The Terrorist Next Door (3 page)

I realize that not all of the world's 1.6 billion Muslims subscribe to this line of thinking, and I'm sure that most just want to raise their families and
be left alone. But credible polls show that roughly 10 percent of the world's Muslims do hold Islamist views and, in the very least, support terrorism against non-Muslims.
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Ten percent of 1.6 billion means that roughly 157 million of the world's Muslims are Islamic supremacists who loathe the United States and Israel and are partial to Osama bin Laden. That's problematic, to say the least. So are polls showing that 13 percent of American Muslims support at least some instances of suicide bombings, with that number rising to 26 percent among young American Muslims.
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Furthermore, because violent jihad and Islamic supremacism is advocated throughout Islam's fundamental texts, those who believe in those concepts dominate the discussion within Islam. They control most of the world's mosques, the main Islamic seminaries, and the Islamic political parties, as well as the U.S.-based Islamic interest groups.

Like other totalitarian movements, Islamism—in its various reincarnations over the past 1,400 years—has always sought world domination. At times, it has come awfully close to achieving that goal, mainly through
jihad
: holy war, as mandated by Allah through his prophet, Mohammed, in the Koran:

This is the infamous “Verse of the Sword.” It is one of Mohammed's final “revelations” in the Koran, and throughout the ages, it has been interpreted by a sizable chunk of Muslims as an open-ended call to violent jihad, for all times. The “People of the Book” that the verse refers to are Jews and Christians. The “jizya” is a crushing tax that non-Muslims living in Muslim lands are forced to pay to remind them that they are vassals of Islam—and that is the precise status to which millions
of Muslims are fighting to reduce “infidels” like you and me, including here in America.

Baby boomers still remember exactly where they were on the day JFK was assassinated. Likewise, a defining question for my generation has become, “Where were you on 9/11?” As for myself, when the first plane rammed into the World Trade Center, I was a 25-year-old kid working on a freelance article in my Philadelphia home. As I turned on the TV to see the World Trade Center engulfed in flames, it was clear to me that America was facing the kind of sink-or-swim moment it hadn't seen since Pearl Harbor: would we fight or would we fold?

My thoughts immediately turned to the friends I had made during a recent stint working in New York City, including some who lived near the Twin Towers. As footage of the Towers' collapse exploded across my television screen, I feared for their safety. That concern quickly turned to anger. Then alarm. Since Philly is a major city rich in national landmarks that lies in between Manhattan and Washington—where the Pentagon had also been struck—I thought it might very well be next on the terrorists' target list.

I called my brother right away because he, at the time, worked in a federal government building in downtown Philly. He was already preparing to board the train and head home to his family, as were tens of thousands of confused, frightened people who had been deeply shaken by the apocalyptic images they had just witnessed on television. I next called my parents' house, reaching my father. Little did I know that I was about to have a conversation that would help change the direction of my life.

My dad was a former paratrooper in the 101st Airborne: the legendary Screaming Eagles. A self-made man through and through, he possessed a razor-sharp mind and was one of the most well-read people I have ever known. Before passing away in 2003 at the age of sixty, he
was a student of military history, a Christian Zionist before I even knew what the term meant, and an all around bad dude—respected at home and on the street. He had grown up in one of the toughest neighborhoods in Philly, a decaying cauldron named Kensington that had a reputation for turning out fierce brawlers. My dad—who in his heyday was 6' 2”, 260 pounds of solid muscle—certainly fit that bill. Up to that point I had only seen him cry once in my entire life. But that morning when he answered the phone, he was sobbing.

“Those bastards,” he rasped. “If I was younger, I'd sign back up and go over there tomorrow.”

His emotional, patriotic call to action was jarring. Once he calmed down, he hit me with what would prove to be an even bigger bombshell.

“It was bin Laden,” he said, lowering his voice to a hoarse whisper. “He hit us in Africa, now he's hitting us here.”

You couldn't live under my father's roof and not have a solid knowledge of current events and foreign affairs, particularly concerning the Middle East. Growing up, my brother, sister, and I were treated to nightly lessons from my encyclopedic father on everything from Alexander the Great to King David to Stalingrad.

On the night of September 11, after devouring hours of news coverage and watching President Bush address the nation, my father's words echoed in my ears: “Know your enemy,” he had always told me, quoting
The Art of War
, Sun Tzu's ancient masterpiece of military tactics. It dawned on me that I needed to read everything I could get my hands on about Islam, terrorism, al-Qaeda, and the Middle East. And I had to do it immediately. Though I already had a solid background knowledge courtesy of my dad, I soon learned that I had a long way to go to fully understand this latest installment of a 1,400-year war waged by Islamic supremacists against the West.

