On September 11, I came across two headlines which sum up the impact on our culture of the 9/11 attacks. One reads:
Michigan Church cancels ‘Is Michigan surrendering to Islam?’ event under pressure from Hamas-linked CAIR
“Is Michigan surrendering to Islam?” Of course it is. The headline makes it obvious.
New York Times says ‘Airplanes took aim at World Trade Center’ on 9/11.
Realizing that airplanes don’t take aim, an editor at NYT rewrote that part of the story as follows:
Eighteen years have passed since terrorists commandeered airplanes to take aim at the World Trade Center and bring them down.
That’s better. Now we know that it was “terrorists” who took aim at the twin towers. But what sort of terrorists? The revised report doesn’t mention “Islam” or “al Qaeda,” so it is anyone’s guess.
What the story does tell us, but only if you read between the lines, is that the Islamic terrorists succeeded in their mission. The word “Islam” means submission, and the goal of Islamic terrorists is to intimidate non-Muslims into submission. If, eighteen years after the event, Americas most prestigious newspaper is afraid to use the term “Islamic terrorists,” it looks like the 9/11 attacks had the intended effect.
The Michigan affair tells the same story. When a talk titled “Is Michigan surrendering to Islam?” is cancelled because of pressure from an Islamic activist organization, it’s difficult to call it anything other than submission.
One wonders how, in the wake of 9/11, an organization called the Council on American-Islamic Relations became so powerful that people all over the country quake and cower at the very mention of the name. CAIR’s lawyers seem omnipresent. If you’re a school principal and you call in the police when a Muslim boy walks into school with what appears to be a ticking time-bomb, CAIR’s lawyers will hit you with a hefty lawsuit. If you’re a business owner and your Muslim employees demand multiple prayer breaks during the workday, you know that CAIR is itching to get you into court. If you’re in charge of hiring for your company, you’ll think twice before rejecting a Muslim applicant because CAIR may be waiting in the wings.
Which brings me to another news story of the see-no-Islam variety. You may recall that in early September, news broke of an attempted sabotage of an American Airlines passenger jet by an airline mechanic at the Miami Airport. It was a top story for about a day, and then seemed to disappear almost entirely from sight. That may be because the airline mechanic is named Abdul-Majeed Marouf Ahmed Alani. It’s not known at this time whether Mr. Alani was trying to wage jihad or whether, as he claimed, he was upset over a contract dispute between his union and the airline.
But it’s telling that the media suddenly lost interest in the story once it was discovered that the would-be-saboteur was a Muslim. Like the New York Times reporter, the news media apparently didn’t want you to start making mental connections you’re not supposed to make.
It’s likely that the story of Maurice Hill suddenly disappeared from the news for the same reason. You probably remember that story. Hill was arrested in Philadelphia after a seven-hour standoff during which he wounded six policemen with an AR-15 rifle. What you may not know is that Hill is a devout Muslim who attended a radical mosque which preaches an extreme form of Islamist ideology.
Again, there is no indication so far that Hill was motivated by Islamic ideology. But, apparently, the news editors didn’t want to take the chance that you might start wondering about his motives. On the other hand, if Hill was a white nationalists or a Christian street preacher, you’d be reading about it for days, and there would be no end of speculation about his motives.
When Guantanamo Bay Naval Base was used to house Islamic prisoners of war, the guards were required to handle the Koran with white gloves. Likewise, ever since 9/11 all our major institutions—media, academia, law enforcement, courts, and churches—have been handling the topic of Islam with kid gloves.
One would have expected that after 9/11, Islamic theology and ideology would have come under increased scrutiny. It did, but only for a relatively short while. Official suspicion was very quickly replaced with official praise. Islam, we were told, is a religion of peace, and terrorists were betrayers of their religion.
To reinforce the message, Catholic bishops and even the pope weighed in with the same assurances: Islam is a religion of peace and justice, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism. To demonstrate its commitment to the message, the Catholic Church in America became the single largest government contractor for the resettlement of Muslim refugees. It also became one of the loudest voices in favor of open borders.
Contrary to what one might expect after a Pearl Harbor-type attack on our nation, the status of Muslims in America actually increased. The main question quickly became not how can we make our nation more secure, but how can we demonstrate our tolerance and openness to Muslims. Even those who didn’t feel particularly tolerant were careful not to show it, lest they be accused of “Islamophobia”—a term of opprobrium that had been carefully cultivated by CAIR and other Muslim activist groups.
As a result of this new found sensitivity Muslims seem to have become less subject to scrutiny than other Americans. Major NIdal Hasan, who massacred fourteen people at Fort Hood in 2009, made no secret about a Muslim’s obligation to perform jihad. In fact, he once gave a PowerPoint presentation on the subject to fellow officers. He even carried a business card that indicated he was a “soldier of Allah.” Some of his fellow officers considered him to be a “ticking time-bomb”. So what did they do? Nothing. Some of them admitted later that they were afraid of being thought “Islamophobic” if they spoke up.
Islamophobia? Maybe on the outer fringes. But in the weeks and years after 9/11, mainstream society accepted the ruse that the 9/11 terrorists had “hijacked a great religion.” Instead of discrimination, Muslims and their faith were accorded special treatment. President Bush insisted that Islam was a religion of peace, the FBI helped Saudi Arabia cover up its role in the attacks, and later purged its training manuals of any material connecting Islam with terror. Schools quickly developed new curriculums portraying Islam as a noble faith; Congress brushed aside a proposal to investigate Muslim Brotherhood infiltration of the government; Huma Abedin who was the daughter of prominent Muslim Brotherhood parents, and was herself an assistant editor of an Islamic supremacist journal, became Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s closest advisor and confidant.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration worked diligently to facilitate the ascendancy of Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt; Anwar al-Awlaki, who was eventually revealed to be one of the world’s top jihadist recruiters, was invited to a luncheon at the Pentagon, and was asked to lead prayers at the Capitol; and Major Stephen Coughlin, the Pentagon’s top expert on sharia law was fired for having the temerity to suggest that sharia law mandates jihad. Even in the Pentagon, the official position was that terrorism has nothing to do with Islam.
More recently, several courts struck down attempts to ban or restrict Muslim migration; Mustafa Javed Ali, a former CAIR employee, was appointed Senior Director of Counter-terrorism for the National Security Council; and hundreds of Michigan schools teachers were required to attend a two-day training seminar on Islam in which, according to the Thomas More Law Center, “Islam was glorified, Christianity disparaged, and America bashed.”
Although the U.S. has done a good job of fighting armed jihad—al-Qaeda, ISIS, and the like—it’s done a poor job of fighting stealth jihad. Over here, it’s the Islamic cultural jihadists who are winning all the battles. They’re winning because most Americans don’t even realize that we’re in a culture war with Islam.
The enormous restraints our society has imposed on freedom of expression in order to appease Islamic activists means that we have very little idea of what those activists are up to. We could find out easily enough just by looking at the many successes of their counterparts in Europe. But the Islamization of Europe is another one of those things that polite people don’t talk about.
In America, we tend to think that as long as there are no further 9/11s there’s nothing much to worry about. But if cultural jihadists, enabled by naïve virtue-signalers, succeed in their mission of cultural subversion, there won’t be any need for another 9/11.
This article originally appeared in the September 14, 2019 edition of Catholic World Report.
Photo credit: Pixabay
