Lt. Colonel discusses motivations of women and children suicide bombers Anat Berko probes the mindset of terrorists, jihadist culture

A former lieutenant colonel in the Israeli Defense Forces visited Binghamton University to take students into the minds of suicide bombers.

Anat Berko speaks to students Monday night in C4. In her talk, organized by Camera Fellowship, BUZO, Bearcats for Israel, StandWithUs and Dorm Room Diplomacy, Berko aimed to provide insight on how and why suicide bombers decide to engage in violent activities.

Anat Berko, a lecturer at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism, spoke Monday night about understanding how and why suicide bombers engage in such violent activity.

“I spent 20 years in high-security prisons speaking with members of Hamas, Fatah and Islamic jihadists. Imagine the Israeli version of Guantanamo Bay, but probably a bit nicer,” she said.

The focus of her talk was the role of women and adolescents in Islamic terror attacks and the mental abuse that leads many of these people to try and take their own lives.

“Today we see a wave of female and children bombers. There have been over 50 female suicide bombers in just Iraq,” she said.

She described how many female terrorists had been sexually assaulted as young women or children.

“Many times these girls are sexually abused,” she said. “And if they commit a ‘mistake’ or are involved with a man they are ruined. But for the man it is always okay.”

Berko went on to describe the double standards in jihadist organizations.

“After a woman blows herself up, she is not really a hero. Everyone wonders what was wrong with her. Nobody says she gets 72 virgin men in heaven,” she said. “When a woman blows herself up, men argue that she reveals too much flesh.”

Berko illustrated her arguments with quotes from prisoners she had interviewed.

“I object that women will go and blow themselves up,” said Sheikh Abu Ter, vice prime minister of Hamas. “It’s crossing the red line.”

Berko also described the scope of child involvement in terrorist attacks.

“There are instances of recruiters waiting for children right out of school. They would just go after students like drug dealers,” she said. “I spoke with a 15-year-old boy in prison, and you could tell he had been beaten and abused.”

Yet when asked if terrorist leaders were often willing to sacrifice their own children, Berko answered bluntly.

“No. What do you think?” she said. “They like to abuse the children of others, not their own.”

Though she sympathized with the background many suicide bombers grew up in, Berko was critical of jihadist culture.

“There is [an] omnipotent feeling bombers have that they can decide who lives and who dies,” she said. “But this causes severe damage to the Muslim world, not the West.”

Many of the nearly 100 students in the Chenango Champlain Collegiate Center multipurpose rooms said they felt shocked and overwhelmed after the presentation.

“It made me really sad. I didn’t realize how involved women were in this and how terrible some of their lives were. It makes me want to do something, but I can’t think of what,” said Phoebe O’Connor, a junior majoring in philosophy, politics and law.

Other students said the presentation gave them new perspective.

“I found this event amazing. Very sad, but amazing,” said Jacob Sneider, a junior majoring in mechanical engineering. “It humanizes some of the terrorists. It doesn’t excuse what they do, but you understand them better.”

Justin Hayet, an organizer from the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) and a sophomore majoring in political science, said that Berko helped bring a balanced view of Middle Eastern affairs to BU.

“The presentation went well and dealt with dense and intense topics,” he said. “It is important for campus events to have unbiased truth. If there is a presenter that accurately showcases Israel in an accurate positive or negative light we want to show that. Today we had a variety of different clubs co-sponsor this event and a lot of different people showed up.”

The event was co-sponsored by BUZO (Binghamton University Zionist Organization), StandWithUs, Bearcats for Israel and Dorm Room Diplomacy.

The Excitement of Being a Martyr for Allah

Guest Column: Jihad Tourism

by Anat Berko
Special to IPT News
October 2, 2013

For 20 years I studied and interviewed Islamistmujahedeen (jihad fighters) imprisoned in Israeli jails, examining their inner worlds and discovering the obsessive thoughts leading them to carry out terrorist attacks. They were addicted to fantasizing about an alternative reality, describing their compulsions in metaphors similar to those used by obsessive gamblers and drug addicts. They likened them to "worms" (duda in Arabic) burrowing into their brains and driving them to seek not another game of cards or a fix, but dead Israelis, Americans, Europeans, or anyone else they considered infidels. They did not try to resist their compulsions or consider that their actions might be wrong, because they felt completely controlled and manipulated by the concept of jihad, which dictated their behavior in every sphere of life.

