Addressing our homegrown enemies By CAROLINE B. GLICK

Column One: Addressing our homegrown enemies
By CAROLINE B. GLICK, The Jerusalem Post
November 12, 2010
To remain free, free societies must shed our politically correct
shackles and address this growing menace to everything we hold dear.

This week we learned that Nazareth is an al-Qaida hub. Sheikh Nazem
Abu Salim Sahfe, the Israeli imam of the Shihab al-Din mosque in the
city, was indicted on Sunday for promoting and recruiting for global
jihad and calling on his followers to harm non-Muslims.

Among the other plots born of Sahfe’s sermons was the murder of cab
driver Yefim Weinstein last November. Sahfe’s followers also plotted
to assassinate Pope Benedict XVI during his trip to Israel last year.
They torched Christian tour buses. They abducted and stabbed a pizza
delivery man. Two of his disciples were arrested in Kenya en route to
joining the al-Qaida forces in Somalia.

With his indictment, Sahfe joins a growing list of jihadists born and
bred in Israel and in free societies around the world who have
rejected their societies and embraced the cause of Islamic global
domination. The most prominent member of this group among US citizens
today is the American-born al-Qaida leader Anwar al-Awlaki.

US authorities describe Awlaki as the world’s most dangerous man. His
jihadist track record is staggering. It seems that there has been no
major attack in the US or Britain ­ including the September 11 attacks
and the July 7 attacks in London ­ in which Awlaki has not played a
role.

Sahfe and Awlaki, like nearly all the prominent jihadists in the West,
are men of privilege. Their personal histories are a refutation of the
popular Western tale that jihad is born of frustration, poverty and
ignorance. Both men, like almost every prominent Western jihadist, are
university graduates.

So, too, their stories belie the Western fantasy that adherence to the
cause of jihad is spawned by poverty. These men and their colleagues
are the sons of wealthy or of comfortable middle class families. They
have never known privation.

Armed with their material comforts, university degrees and native
knowledge of the ways of democracy and the habits of freedom, these
men chose to become jihadists. They chose submission to Islam over
liberal democratic rights because that is what they prefer. They are
idealists.

This means that all the standard Western pabulums about the need to
expand welfare benefits for Muslims or abstain from enforcing the laws
against their communities, or to give mosques immunity from
surveillance and closure, or to seek to co-opt jihadist leaders by
treating them like credible Muslim voices, are wrong and
counterproductive. These programs do not neutralize their supremacist
intentions or actions. They embolden the Western Islamic supremacists
by signaling to them that they are winning. Their Western societies
are no match for them.

IN RECENT weeks we have seen a number of statements by establishment
political leaders in Europe indicating that they are willing to
consider abandoning these politically correct bromides. German
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s statement last month that “multiculturalism
has utterly failed,” for instance, is widely perceived as a watershed
event.

And in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on Monday, former British
prime minister Tony Blair acknowledged that there is a problem with
unassimilated Muslims in Britain. As he put it, anti-immigration
sentiment is not general but particular. It relates, Blair admitted,
to “the failure of one part of the Muslim community to resolve and
create an identity that is both British and Muslim.”

Blair acknowledged that it is due to the European establishment’s
refusal to acknowledge the problem of growing Islamic supremacism in
Europe that so many millions of Europeans are today ditching the
establishment and its politically correct orthodoxies and voting for
anti-establishment politicians who are willing to address the problem.
He called for a continent-wide approach to immigration whose goal
would be to prevent jihadists from exploiting the system to overthrow
it.

Moves like Merkel’s and Blair’s are insufficient. But the very fact
that enough Europeans are willing to break the PC barrier to force
these leaders to acknowledge and perhaps address the challenges of
unassimilated, supremacist Muslim minorities means that Europe is
taking the first steps towards addressing the challenges that jihadist
Islam poses to its security, culture and civilization. Perhaps most
emblematic of this change was the Merkel government’s recent move to
finally close the mosque in Hamburg where the September 11 plotters
met and planned their acts of war against the US.

Disturbingly, the establishments in the two countries most actively
targeted by global jihad ­ the US and Israel ­ remain in deep denial
about the challenges of homegrown jihadist fifth columnists. The US
remains in denial even though the majority of recent jihadist attacks
and attempted attacks against the US were carried out by American
citizens.

The US’s denial of the nature of the jihadist threat was demonstrated
in all of its politically correct glory this week with President
Barack Obama’s address to Indian students at St. Xavier University in
Mumbai. In response to a student’s query about his view of jihad and
jihadists, Obama praised Islam as “one of the world’s great
religions.” He went on to claim that the overwhelming majority of
Muslims view Islam as a religion of “peace, justice, fairness and
tolerance.”

Obama’s message was not only deceptive and off point, it was deeply
insensitive to his audience. Two years ago this month, Mumbai was the
site of a massive jihadist commando attack against targets throughout
the city, and the city is still grappling with the wounds of that
attack.

