Mac-Coleman

12 September 2013 –

Where Is The Islamic Jihadist Threat Coming From?

In April 2001, five months before 9/11, I attended a Middle East Orientation Course before deploying to Turkey as part of Operation NORTHERN WATCH.  Our job there would be to enforce the no-fly zone above the 36^th parallel in Iraq—a vestige of DESERT STORM’s defeating Saddam Hussein’s forces in 1991 and liberating Kuwait.  The course included presentations on the governments, cultures, religions, economies, and histories, of the countries from Morocco to Iran.  In military parlance, we were drinking from the fire hose before being thrown into the fire.   

An Air Force Moslem chaplain was one of the presenters.  A Catholic convert to Islam, he completed religious training under an American program funded by the Saudi Arabian Wahabist sect of Islam.  What bothered me immediately was a bearded civilian of middle-eastern descent who stood at the edge of the stage and monitored the chaplain’s presentation. The chaplain often turned to him for silent approval. 

During the question and answer period, I asked about the extra man on stage.  The chaplain said that he came from a local mosque in Florida and was there to approve his, the chaplain’s, remarks.  I asked why a trained Air Force chaplain, in uniform, talking to other Air Force personnel in an official setting, would need a local civilian to approve what he said.  No other religion’s chaplains had such a requirement.  The chaplain said that his authority to counsel Air Force Moslems and to preach Islam came from his imam and not from the Air Force.  He said that he was always under such control.  The local imam on stage scowled at me throughout the explanation. 

I then suggested to the chaplain the following scenario:  Suppose a Moslem fighter pilot was deploying to Turkey to fly combat missions over Northern Iraq and came to his chaplain for spiritual guidance.  This pilot may indeed be ordered to attack and kill Iraqi soldiers on the ground.  These Iraqi soldiers would most certainly be Moslems.   How would he, the conservative Moslem chaplain, advise this pilot?  A dreadful answer followed.  The chaplain looked at his imam handler and then said that as a Moslem chaplain he would tell the fighter pilot to refuse to attack fellow Moslems on the ground.  I reminded the chaplain that this USAF officer voluntarily bound himself by oath to execute the missions given him.  I also reminded the chaplain that he also had taken that same oath of office.  Therefore, would the chaplain counsel a fellow officer to break that oath?  The chaplain’s second answer: He would counsel Moslems to refuse to kill Moslems, no matter what uniform anyone was wearing. 

I said nothing more.  All the air was sucked out of the room in amazement.  The civilian imam motioned that the session was over, and he and the chaplain left the stage.  We immediately broke for lunch.  When we returned, the commander of the base, an upset two-star general, took the stage and announced that the Air Force had no problems with any Moslems serving and that we should go on with our presentations.  We dutifully obeyed and finished the day with no further confrontations with uniformed traitors.       

I write about this event twelve years later to emphasize a compelling fact: Almost every international “crisis” confronting the United States in the last two decades has been woven throughout by major strains of Islamic Jihadist violence.  The violent attacks of the last decades, funded by petro dollars, are the latest jihadist campaign in a 1300-year war between an increasingly secular Western civilization and Islam.   What we in the West call toleration, jihadists call weakness and willful rebellion against authority.  What we honor as individual liberties, jihadists call infidels’ insubordination to Islam.  Jihadists look at our nation’s grand experiment of freedom, buttressed by obligations to our nation and to others’ liberties, as a weakness to exploit.  Jihadists hate our way of life, and they hate us.    

To blunt our enemy’s latest aggression, we must remind ourselves who killed three thousand Americans twelve years ago, who has killed thousands of American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, who killed bystanders in the Boston marathon, who killed unarmed soldiers in a processing center at Fort Hood, Texas, who killed our ambassador and three others in Benghazi, who is killing thousands of Coptic Christians in Egypt, and who is killing Syrian Christians today, right now.   

We know our enemy.  We know where he comes from.  We know he wants to punish then eradicate the West.  This is war.