The findings of my research indicated that the jihadists' obsessions created what are known as "overvalued ideas," that is, false or exaggerated beliefs sustained beyond reason or logic. One often repeated, was the vision of what awaited the shaheed (a martyr for the sake of Allah) in the Islamic paradise after death. The sensations of the release of tension and relaxation come only after the terrorist act, when the perpetrator looks at the people he murdered. Even suicide bombers whose explosive belts failed to detonate or who were arrested before they could carry out their missions described a transcendent sensation, a smile as they approached their targets.

They spoke of their inability to control their impulsive behavior, harmful to themselves and others.

They described the mujahed's [the jihad fighter's] search for meaning in his life, how he turns his back on civilization and everything it represents. Many of them felt rejected by their immediate surroundings, either because of feelings of inferiority, marginality or guilt for things they had done (or not done) that brought dishonor to their families, or simply because they could not integrate into society as productive, contributing citizens. Those who had been exposed to Western society had strong feelings of inferiority, jealousy and rejection, especially because of differences in life styles, sex roles, confidence and other personal attributes. Some of them noted unbridgeable gaps between culture and science. One dispatcher of suicide bombers spoke of the great differences in capabilities, culture and economic condition between Christian and Muslim Arabs. For the mujahedeen, people are either good or bad, and that conceptual polarity directs their course.

Terrorists are also frustrated and alienated by those who rejected them, leading them to announce that as mujahedeen they "reject the rejecters." A similar sensation has been noted in criminological studies as a criminal behavioral dynamic, and because the criminal is rejected by a normative society and cannot integrate into it, he declares war on it. Generally speaking, there is no psychopathology among Muslim terrorists. That is, none of them can be diagnosed as having a recognizable mental illness, even those who attempted to carry out suicide bombing attacks. What remains to be examined is whether or not there is a collective pathology, and if it is a question of a society, many of whose members find it difficult to suppress violence and control their urges and anger.

Jihad, a holy war against the infidel, is the personal duty of every Muslim, and if he does not wage it, he will die as a religious hypocrite, someone who only outwardly practices Islam but does not truly believe, and be damned for all eternity. The terrorists I interviewed told me that waging jihad is, for the mujahed, the way to partake of Allah's mercy for themselves and the members of their families, and to go directly to paradise without the Islamic "tortures of the grave" and without undergoing a painful examination by angels before they are allowed to enter.

Exhilaration and ecstasy accompany jihad fighters in their search for arenas of excitement around the globe. They look for places where they can rape and kill with impunity and fight the infidel in the name of Allah, reaching the pinnacle of masculinity and honor reserved for the shaheed. Superficially, they may seem to be fighting for an ideal, but in reality, even in suicide bombing attacks, there is an element of desire for reward, both in this world and the next. The overwhelming desire of many Muslim adolescent boys, even those educated in the West or who are converts to Islam, especially those living in countries where there is no real governance, is excitement. To that end they stream into confrontation zones like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Chechnya, Libya, Iraq, Africa (such as the recent terrorist attack in Kenya), and Syria to experience the mission, the excitement and promise of being a shaheed as the ultimate in self-realization.

