Investigators have recently uncovered a series of Internet postings made by the wives of a group of suspected jihad terrorists. They include these comments (all spelling and punctuation is as it was written):
“All muslim politicians are corrupt. There's no one out there willing to rule the country by the laws of Allah, rather they fight to rule the country by the laws of democracy.”
“Are you accepting a system that separates religion and state? Are you gonna give your pledge of allegiance to a party that puts secular laws above the laws of Allah? Are you gonna worship that which they worship? Are you going to throw away the most important thing that makes you a muslim?”
These posts and others like them were written in Canada by several of the wives of the jihad terror plotters recently arrested there: Mariya, wife of the suspected plot ringleader; Nada Farooq, wife of Zakariya Amara, who is thought to have been Ahmad’s second-in-command; Rana, wife of another suspect, Ahmad Ghany; and Cheryfa MacAulay Jamal, a convert to Islam and the wife of Qayyum Abdul Jamal, who is alleged to have stirred the others to act with his fiery sermons preaching jihad and hatred of Christians, Jews, and the West—and whose violent exhortations were tolerated by mosque officials because he took out the garbage.
Leftist analysts who explain Islamic jihad as a reaction to Western atrocities and oppression, as well as those on the Left and the Right who assume that education and exposure to Western culture and values will blunt the force of that jihad, are hard-pressed to explain the phenomenon of jihadists and jihad sympathizers who are born and raised in Western countries. But when asked what she thought was unique about
Nada Farooq has no doubt been taught that all non-Muslim society and culture is jahiliyya—ignorance or barbarism, worthless and to be despised.
The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood theorist Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), whose writings are popular today among Muslims in the West, emphasized this: “Islam cannot accept any mixing with Jahiliyyah [the society of unbelievers]. Either Islam will remain, or Jahiliyyah; no half-half situation is possible. Command belongs to Allah, or otherwise to Jahiliyyah; Allah’s Shari’ah [law] will prevail, or else people’s desires.”
Likewise, Syed Abul Ala Maududi (1903-1979), founder of the Pakistani political party Jamaat-e-Islami, declared that non-Muslims have “absolutely no right to seize the reins of power in any part of God’s earth nor to direct the collective affairs of human beings according to their own misconceived doctrines.” If they do, “the believers would be under an obligation to do their utmost to dislodge them from political power and to make them live in subservience to the Islamic way of life.”
This is a matter of religious conviction. These ideas will not be dislodged by education about Western values, which are all part of the jahiliyya these women and their husbands despise, or by better access to jobs or housing. One primary lesson that authorities should draw from these Internet postings is that Islamic terror is not a problem that can be solved by social engineering. It cannot be assuaged by gestures of good will, negotiations or concessions. There is in Western countries today a large and growing population of Muslims, among whom are many who have no intention of assimilating or adopting Western values and perspectives, and who regard the West with as much or more disdain and contempt as these women show in their Internet postings. The jihad ideology as such must be confronted and combated, or it will continue to spread, and breed terrorists and subversives.
But for authorities to understand this and take positive steps to deal with it, they would first have to admit that Islam has anything to do with terrorism at all—something they have taken great pride in denying. And that denial only ensures that there will be many more jihad cells in
