FRONT PAGE MAG: A Memorial Day for Islamic Terror May 27, 2013 By Daniel Greenfield

On John Wilson Street, the flowers lie thick. Men and women walk by leaving bouquets and cards. If not for the balloons and teddy bears with British flags on them, it might be Copley Square near the finish line of the Boston Marathon where the same bouquets lie limply against steel barriers. But there the teddy bears and balloons wear the stars and stripes.

In the middle of May, Prime Minister David Cameron was at Copley Square saying that we will never give in to the terrorists while praising the values of diversity and then two weeks later he was outside 10 Downing Street declaring that we will never give in to the terrorists and praising Islam. The places had changed but the script hadn’t.

Listen long enough and you realize that every politician is working from the same script.

After Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the second Boston bomber, was captured, Obama gave a little speech praising the “diversity that makes us strong” and asserting that “we refuse to be terrorized.”  After the butchery of Jewish children by a Muslim terrorist in Toulouse, France last year, President Sarkozy talked up Muslim victimhood and said, “We mustn’t give in to terror.”

“I want the world to understand that our actions today were not aimed against Islam,” President Clinton had said, as he announced strikes against Al Qaeda targets after the bombings of American embassies, “the faith of hundreds of millions of good, peace-loving people all around the world, including the United States.”

Like a commercial jingle, after the obligatory tributes to the indomitable courage of whatever city the attack took place in, the same two contradictory messages repeat again and again. “Islamic PR is our priority” and “We won’t give in to terror.”

It would be easy enough to make a tour of such places and hear the empty words ring from mute stone and the washed out remains of posters and cards, wilted flower petals and teddy bears whose colors have run together until it is impossible to tell what flag they used to wear. What lost child and lost father they memorialized.

The politicians only speak to assure the people that they are taking the problem seriously when past echoes from the stones tell us that they aren’t taking it seriously at all.

“We will find out who did this and we’ll find out why they did this,” Obama said after Benghazi. Those words should sound familiar. In 1993, after the World Trade Center bombing, President Clinton told Americans, “We’ll find out who was involved and why this happened. Americans should know that we will do everything possible to keep them safe in their streets, their offices and their homes.”

Eight years later the towers had fallen.

The FBI had two years’ worth of warnings and an informant inside the group that did it. Ramzi Yousef, the perpetrator of the attack, was the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the attacks of September 11 that finished what his nephew had begun.

Yousef studied electrical engineering in the United Kingdom and then spent time in one of Osama bin Laden’s training camps. And then back to the United Kingdom and on to the United States.

The story is a familiar one. Neither Tamerlan Tsarnaev nor Michael “Mujaheed” Adebolaja came out of nowhere. They were familiar presences in intelligence files. Their links to terrorist groups were known. They could have been stopped but they weren’t, because Islam is a religion of peace and diversity is our strength. Instead they were just among the thousands of strongly diverse names sitting in file folders.

The UK government is rolling out a task force that will tackle violent extremism of unspecified origin. Proposals include keeping “extremists” from appearing on campuses. Considering that one of the London beheaders had been “radicalized” as a teenager by a combination of Somali drug gangs and his local mosque, it’s a weak and random suggestion that will almost certainly go nowhere.

Over a month after the Boston bombings, Obama unrolled his own proposals, questioning the morality of drone strikes, and calling for the release of more Gitmo terrorists and the end of the War on Terror.  By refusing to be terrorized, Obama apparently meant that if we pretend that terrorism doesn’t exist, then it won’t. War is over if you want it. Put down some cards and flowers and then let the terrorists go.

Governments have been successfully terrorized. It has fallen on the people not to allow themselves to be terrorized, to keep a stiff upper lip when the bombs go off and bloodied bodies roll into the gutter.  They are expected to convince themselves that the presence of large numbers of Muslims in their cities is a strength, rather than a dangerous threat. To notice that is to be terrorized. And if you notice that the terrorists are Muslim, then the multiculturalists have lost and the terrorists have won.

If you doubt that, consider the 1,200 London police officers dispatched to protect mosques after the brutal Muslim attack on a British soldier. Or the Stockholm police chief saying, ”Our ambition is really to do as little as possible” in the face of Muslim riots, but still taking the time to hand out tickets to the Swedes whose cars were burned and to arrest Swedish vigilantes coming out to protest the rioting.