Frustration, alienation and a sense of inferiority accompany the increase in the pace of modern life, and the gap between East and West continually grows. The deprivation, restrictions and solutions imposed by Islamism lead people to seek a group to which they can belong and which will help them channel their negative feelings for the other, the different, the "infidel," feelings which are common to all. In addition, the need for adventure and excitement has helped create a kind of "jihad tourism" especially but not exclusively relevant for young Muslim men, including those born in the West. Today in Syria there are jihadist fighters from 60 countries, among them converts to Islam, who star in videos and help the jihadists recruit supporters and spread propaganda. Jihad tourism is a subculture of fun and excitement, a festival of violence, similar to the Western criminal and gang subcultures. The jihadist lifestyle allows them to shake off the confines of the disintegrating patriarchal family. As opposed to ordinary criminals, whose social status is lowered when they are classified as felons, the Islamic terrorists feel they are performing good deeds for the sake of Allah, raising their status. They act on violent impulses, are unrestrained in their aggression and try to impress those around them by taking risks, hoping for admiration and praise. They butcher people of all ages, use both sarin gas and hatchets, behead, rape and mutilate their "enemies" with no regard for the fact that until recently the enemy was a neighbor, or at least shared their language and culture.

In their "extreme jihad journeys" they become accustomed to violence and atrocities, or as one of the men I interviewed said, "we find the smell of blood natural; even as young children we saw sheep being slaughtered in our yards." In addition, they receive religious justification from various fatwas, religious edicts issued by sheikhs such as Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood's religious authority. The jihad tourists live like wandering adventurers, generally finding it difficult to integrate into the mainstream of modern life. Instead they choose a path of murder and violence while embracing simplicity and even primitiveness. Having different aspirations, they do not have to compete with the West, seeking instead to destroy it while hoping to recreate the past in preference to joining the future. Before he was killed by the Americans, the terrorists I interviewed often praised Osama bin Laden and the simple life he lived in the caves of Tora Bora – an illusion, because bin Laden lived a life of relative comfort in Pakistan.

The waves of jihad tourism and terrorism targeting mainly Christians and Jews in the West have spun out of control and are not susceptible to the restraints of family, culture, religion or society. Violent jihad tourists are now overwhelming entire countries: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt and Syria. The atrocities currently being committed in Syria would not embarrass any legendary serial killer, and there are thousands of such jihad tourists there, Sunni and Shi'ite, and even Western converts to Islam, who torture and kill innocent civilians.

It is the high season for jihad tourism, and while the mujahedeen continue their activities in Iraq, the trendy watering hole is currently Syria, where Bashar al-Assad's friends and foes alike indiscriminately slaughter innocents of all ages and sexes. They surf on waves of blood, and the operatives of the Al-Nusra Front, a group affiliated with Al-Qaeda, slaughter both members of the Assad regime and of secular rebel organizations who fighting the same regime.

The goal of Western educational systems is to provide the tools necessary for functioning in society. In the Islamic countries, however, children are taught from infancy that the family and clan are the foundations of their lives and dictate their behavior. Islamic society binds its members in chains, and the individual has no choice but to submit to group pressure. Drowning in blood and violence, his only justification is seeking the death of a shaheed.

And recent conflicts show that the West provides plenty of jihad tourists despite our education and opportunities. For some, especially converts to Islam, waging jihad in foreign lands can be exciting and revolutionary and a chance to prove the depth of their new devotion.

With all of this in mind, I would like to propose calling murder for the sake of Allah "shahadamania," which might make it easier for the West to understand and fight the syndrome. It refers to the obsession for istishhad [martyrdom for the sake of Allah] and includes feelings of transcendence and euphoria after killing the infidel, the capitulation to instinct, the inability to function in daily life, and jihad as a good and even altruistic deed in this world to qualify for a hedonistic afterlife.

Dr. Anat Berko, PhD, is a Lt Col (Res) in the Israel Defense Forces, conducts research for the National Security Council and is a research fellow at the International Policy Institute for Counterterrorism at the Interdisciplinary Center in Israel. A criminologist, she was a visiting professor at George Washington University and has written two books about suicide bombers, "The Path to Paradise," and the recently released "The Smarter Bomb: Women and Children as Suicide Bombers" (Rowman & Littlefield)

San Francisco bus ad: 'Killing Jews is worship that draws us closer to Allah'

The ad above is appearing on buses in San Francisco, and this time it was not placed by the jihadis. It was placed by Pam Geller's American Freedom Defense Initiative and it's meant to show the reality of jihad. The ads have San Francisco Leftists bouncing off the walls.

