 9:5). No reporter asked Wanly to explain what he meant when he said that Mohamud’s actions were “completely, clearly, textually denounced in the Islamic religion.” No reporter asked him to explain what was incorrect from an Islamic standpoint about the statements Mohamud had made about the Muslims’ obligation to fight defensive jihad against invading infidels. No reporter asked him what programs he had instituted or planned to institute at the Salman Al-Farisi Islamic Center to make sure that no other members of his community misunderstood the Religion of Peace as spectacularly as did Mohamed Mohamud. No reporter asked him what steps he was taking to cooperate with law enforcement officials to make sure Mohamud had no accomplices or allies within the mosque.
IV. The search for alternate explanations
If he wasn’t really an Islamic jihadist, despite the testimony of his own words, then why did Mohamud try to blow up the Christmas tree lighting ceremony? Wanly said that he had a difficult childhood after moving with his parents to the U.S. from Somalia when he was five years old. According to the New York Daily News [3], “neighbors say Mohamud was doted on by his family but embraced militant Islam not long after his parents split up. ‘He was a quiet kid, but with his folks splitting up, who knows?’ Adam Napier, who lived next door to Mohamed Osman Mohamud for years told the newspaper.”
Yes, who knows? The divorce of parents has driven many an unhappy child to try to set off a bomb in a crowded place and murder hundreds, if not thousands, of people, hasn’t it?
Of course, many more terrorist attacks have been committed by Islamic jihadists who read and took seriously the Qur’an’s commands to wage war against infidels than by children traumatized by their parents’ divorce, but never mind: when it comes to exonerating Islamic texts and teachings of any responsibility for motivating violent jihadists, government, law enforcement and media officials join Islamic spokesmen in grabbing hold of any alternative explanation, no matter how implausible.
V. The portrayal of Muslims as victims
Generally after a jihad attack in the United States, whether successful or not, mainstream media outlets run multiple stories about how Muslim communities fear a “backlash” against innocent Muslims from enraged “Islamophobic” rednecks. Of course, such “backlashes” never materialize, but the purpose of such stories is to shift the public’s attention away from the reality of Islamic jihad and onto the fiction of Muslims as victims, living in fear of vigilante attack in the United States. In reality, hate crimes against Muslims accounted for only eight percent of crimes thus classified in the U.S. in 2009, according to a recently released FBI report [4]. Blacks and Jews were far more likely to be victimized – and far less likely to be the subject of fawning media reports featuring hand-wringing over a “backlash” against them.
But in this case, there appears to have been a genuine backlash: an arson attack at the Salman Al-Farisi Islamic Center in Corvallis. The FBI offered a $10,000 reward for information, and FBI spokesperson Beth Anne Steele thundered: “The FBI would not tolerate any retaliation on the Muslim community as a result of that arrest.”
If this was truly a retaliatory vigilante attack following Mohamud’s attempted jihad bombing, then it is hateful and must unequivocally be condemned. It is important to note, however, that while the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) called on the FBI and local police to protect the mosque, CAIR [5] and [6] other Muslims [7] have not hesitated to stoop even to fabricating “hate crimes,” including attacks on mosques. CAIR and other groups like it want and need hate crimes against Muslims, because they can use them for political points and as weapons to intimidate people into remaining silent about the jihad threat.
Was the arson attack against the Islamic Center in Corvallis a staged event designed to deflect attention away from Mohamud’s jihad attack and onto Muslims as victims? There is no way to tell unless law enforcement officials consider this possibility, which they should do given the many faked incidents in the past. But whether they will actually do so is another matter.
And so with this latest attempted jihad attack against Americans, the same scenario plays out yet again: an Islamic jihadist invokes Islamic doctrine to explain his actions, while law enforcement, government and media all look the other way and grab hold of alternative explanations, no matter how preposterous. Meanwhile, the media focuses on how, in the wake of yet another attempt by a Muslim to kill infidels, Muslims are again victimized.
The script has long been written. The characters are cast. With every new jihad plot, all the media, government and law enforcement officials, and Islamic leaders need to do is fill in the blanks.
Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com
URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2010/11/29/even-in-oregon/
URLs in this post:
[1] according to the Associated Press: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2010/11/26/national/a222107S31.DTL&ao=all
[2] Wanly said: http://www.kval.com/news/local/110925199.html
[3] New York Daily News: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2010/11/28/2010-11-28_neighbors_say_wannabe_christmas_bomber_mohamed_mohamud_embraced_extremism_after_.html
[4] according to a recently released FBI report: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20101122/pl_afp/uscrimesocialracismreligiongay_20101122190340
[5] CAIR: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=154325C2-EF71-48FD-B33C-B5A584CFB8CF
[6] and: http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/023204.php
[7] other Muslims: http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/023150.php
Robert Spencer
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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