The role of the people is to see nothing and to take comfort in the empty promises. We refuse to be terrorized. We won’t give in. But they have already given in. And they will let us put out the flowers, cards and teddy bears so we get it out of our systems. Until the next time.

It’s not that our governments can’t protect us against Islamic terrorism. It’s that they choose not to.

The enemy we fight is not unknown. His soldiers are no ciphers. Their names sit in intelligence databases. And when the names come up on their screens, the analysts nod and go, “Yes, him. Thought he might do something like that one day.”

On John Wilson Street, Michael ‘Mujaheed’ Adebolaja stood with bloody hands to tell us that he was killing in the name of Islam. And then out came the Prime Minister and the Mayor of London to assure everyone that Islam had nothing to do with it. And who are we to believe, the politicians or our own lying ears?

The scene could be happening anywhere. It could be Boston or New York, Paris or Jerusalem. In Nigeria, they are blowing up churches. In Myanmar, they are burning Buddhist monks alive. This isn’t the political outrage of a tiny minority, but the continuation of a thousand years of genocide.

There aren’t enough flowers in the world for every man, woman and child murdered by Islam since Mohammed. There aren’t enough cards or teddy bears or words. There certainly aren’t enough tears. The best way to remember them is with a determination to tell the truth about their killers.

There have been enough lies. To the living and the dead, we owe the truth.

Britain has been in denial about the Islamist threat. Time to face it down. (Hey London, Can't Say You Weren't Warned) DOUGLAS MURRAY, associate director of the Henry Jackson Society, a London-based think tank.

How many ignored warnings does it take? That is one question that should hang over Britain after the horror of the daytime murder of a British soldier on the streets of south London. On Wednesday afternoon, Drummer Lee Rigby was killed in Woolwich by two men wielding large knives and shouting "Allahu akbar"—God is great.

Islamists have been saying for years they would do this. They have planned to do it. And now they have done it.

The attack itself is not surprising. What is surprising is that British society remains so utterly unwilling not just to deal with this threat, but even to admit its existence. Politicians have called the Woolwich killing "unforgivable" and "barbarous." But expressions of anger should not really be enough.

Attempts to attack military targets in Britain go back to before the millennium and even before, it is important to note, the war on terror. In 1998 Amer Mirza, a member of the now-banned extremist group al Muhajiroun, attempted to petrol-bomb British army barracks. In 2007, a cell of Muslim men was found guilty of plotting to kidnap and behead a British soldier in Birmingham. The plan had been to take the soldier to a lock-up garage and cut off his head "like a pig." They wanted to film this act on camera and send it around the world to cause maximum terror.

In 2009, al Muhajiroun protested at a homecoming parade in Luton for British troops returning from Afghanistan. Carrying banners saying "go to hell," "butchers" and "terrorists," the group was protected by British police officers from an increasingly irate crowd of locals. The resulting outrage toward the police gave rise to the deeply troubling English Defence League, a street protest movement that often turns violent.

Now comes the attack in Woolwich, which the perpetrators—as with the earlier cell—wished to be observed and even filmed. Reports suggest that they invited people to capture their actions on video. The perpetrators gave interviews, machetes in hand, to bystanders with cameras. This horrific scene is something that will stick in the memory.

But it should also have been foreseen. Instead we entered the stage of denial. For there is already, in the reaction to events, more than a hint of what I have previously termed "Toulouse syndrome." The term is named after the attacks last year carried out by a jihadist called Mohammed Merah, who killed three French soldiers in a rampage that concluded with the murders of four French Jews at a school in Toulouse.

In the early stages of the attacks, when little was known, there was significant speculation that the culprit was a far-right extremist. At that stage everybody knew what they were going to say. But once the culprit turned out to be an Islamist, the gaze nearly fell away completely. "Nothing to see here, please move on" was the order of the day.

"Toulouse syndrome" also touched Boston last month. After the bombing at the marathon, media and politicians waited, hoping—some even said as much—that the attackers would be tea-party types. Then everybody would know what to say. But when it turned out to be Islamists?

So it is with the Woolwich killing, which British officials have lined up to denounce. Yes it is sickening. Of course it is barbaric. But what of it? Even all these years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2011, our societies remain unfit for purpose in facing up to—and facing down—Islamic extremism.