Several San Francisco city leaders, including District Attorney George Gascon, have condemned the campaign.

“San Francisco won’t tolerate Islamophobic bigotry,” said Gascon. “The only thing necessary for evil to prevail is for good people to look the other way and do nothing.”

Board of Supervisors President David Chiu said the American Freedom Defense Initiative is made of “well-known hate extremists” and said he is introducing a resolution at Tuesday’s board meeting to denounce the ads.

Geller said the ads were a response to another bus ad campaign earlier this year by the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

That campaign sought to disassociate the word “jihad” with violence and reclaim its meaning as “the struggle,” which is a central tenet of Islam.

Could someone please explain to me why quoting the very words that the Islamic terrorists use is 'Islamophobia'?

MEMRI: "Suicide bombing the most lofty form of Jihad"

Following are excerpts from an interview with Ja’far Abd Al-Salam, secretary-general of the Islamic Universities Association, which aired on Al-Aqsa TV on January 21, 2013.

Ja’far Abd Al-Salam: The spirit of resistance is nurtured by the ideology of Islam. “Allah purchased from the believers their lives and their property, in return for Paradise.” For a Muslim, life is worthless unless it is given away and spent for the sake of Allah. This culture is nurtured by Islam and by patriotism.

[…]

Only great pain makes a great man. The great pain of martyrdom leads to the great reward of Paradise. Brother, this culture does not exist in the West, because Westerners value human life very much.

Interviewer: They focus on the material at the expense of the spiritual.

Ja’far Abd Al-Salam: Maybe you have noticed that the thing that frightens the Jews, or Zionists, most of all is being killed. We do not have this kind of fear.

[…]

It is certain that Islam views [suicide operations] as sacrifice and as the most lofty form of Jihad.

Police investigating Islamic school over curriculum comparing Jews to Nazis

Police are investigating a complaint about a Toronto Muslim school whose curriculum tells boys to exercise so they are “ready for jihad,” refers to “treacherous Jews” and contrasts Islam with “the Jews and the Nazis.”

“Yes, I can confirm for you that a complaint has been made and our Hate Crimes Unit is investigating,” Acting Sergeant Rebecca Boyd, a York Region Police spokeswoman, told the National Post on Monday.

“However, they are in the early stages of the investigation,” she added. The complaint was made by the Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, which found the material on the website of the East End Madrassah.

Excerpts

“Islam has allowed boys to engage in sports for one specific reason and that is to always keep them healthy and strong. But why should a Muslim be healthy and strong? Firstly, it is necessary to take care of the body because it is a gift from Allah. Secondly, so that you may physically be ready for jihad whenever the time comes for it.”

“Islam is a dynamic, comprehensive school that aims at the rectification of the social and economic systems of the world in a special manner. Unlike the beliefs of the ancient Romans, the Jews, and the Nazis, Islam is not restricted to a certain community of a certain race, but is for all human beings…”

“No doubt any wise, humanitarian person accepts such a combat and admires it [jihad] because there is no other way to achieve the sacred ends of the Prophets.”

“End of Jewish Plots and Treacheries: Ever since the Prophet’s entry into Madina, the treacherous Jews had vehemently opposed him and his Islamic call, evoking memories of their hostility to the previous Prophet, Jesus Christ, half a millennium ago. The crafty Jews entered into an alliance with the polytheist Quraish in a bid to stamp out Islam. They conspired to kill Prophet Muhammad despite the fact that he was lenient towards them and had treated them kindly, hoping to convince them of Islam’s truth. But eventually as Jewish plots and aggressions increased, he had no choice other than to take up arms against them, in order to protect Islam and the Muslims. At the battle of Khaiber which is famous for Imam Ali’s heroic exploits, the Prophet defeated them ending Jewish intrigues and conspiracies in Arabia.”