Obama’s statement also ignored the US’s contribution to that attack.
The suspected mastermind of the Mumbai massacres was a US citizen
named David Coleman Headley from Obama’s hometown of Chicago.
Moreover, Headley (formerly Daood Sayed Gilani) served for many years
as a double agent. A convicted drug dealer, he was sent to Pakistan as
a Drug Enforcement Agency agent. While there, he trained at
Lashkar-e-Taibe jihadist training camps.

Obama failed to note that perhaps due to his work at the DEA, US law
enforcement officials ignored testimonies from two of Headley’s former
wives in 2005 and 2007 that he was a member of Lashkar-e-Taibe, the
India-focused Pakistani al-Qaida affiliate run by Pakistan’s
Inter-Services Intelligence agency.

Rather than address these issues, or the fact that the US has refused
Indian extradition requests for Headley, Obama vacuously told students
that it is the job of young people from all religions to reject
extremism and violence.

Headley, of course, is just one of many American jihadists who has
enjoined the fruits of America’s politically correct denial of the
homegrown Islamic threat. In the months following the September 11
attacks, the US Department of the Army actively courted Awlaki as part
of its Muslim outreach program. Awlaki, then George Washington
University’s Muslim chaplain, was wooed despite his documented links
to three of the September 11 hijackers.

AS ISRAELIS wake up to the reality of al-Qaida in Nazareth, our
leftist establishment remains in denial about it role in enabling this
reality. Sahfe’s Shihab al-Din mosque was established as a
triumphalist mosque adjacent to the Church of the Annunciation in the
lead up to the millennium. At the time, the Vatican launched a vocal
protest against its construction.

In the hopes of winning over the likes of Sahfe, then-prime minister
Ehud Barak and then-foreign minister and public security minister
Shlomo Ben-Ami rejected the Vatican’s objections. They even donated
the land for the mosque from the Israel Lands Authority.

Safhe returned the favor by interrupting Pope John Paul II’s homily at
the Church of the Annunciation during his March 2000 visit with a call
to prayer. Months later, the Shihab al-Din mosque was one of the focal
points for inciting the anti-Jewish riots in the Arab sector in
October 2000.

Today, leftist judges together with leftist politicians and opinion
makers block all efforts by politicians and the public to acknowledge
and address the growing lawlessness and jihadist bent of Israel’s
Muslim minority. Fear of the politically correct Supreme Court has
deterred authorities from outlawing the Islamic Movement. Efforts to
contend with illegal land seizures and building have been blocked by
the leftist media, pressure groups largely sponsored by the New Israel
Fund and the courts. Even symbolic measures like the government’s
recent bid to require non-Jewish immigrants to pledge loyalty to the
state have been viciously attacked by Israel’s leftist establishment
as fascist and racist.

But as Europe is belatedly acknowledging, these politically correct
commissars must be sidelined if the free world is to withstand the
growing threat of homegrown jihad.

What this means for Israel is that the political and legal space has
to be found to speedily embark on the law enforcement equivalent of a
counterinsurgency operation. Israel must enforce its laws with as much
zeal and commitment in the Muslim sector as it does in the Jewish
sector. This means that Shihab al-Din and other jihadist mosques have
to be closed.

It means that jihadist groups like the Islamic Movement have to be
outlawed and its leaders have to be tried for treason and other
relevant offenses. The same is true for all Arab leaders, political
groupings and social organizations that promote the destruction of
Israel.

Building and zoning laws must be enforced. State lands that have been
seized must be taken back, if necessary by force, including with the
involvement of the IDF.

So, too, Jewish rights have to be protected. Like Muslims, Jews have
the right to buy land and homes throughout the country. Jews who wish
to live in Muslim-majority communities must enjoy the protection of
the law just as Muslims who live in Tel Aviv and Upper Nazareth do.

By the same token, the government must embark on a campaign to win
back the loyalty of its Muslim citizens. It must empower leaders who
embrace their identity as Israelis and seek the integration of Israeli
Muslims into the wider society. Authorities must ensure that Israeli
Muslims who wish to integrate are not discriminated against by Jews or
intimidated by other Muslims.

Over the past couple of weeks, IDF commanders have spoken at length
about the nature of the war to come. Their remarks have concentrated
on what is already largely recognized ­ that Israel’s home front will
be targeted by long-range missiles.

Disappointingly, they ignored the most significant new threat facing
the home front today: The likelihood that Israel’s external foes will
receive active assistance from its Muslim citizens.

Nearly a decade after the September 11 attacks, global jihad remains
the central threat to the West, and not because of its popularity in
western Pakistan. It remains the central threat to the free world
because of its popularity among the Muslims in the free world.

To remain free, free societies must shed our politically correct
shackles and address this growing menace to everything we hold dear.