Too many still seek refuge in ignorance and denial that was so memorably displayed by U.S. officials after the Fort Hood shooting in 2009. A man who was a member of the American armed forces, Maj. Nidal Hasan, gunned down his colleagues while shouting "Allahu akbar." On that occasion the American government, like the French government before it and the British government this week, decided to focus on everything about the attack other than what really mattered: the motive. Fort Hood was put down to a case of workplace violence.

There will be many angles to the events in London that must be addressed in the coming days, and we can hope many will receive the appropriate level of public attention. Among them will be one particularly unpleasant irony.

Most of the extremists who have repeatedly expressed their hatred of British soldiers are themselves supported by the British state. A prominent hate-preacher—Anjem Choudary, a leader of the disbanded al Muhajiroun—was even caught on video earlier this year extolling Britain's "jihad-seekers' allowance." As he explained to his followers, "The normal situation, really, is to take money from the kafir"—a slur for non-Muslims. "Allahu akbar. We take the money."

After the video showed up online, a BBC reporter asked Mr. Choudary to clarify how much he's taking—the press has long reported a sum of £25,000 ($37,770) per year. "It's irrelevant," Mr. Choudary replied.

This would not be the first time a country has paid both sides in a conflict. But if the reported figure is anywhere near accurate, it would surely be the first time in human history that a society has paid its opponents better than it pays its own. A British soldier can expect to start in the army on a salary of around £16,000 ($24,172).

The events in south London must cause a re-evaluation by British society of the insanity we have been permitting. The question is not how sad we feel. The only question should be what we do about it.

Time we stood up to Islamists who would destroy us - Let's Stop Paying Them to Kill Us On a sunny afternoon on a London street an unarmed young man is murdered in the most brutal way imaginable. First his assailants frenziedly hack at him with meat cleavers then yelling "Allahu akbar" (God is great) they slice off his head.

Can you spot what's wrong here? I would have thought it was obvious. I'd say it's one of the vilest crimes committed in Britain since at least the 7/7 London terrorist bombings. But clearly I'm a bit eccentric because lots of people disagree with me - as I discovered when the horrific story first broke.

Some thought the worst aspect of the case was that BBC political reporter Nick Robinson had described the suspects on the news as "of Muslim appearance". Others were mightily exercised that the alleged murderers had been shot by police (rather than politely escorted to the nearest cell with full access to Sky Sport, presumably).

Still others seemed determined not to draw any "unhelpful" conclusions about the murderers' religious motives. All right, so they might have shouted "Allahu akbar" and given an interview afterwards saying: "We swear by the almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you until you leave us alone."

But this was no reason to suggest that this sordid crime had anything to do with the "Religion of Peace", now, was it?

Not for the first time I find myself wondering what madness has seized our culture.

Have we been so brainwashed by political correctness that we no longer know how to respond honestly to a crime of near matchless barbarity and evil? For me - and no doubt you too - it couldn't be more clear cut.

What happened to that young soldier on the streets of Woolwich on Wednesday was wrong if you're white; wrong if you're black; wrong if you're Christian; wrong if you're Muslim; so wrong from every conceivable angle that it seems a crime against decency and logic for anyone, however wellintentioned, to try to make excuses for it.

Indeed I'd argue that the people mouthing these inane pieties are Islamic fundamentalism's useful idiots - they make it more, not less, likely that there's going to be another atrocity like this just around the corner. What their attitude shows is that we as a society don't have the gumption to tackle this problem head on.

So what exactly should we be doing to prevent home-grown atrocities such as this? Step one, definitely, should be to acknowledge that the problem actually exists rather than burying our heads in the sand for fear of causing offence.

At the moment - as we saw with the Boston marathon bombings - our default response to any Islamist terrorist incident is first to worry about how the "Muslim community" might feel.

What ought to be a story about the very real menace of militant political Islam instead becomes a story about how we must all try to be nicer to the Muslim community at this difficult and embarrassing time.

Police and forensic officers at the scene of the attack in Woolwich

Not for the first time I find myself wondering what madness has seized our culture.

But we knew that. Hardly anyone - save the odd crackpot - seriously blames Muslims generally for incidents such as this.

It would be nice, though, if on these occasions a few more members of that peaceful Muslim majority came forward and condemned the deed outright rather than using it as another excuse to play the oppressed minority victim card.

This is symptomatic of a broader problem with Islam in Britain: that all over, in ghettolike pockets, there are immigrant communities that feel no loyalty to the traditions and values of their host country, only to the broader Islamic world known as the "umma".