Source: Curriculum, East End Madrassah, eemadrassah.ca

The Islamic school operates out of David and Mary Thomson Collegiate Institute, a public high school in Toronto. But the complaint was made to police in York because the Islamic school’s mailing address is in that region.

“We are looking into it,” said Masuma Jessa, principal of the East End Madrassah. She said the curriculum document in question had been removed from the school’s website. Later on Monday, the entire school website went offline.

The Toronto District School Board said in a statement it was cooperating with police and would “take appropriate action pending the conclusion of the investigation.”

Spokesman Ryan Bird said the board could revoke a school permit if the holder was found to be promoting hatred. “The TDSB does not support or tolerate any group that promotes hatred.”

The complaints concerned the school’s Level 8 curriculum, which describe historical conflicts between Muslims and Jews. It refers to “Jewish plots and treacheries” as well as “crafty” and “treacherous” Jews.

Another section discusses jihad, which it says means “to strive for something.” But it adds that jihad “sometimes also involves fighting a war against an unjust ruler.” It then quotes Muslim scripture that says about “fighting (in the cause of Allah) is ordained unto you…”

In “Sports and Jihad,” a section of the Level 7 curriculum, it says Islam encouraged boys to engaged in physical training in order to be ready for jihad, but girls were instead to stick to “hobbies” that prepare them to become wives and mothers.

The Level 3 curriculum asks students to color 10 boxes, each representing a branch of Islam. One of the boxes is labeled: Jihad. Later, it explains that jihad “is not just with a weapon, it can be with your writing and speech also,” as well as an internal struggle.

“To think that this is happening right here in Canada, in our backyards, in our own country where we promote tolerance, diversity, understanding, human rights, and bringing those types of concepts over the from the ancient world if you will, its just unbelievable,” said Avi Benlolo, President and CEO of the Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre.

The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs also raised concerns about the curriculum in a press release issued Monday, as well as in a complaint to the Toronto school board.

“Using religion to promote hatred among youth is not just offensive and abhorrent – it shows a stunning disregard for Canada’s basic values of decency and tolerance,” said David Spiro, Greater Toronto Co-Chair of centre.

Ms. Jessa said the complaint about the material was made on Thursday. “We told them that we took the book off the website and yesterday [Sunday] we had a meeting and we looked at it and we are correcting it,” she said. “It was an error.”

She said the school was a “subsidiary” and the “parent company” had dealt with the matter. The Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre said the response to its complaint had come from the Islamic Shia Ithna Asheri Jamaat, an Islamic centre on Bathurst Rd. in Toronto.

The centre’s resident scholar could not be reached for comment on Monday. But in an email to Mr. Benlolo on Saturday, the group’s honorary secretary, Mazahair Dhirani, promised an internal review.

“In the meantime, we have asked the book to be removed from the web portal and there should no distribution of any physical material (if available) until the necessary changes have been made to the text,” he wrote.

How the NYPD Gets Jihad Right In a world of wishful thinkers, Commissioner Kelly is a realist.

‘Every conspiracy against Islam and scheming against Islam and the Muslims — its source is America.”

