The Al Qaeda Associated Movement

My last couple of posts, as well as some of the comments over at Jim's, apparently have elicited quite a bit of puzzlement and consternation. I think that's because I haven't been very clear in what I've been talking about when I say that our public institutions have apparently been compromised by radical Islam. 

What I mean is this: radical Sunni Islam overtly intends to destroy Western civilization and enslave all non-Muslims. This is not a secret: it is the overt, public teaching of Salafism and Wahhabism's most important leaders, including Ibn Taymiyyah, ibn Abd al-Wahhab, Sayyid Qutb, Abdullah Azzam, Omar Abdel Rahman, and Osama bin Laden. 

To that end, Salafists and Wahhabists have devoted themselves to jihad in many different ways, but the ultimate objective is the same: our destruction. 

Osama, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and al Qaeda have pursued an integrated, primarily military and information-based strategy to undermine our institutions, while the House of Saud and other Saudi-based Salafists and Wahhabists have pursued political and financial strategies. These different strategies are coordinated and complimentary, however, and are extremely complex and sophisticated. They are not, in general, secret - Islamic leaders are loquacious in describing their strategies for our destruction. Anwar al-Awlaki (gosh he's been in the news a lot lately) has been particularly vociferous and eloquent about destroying the country of his birth. Please read Awlaki's "44 Ways to Support Jihad": it pretty much covers everything I'm talking about. 

The most insidious facets of the overall Salafist strategy of jihad are the compromise of our institutions from within, via political and financial influence, and the socialization of the Ummah to the radical Wahhabist/Qutbist ideas about jahiliyyah and jihad. These two facets work together. 

The socialization of the Ummah, or promoting the teachings of Taymiyyah, Wahhab, Qutb, et al, has been the most dramatically effective of all the strategies of jihad sponsored by the House of Saud. It created al Qaeda and the al Qaeda movement, which inspires individuals or small groups of jihadis to carry out terrorist attacks against Western targets without any guidance or sponsorship from the central AQ leadership. That appears to be what happened last week with Nidal Malik Hasan.

Compromise of our institutions is a complementary strategy: it enhances and amplifies the effectiveness of unilateralist jihad. This is a very Leninist approach - Lenin wrote that the corruption inherent in capitalist systems would prove their undoing. The Islamists are simply using their wealth to help speed things along. At the same time, an army of Islamic lobbyists plays upon our inherent guilt to promote the idea that any opposition to the Islamist agenda is racist and intolerant. This theme of course finds a very receptive audience among American liberal elites. In that way anything we might do to counter their strategy is immediately neutralized.

We've been fighting hard in Iraq and Afghanistan when the most critical front in the "Global War on Terrorism" is right here at home. The Islamists are laughing with undisguised glee at our willingness to help them in their jihad against us. 

Oh well - I still haven't scratched the surface of this subject. It's pretty hard to encapsulate the ultimate clash of civilizations in a blog post, even several blog posts. I will keep trying as time permits.