The next day, I began studying the Koran and poring over Islam's other core texts. I wanted to know more about the people who had attacked us: their culture, their motivations, their strengths and weaknesses,
and their history and ideology. In essence, I did what our elected officials in every branch of government should have done, but didn't: I set about getting to know the enemy, with zero consideration given to political correctness or my own preconceived notions.

I already knew of Islam's bloody legacy of conquest; how it spread by the sword out of the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century, covering the entire Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. Parts of Europe were also subjugated—Spain and Sicily in the first great jihad, and later, Greece and the Balkans at the hands of the Turkish-led Ottoman Empire. But I didn't yet know the full extent of the oppressive tyranny that the conquered peoples suffered—those who were not butchered or bullied into converting to Islam were deprived of basic rights, frequently physically and psychologically abused, restricted from building new houses of worship, and sometimes forced to wear distinctive yellow garments identifying them as non-Muslims.
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All of this was in accordance with Islamic law, or
sharia,
a system that dictates every aspect of a Muslim's life, from how and when they should wage jihad, to how they wear their pants, to how they treat their wives, to how they are to deal with non-believers. A handy summary of what the West could expect under sharia law—if Islamists were to some day get their way—is provided in an indispensible little pamphlet called
Sharia Law for the Non-Muslim
, published by the Center for the Study of Political Islam:

Under Sharia law:

Not exactly what the Founders had in mind.

By the fall of 2002, I had begun focusing all my work on national security and the jihadist threat to the West. I contributed articles to websites and major newspapers, became a senior writer and analyst for Steven Emerson's Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT), and appeared as an IPT terrorism analyst on nationally syndicated radio programs and TV networks. I eventually moved on to the Christian Broadcasting Network, where I'm host of my own show,
Stakelbeck on Terror
.

To my great distress, my work has brought me to realize that today, ten years after 9/11, America is losing the war against Islamic fascism. Yes,
we have had military successes against the jihadists and have killed or captured several top al-Qaeda leaders, hearing the usual self-congratulatory rhetoric out of Washington whenever an attack is thwarted. However, in the war of ideas—the ideological war, which is even more important than the military sphere against this particular enemy—America is getting its tail kicked. Why are we letting the Islamic supremacist government of Saudi Arabia fund mosque-building across our nation and help place textbooks in American public schools that give the Saudi version of Islamic history? Why is the Obama administration openly embracing groups that have intimate ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, a jihadist organization whose Palestinian branch is none other than the genocidal terror group Hamas? Why was a Brotherhood-linked Islamist invited to speak to U.S. troops at Fort Hood in 2009—one month after the terrorist massacre there? Why are our schools devaluing Judeo-Christian civilization but teaching our children that, in the unenlightened words of Presidents Bush and Obama, Islam is a “religion of peace?”

We are facing an existential threat, yet Islamic terrorism remains the enemy we dare not name. “Violent extremism,” anyone?

Yes, there are moderate Muslims who want no parts of jihad, sharia, or the caliphate. I know such Muslims, and I fully support and appreciate them. I pray that they can spearhead an Islamic Reformation that brings their faith into the twenty-first century and somehow mitigates sharia and the many calls to violence against non-Muslims that are found in the Koran and the hadiths. But I am not optimistic. The pushback against such a movement in the Muslim world is just too strong.

The surging tide of Islamic supremacism, and the vulnerable position occupied by the few brave souls in the Islamic world who oppose it, was starkly illustrated by the January 2011 assassination of Pakistani governor Salman Taseer and, two months later, the killing of Pakistan's sole Christian government minister, Shabaz Bhatti—both men gunned down for their efforts to reform Pakistan's blasphemy laws, which can impose the death penalty for the crime of insulting Islam. A correspondent for
The Economist
issued the following report a month after Taseer was murdered by his own bodyguard:

This is no time to mince words, and we need to face the harsh reality that, while there are moderate Muslims, Islam itself is not moderate.

In fact, if followed to the letter, Islam is inherently incompatible with Western democracy and values. I sincerely wish it weren't so. But based on Islam's core texts, the example of its warrior prophet, Mohammed, and a review of Islamic history—both recent and older—no intellectually honest individual could say with a straight face that Islam is a religion of peace. The evidence against this is just too overwhelming to ignore.