“Jihad is Jihad. There is no such thing as commerce, industry, and science in jihad. This is calling things other than by its [sic] own name. If Allah says, ‘Do jihad,’ it means do jihad with the sword, with the cannon, with the grenades, and with the missile. This is Jihad. Jihad against Allah’s enemies for Allah’s cause and his word.”
“Why do we fear the word ‘terrorist’? If the terrorist is the person who defends his right, so we are terrorists. . . . The Koran mentions the words ‘to strike terror,’ therefore we don’t fear to be described with ‘terrorism.’ . . . We are ordered to prepare whatever we can of power to terrorize the enemies of Islam.”
This rhetoric was not at all unusual. It was the sort of thing you’d hear on any given Friday at mosques in Brooklyn or Jersey City. Nor is there anything ostensibly criminal about it, at least according to the hash the Supreme Court has made of the First Amendment.
That wasn’t the case in the speaker’s native Egypt. There, Omar Abdel Rahman had been notorious for such fiery Friday sermons. There, the imam known as “the Blind Sheikh,” a renowned scholar of Islamic jurisprudence, had been jailed several times for inciting Muslims — urging that they kill regime officials for allying with America and for failing to implement sharia, Islam’s legal system.
But not here, not in the land of free expression: In the United States, the authorities regarded Abdel Rahman as a respected community leader. The federal government put out its welcome mat despite his appearance on its terrorist watch lists. Federal authorities never consulted the police force responsible for protecting the New Yorkers he would attack; they just issued him a green card to work as a “religious teacher” and sent him on his way.
It was Ray Kelly, one of the great police commissioners in American history, who finally arranged to place the blind sheikh in handcuffs. This was during the summer of 1993, when Kelly was in his first go-round as NYPD commissioner.
The sheikh was holed up in a favorite New York City mosque, surrounded by his followers — at least those of them who were not already in prison or on the lam for multiple bombing plots. As I recounted in Willful Blindness, when Attorney General Janet Reno green-lighted the arrest that we prosecutors had been seeking for weeks, it was Kelly and his savvy city cops who defused the potentially explosive situation. The NYPD spoke to people in the community, the sheikh was coaxed out of the mosque, and federal immigration agents took him into custody without incident. This was no small thing: In the two decades since, dozens of innocent people have been killed by zealots demanding his release.
What I most remember about that day is Kelly’s quiet confidence, instilling calm in a room full of NYPD cops, FBI agents, and immigration officers — not to mention a thirtysomething government lawyer who happened to be on hand. A panicky supervisor from INS (called ICE now) groused that the sheikh’s arrest — initially on immigration charges — would have to wait until he could get clearance from his office. I was speechless. After all, the attorney general had already made her decision — why would we now have to wait on a midlevel bureaucrat? Because, it turned out, INS had sent the wrong bureaucrat to the meeting, the New York supervisor instead of the guy from across the river who was in charge of the INS end of the investigation. “You don’t understand,” the supervisor muttered as he reached for a phone, “the case belongs to New Jersey.”
“Yeah,” countered Commissioner Kelly, “but the streets belong to me.”
Kelly is now in his second tour of duty as commish, and New Yorkers are extraordinarily fortunate that their streets have belonged to him for most of the decade since September 11, 2001, when nearly 3,000 of our fellow citizens were murdered. You mightn’t think so, however, if all you had to go on was the hatchet-job published by the Associated Press last week.
By the AP’s lights, Kelly is running a rogue domestic-spying operation. To the contrary, the commissioner has crafted an unparalleled counterterrorism strategy. Ever mindful of civil rights and respectful of Islamic culture — just as the police must be respectful of the variegated cultures in the Big Apple’s ethnic goulash — Kelly has kept the world’s No. 1 terrorist target safe from mass-casualty attacks. He has managed this despite 13 known attempts — and who knows how many others that cannot be spoken of without compromising intelligence sources.
The AP hit was compiled with scads of cooperation from federal-government sources, Islamist organizations, and the Lawyer Left (fancying itself the “civil-rights community”). Its timing is no coincidence. We are approaching the tenth anniversary of 9/11, which our community-organizer-in-chief is feverishly recasting as a “community service” exhibition rather than a day of national remembrance. The AP dropped its purported bombshell hard on the heels of “Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States,” Obama’s recently published strategy for countering terrorism without referring to it as “terrorism” — a term that, as the Blind Sheikh inconveniently points out, has roots in the Koran (e.g., Sura 8:12, in which Allah instructs Muslims, “I will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite all their fingertips off them”).