While it's true that the vast majority of them will have been properly appalled by the barbarity of the Woolwich murder many will yet have sympathised with the killers' line that: "We must fight them as they fight us."

Yet almost no one in our political class (at least not outside Ukip) will admit this. "We will defeat violent extremism by standing together," announced David Cameron. But actually that's just not true, we need to show that the limits of our tolerance for this enemy within have been thoroughly exhausted.

We need to withdraw from the European Court of Human Rights, which for years has denied us the chance to deport Islamist hate preachers and terrorist sympathisers such as Abu Qatada.

We need to stop giving benefits to those who abuse our hospitality and generosity by plotting to destroy us. We need to clamp down on specialist Muslim schools and madrasas that use Saudi textbooks preaching that Jews are lower than pigs and that "kuffar" (non-Muslims) are inferior.

We need to stop Islamist extremists targeting vulnerable groups such as prisoners and university students. We need to stop turning a blind eye to honour killings, female circumcision and the grooming of young girls by organised Asian gangs.

Above all we need to realise that there will never be peace or social cohesion in our divided land so long as we go on playing this ridiculous game where one section of our population has to be treated with kid gloves and special rules in case they're offended.

Fundamentalist Islam is not a problem we should be trying to sweep under the carpet, it is a problem we should be striving to defeat. So far we're not doing a very good job.

Losing Our Sons; A new film reveals the deadly cost of refusing to call jihad by its name.

It is, in my view, the defining exchange of our time. It took place, not inappropriately, on Pearl Harbor Day of 2011, at one of the joint House-Senate hearings called by New York Congressman Peter King and Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman  to examine the radicalization of American Muslims. As seen in the You Tube video, Congressman Dan Lungren of California poses a simple, straightforward question to a witness, Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Stockton. “Secretary Stockton,” he asks, “are we at war with violent Islamist extremism?”

What follows is several minutes of the most grotesque and extraordinary dodging, as Stockton, despite unrelenting pressure from Lungren, repeatedly refuses to admit any connection between Islam and the “war on terror”: “We are at war with al-Qaeda, its affiliates and adherents….al-Qaeda are murderers with an ideological agenda…al-Qaeda is a violent organization dedicated to overthrowing the values that we intend to advance…” After a couple of minutes of proding, Stockton explains his dodging: “Al-Qaeda would love to convince Muslims around the world that the United States is at war with Islam. That’s a prime propaganda tool, and I’m not going to aid and abet that effort to advance their propaganda goals….I don’t believe it’s helpful to frame our adversary as Islamic, with any set of qualifiers that we might add. Because we are not at war with Islam.”

At this point, Lungren takes a slightly different tack: according to the Defense Department, it’s important to keep an eye out for certain “behavioral indicators” that can signal an individual’s turn to radicalism. Lungren notes that the Fort Hood jihadist identified himself on a calling card as a “Soldier of Allah.” Would that sort of thing, Lungren asks, be considered a “behavioral indicator”? If he were a soldier, would it be appropriate for him to report such a thing as a “behavioral indicator”? Stockton, though in a roundabout way, finally says yes – implicitly acknowledging something that every American already knows but that the government, perversely, is determined not to say straight out.

Some of us, including yours truly, have watched that exchange over and over again – perhaps because it take multiple viewings for the depth and breadth and likely long-term impact of this horrible folly to really sink in, and perhaps partly because this single brief interrogation tells us something about the nature of the human animal that is at once tragic and absurd. For my part, I had the occasion to view it yet again the other day, because it figures in a documentary I was watching, Losing Our Sons. Released earlier this year, Losing Our Sons is a powerful illustration of the human cost of the categorical refusal of Stockton and his “affiliates and adherents” to look reality squarely in the face.

The film’s point of departure is another encounter between two men – two very young men who came face to face in Little Rock one day in 2009. It’s also about their fathers.  Carlos Bledsoe, a black kid, grew up in Memphis, where his dad, Melvin, owned a sightseeing-bus firm, the Blues City Tours Company. Andy Long, a white kid from Little Rock, joined the Army at twenty-three; his dad, Daris Long, is a retired Marine who spent much of his life in Afghanistan (and whom Jamie Glazov interviewed in August). After Andy finished basic training, Daris explained to him in a heartfelt letter that “your job is to stand watch” and that “for those who have fought for it, freedom has a flavor the protected will never known.” The letter ended: “You are my son, my hero.” While Andy waited to be shipped off to Korea for his first tour of duty, he was assigned to work at a recruiting station in his native Little Rock.