Make no mistake: There is a battle under way over how we should pursue national security. It is not enough to say the Left wants to move us back to a September 10 mindset — unless you mean September 10 sometime in the mid-1970s. That was when “intelligence” became a dirty word upon revelation that the CIA and various law-enforcement agencies had gathered it against such left-wing radicals as Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, the Weather Underground terrorists who would later become the friends, ideological allies, and activist partners of a certain upstart Chicago pol.
The winners write the history. Thus, “domestic spying” has become That Seventies Show: the revisionist narrative the Left uses to erase the fact that it wasn’t all about cracking down on peaceful, patriotic dissent. In truth, there really were evil people who built bombs and tried to kill hundreds of Americans in an effort to foment revolution — people like Ayers, who tartly concedes that he was “guilty as sin,” even though he ended up “free as a bird.”
The difference is that today’s threat comes from a mostly alien force inspired by a known (albeit consciously ignored) ideology rooted in fundamentalist Islam — which, in much of the world, is mainstream Islam. Because that is so, service to the cause is convincingly sold to young Muslims as a religious duty. This not only makes jihadist recruitment easier, it also ensures that many of those disinclined to participate in violence will be open to lesser degrees of aggression: a posture of hostility toward America, hatred of Israel and of Jews, and the Muslim Brotherhood’s scheme of voluntary apartheid — life in a closed community of believers in a Muslim enclave that is functionally independent from the state, its laws, and their enforcement by police.
Today’s threat has also systematized jihadist training. That means its terror cells are more competent by orders of magnitude than the 1960s variety. Moreover, weaponry has evolved in the last half century. It takes fewer terrorists to project more lethal force. The horrific price of missing the signals of an oncoming attack, we learned ten years ago, cannot be calculated in dollars, cents, or lives destroyed.
That is what we are up against, and that is why Ray Kelly is a godsend. A decorated veteran who led Marines in combat, Kelly gets the difference between a crime racket and a national-security challenge. He was on the front lines when the jihad first came to these shores: when the World Trade Center was bombed in February 1993 and when, within a few months, jihadists were thwarted as they conspired to carry out a string of simultaneous attacks on New York City landmarks. He realized that the terrorists had been guided by Abdel Rahman’s sermons, had successfully drawn recruits from local Islamic centers, and had been influential fixtures in the metropolitan area’s Muslim community.
After Kelly’s first stint as commissioner, President Clinton had the good sense to make him a top Treasury Department official, with a portfolio covering counterterrorism and financial intelligence. He brought that experience to a three-year tenure as the nation’s customs commissioner. The newly elected mayor Michael Bloomberg brought Kelly back as NYPD commissioner in January 2002, while the city was still in shock over 9/11 and the War on Terror overseas increased the need for vigilance at home.
Kelly knows his city a lot better than Washington does. He appreciates that not every Muslim is a suspect — that most American Muslims are cold to the fundamentalist call and thus natural allies of law enforcement. But Kelly also grasps that Islamism is not a fringe movement, which is why cooperation with the police is fraught with risk for pro-American Muslims. It is simply a fact that our enemies have strong pockets of support in the Islamic communities.
Naturally, the AP report did not see fit to mention the findings of the Mapping Sharia project, which determined that roughly 80 percent of American mosques disseminate Islamist literature that endorses violence. The imams in these mosques tend to promote that literature. Over half of these mosques host guest lecturers known for promoting violent jihad.
The Mapping Sharia study, as its authors observe, may not accurately reflect the whole of Islam in America. Many Muslims do not attend mosques, and those who do are not necessarily receptive to the interpretation of Islam the imams are pushing. The study, however, is a stark depiction of the leadership in Muslim communities. It becomes easier to understand how Islamist ideology takes root in the young. It becomes easier to see how figures the authorities portray as respected community elders — just as the Blind Sheikh was once portrayed — are positioned to inspire anti-Americanism and worse.
Those responsible for protecting millions of lives cannot afford to be willfully blind to this sort of information. It indicates — just as common sense indicates, just as Ray Kelly’s experience indicates — that you cannot have safety without intelligence. Police need to be a visible presence in neighborhoods. They also need to be an invisible presence. When there are signs of trouble, they have to have informants willing to be their eyes and ears — meaning our eyes and ears. In Islamist hotbeds, they have to cultivate ties with pro-Western Muslims. They need to reach out not just to community leaders but to ordinary Muslims who do not want sharia enclaves, Muslims who are disposed to help police provide security but fear being ostracized as traitors if their cooperation becomes known.
Proactive, energetic, intelligence-based security is what Ray Kelly has forged. It is not an entirely new concept. It builds on Compstat, the crime-analysis and accountability system pioneered in the 1990s by Mayor Rudy Giuliani and NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton — a system of intelligence-based policing driven by intensive analysis of crime data. The system drove city crime down by a remarkable 77 percent, and Heather Mac Donald sagelydescribes it as “the most revolutionary public-sector achievement of the last quarter-century.”
In our post-9/11 reality, the imperative of crime prevention has been magnified into mass-murder prevention. Kelly has thus incorporated the tactics that have worked nationally: recruiting aides schooled in CIA intelligence operations to make police better at collecting and analyzing information, and establishing liaisons overseas with foreign police and intelligence services, recognizing that attacks inside the city are often triggered from outside that city and outside the country. But, as Kelly often emphasizes, the system operates within the rigors of law-enforcement protocols.
This is not martial law, and it is not “domestic spying.” Investigations are triggered by reasonable, articulable suspicions of criminal activity — people are not targeted just because they are Muslims. The police are trained to be culturally sensitive and to avoid giving gratuitous offense. But, at the same time, culture is not treated as immunity from investigation. Police are duly deferential to community leaders, but they do not delegate their intelligence-gathering duties to them.
This is not the way the Obama administration wants things done. The president’s strategy warns against singling out any particular brand of “violent extremism” for special attention — jihadist terror is not to be regarded as any more a threat to America than other sources of violence. Obama miniaturizes the threat as “al-Qa’ida’s hateful ideology” — as if the Islamist challenge to the West were a fringe movement. He waves off concerns about Muslims’ support for Islamists with the peremptory declaration that “Muslim American communities have categorically condemned terrorism” — as if that were an incontestable proposition or one that told the whole story.
The real threat to our security, so the theory goes, is not Muslim terrorist plots against us but our provocation of Muslims by conveying the misimpression that America is at war with Islam. Therefore, the key to security is “partnering” with the leadership in Muslim communities: Let them train the police, let them be our eyes and ears, and surely they’ll let us know if there is any cause for concern.
In fact, in 2010, a working group of Obama’s Homeland Security Advisory Council, whose recommendationsform the foundation of the administration’s new strategy, took a thinly veiled shot at the NYPD’s 2007 effort to study the phenomenon of Muslim radicalization. Current understanding of the “sociology of ‘radicalization’ and ‘extremism’ is still immature,” the president’s advisers pronounced. Therefore, they decreed, we must “delink” crime-reduction efforts from studies of radicalization — we must, that is, ignore the nexus between Islamist ideology and aggression by Muslims.
As we look across the Atlantic, we can see what happens when multi-culti governments convince themselves that security lies in abdicating sovereign responsibilities to a movement whose very goal is to split off from the sovereign. That this is done under the sweet-sounding guise of “partnering” with communities does not change the outcome. Good policing requires that hostile movements be understood as such. To be sure, keeping the peace counsels against antagonizing the movement’s adherents absent good cause. But it doesn’t mean “partnering” with them, and it cannot entail transferring law-enforcement chores to them. The police are a society’s manifestation of the determination to govern itself in accordance with its rule of law. They are there to protect and to serve, not to be passive observers of the society’s surrender.
The Blind Sheikh preached from his incendiary pulpit. His followers used their mosques to convene, to plot attacks, and to store and transfer weapons. They exploited Islamic community centers to recruit for the jihad and to advertise paramilitary training sessions. They found sympathizers in the community who would not join in forcible conduct but who were supportive — morally, and sometimes materially. They were able to carry out attacks that required months of planning because people who might have helped the police stop them were afraid to speak up.
This menace has not gone away. What do you suppose gives us a fighting chance to protect ourselves: Ray Kelly’s NYPD or the Obama administration’s “Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism”? Do we really want to mess with ten years of success?