During the time that Andy had spent training to be a soldier, Carlos had been undergoing a different kind of training. Moving from Memphis to Nashville, he discovered that city’s sizable Muslim community, of which the film provides an overview. At Nashville’s leading mosque, an imam warns his congregation not to be influenced by the “kufur” (infidels); at Vanderbilt University, the Muslim chaplain issues similar warnings about Westernization and the dangers of secular society – and, answering a student’s question, affirms that executing gays is entirely consistent with sharia law, which he supports. Meanwhile the religion editor of the local newspaper, the Tennessean, writes articles whitewashing all this mischief.

Long story short: Carlos Bledsoe, raised a Baptist, converted to Islam under the influence of these reprobates, changing his name to Abdulhakim Mohamed. For further jihad study, they sent him to an “institute” in Yemen that has served as a polishing school for al-Qaeda members. Caught with a fake Somali passport and a flash drive containing instructions for bomb-making, he spent four months in a Yemeni jail – after which, astonishingly (or not), he was able to return, apparently without any difficulty, to the U.S., where he began driving around the country in a car full of arms and ammunition seeking out appropriate targets for jihad. On June 2, 2009, he found one – an Army recruiting station in Little Rock, where he shot Andy Long to death.

Both Andy’s and Carlos’s fathers testified before the House Homeland Security Committee, and both had the same message: young Americans are being turned by American Islamic leaders into jihadists. Both fathers urged the panel to recognize that Carlos’s killing of Andy had been a terrorist act, pure and simple. “Our country needs to hear the truth,” Daris Long insisted. But some people didn’t want to hear the truth. With breathtaking condescension, Congresswoman Jackie Speier (D-CA) dismissed the fathers’ testimony as “interesting” but “unenlightening” because it didn’t come from “experts.” Deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonogh urged folks not to “stigmatize” Muslims. With very few exceptions, high-level government officials were agreed: to suggest that the Little Rock killing had been a jihadist act was pure Islamophobia. According to the Department of Justice, it not only wasn’t an act of jihad: it didn’t even qualify as a federal crime. The Army agreed, ruling that Andy wasn’t entitled to a Purple Heart. All this, despite the fact that Carlos, after his conviction, admitted to being a member of al-Qaeda – a jihadist out to kill U.S. soldiers and leaders of Jewish groups.

The Army’s position on the Little Rock case was identical to its stance on the murders at Fort Hood. Evidence be damned: neither of these incidents was a terrorist act. As Lieberman complained, “The Department of Defense is still not prepared to call the enemy what it is.” Nor was Attorney General Eric Holder, who, in testimony before the committee, insisted: “I don’t want to say anything negative about a religion.” Not even, obviously, if those negative things are true – and vital to American security.

This denial isn’t a partisan issue: both the Bush and the Obama administrations have bent over backwards, as the film puts it, “to accommodate Muslim sensibilities.” The official 9/11 commission report included repeated mentions of Islam and jihad, but since then government agencies have efficiently scrubbed these word from their accounts of terrorist acts. Faced with U.S.-based imams who openly support sharia law and “Muslim-rights” groups with known ties to terrorist groups, American authorities don’t acknowledge that these are enemies within but, instead, invite them to help instruct police officers about Islam and to serve as consultants to the Department of Homeland Security.

It’s a simple concept: know your enemy. After 9/11 there should have been a major educational effort to explain to American citizens the motives behind the attacks – to help them, just for starters, to understand jihad and its centrality to Islam. Instead what was set in motion under Bush, and intensified under Obama, was a comprehensive disinformation effort – an attempt to whitewash Islam, and to brand as Islamophobes all those who dare to speak the truth about it. As a result of this cowardice, two American fathers lost their sons – one of them transformed into a jihadist by hooligans who should never have been allowed into the country, and the other gunned down in an act of terrorism that officials high and low, trained in the post-9/11 Newspeak, refuse to call by its real name. In presenting its moving account of these sons and fathers, the film is, of course, also telling the story of America today – and of how our leaders’ Big Lie, perpetrated in the name of a misbegotten sensitivity, not only caused the death of Andy Long, but is, right before our eyes, strangling the very freedoms he signed up to defend.