The Formidable Influence of Iran in Worldwide Jihad
A History of Jihad, Article 1 of 6
by Clare Lopez, CenterForSecurityPolicy.org
UnityCoalitionforIsrael.org:
How is Iran influencing world affairs in Syria, Lebanon and Gaza and are the sanctions helping to limit this tyrannical reach?”
Clare Lopez:
The will of Iran in the region has been a very destabilizing one for a very long time, at least since 1979 when the Ayatollah Khomeni staged his Jihad revolution. The Islamic Republic of Iran has been AT WAR with the United States ever since that time – we’re coming up on 40 years now.
As a first act, of course, was to attack our US Embassy in Tehran TWICE in the year 1979, and, the second time, holding our hostages – they had 4 hostages – for a very long time.
After that, the most important thing for listeners to understand, especially when they think about Shi’ites in Iran and Sunni-Other Jihadis, and Jihad Groups, like Al Qaeda, for example, is to NOT separate them. They have been working extremely closely together in a terrorist operational alliance, formerly, at least, since 1990!
So, in that year (1990), listeners might recall that the war in Afghanistan had ended, Osama Bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman Al Zawahiri, had not yet formed Al Qaeda – it didn’t exist yet in 1990. But they wanted them to carry on the fight to the West, obviously, they found safe haven with the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government of Khartoum, Sedan with the president then, who’s still the president today, Umar Al Bashir, with his Muslim Brotherhood allies. There, they found safe haven and (Bashir) invited to that city, what you might call the Jihadi Organizations of the World: They invited the PFLP, the PLO, Yasser Arafat’s group. They invited Hizbollah and they invited the entire leadership of the Iranian Government!
And EVERYBODY ACCEPTED! They all thought a Jihad Jamboree was a great idea and they all converged on Khartoum, including the president of Iran at the time, Ali Hashemi Rafsanjani, now deceased, the head of Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Gaurd Corps, at that time, IRGC. You had the head of Iranian Intelligence at that time, Ali Sa Larijani and many others of the town leadership of the Iranian Government.
I want to emphasize that. The Iranian Government went to Khartoum where the host, Umar Al Bashir, made the introductions – and also with Hizbollah – that’s important – for the role that they would play coming up. In particular, Imad Mughniyah, who was the terror Chieftain of Hizbollah, for something like at least a couple decades, with the fact there’s Hizbollah there, in Khartoum… and, what happened, is that the leader-in-Al-Qaeda-to-be, which, remember is Osama Bin Laden, turned to the Iranians and said, “Hey, I REALLY like what your Hizbollah boys do with EXPLOSIVES.” Big truck bomb explosives and how they can bring down big buildings – remember what happened in Beiruit (Lebanon) in 1983 with our Embassy (19th April, 1983), the French Embassy (7th December, 1985 – 17th September, 1986), the Beirut Barracks bombing (23rd October, 1983) – all of that was Hizbollah and the order, of course, of Iran.
So Bin Laden says, “I’d really like my guys to know how to do that. Can you teach them?” And the Iranians said, “Yeah, sure thing. Imad, come on over here.” And the Iranian government assigned Hizbollah terror chief, Imad Mughniyah, to teach Al Qaeda operatives how to big building, suicide truck bombings. And then, what did you see? Remember? On through the 90s after that, there was a litany of suicide bombing attacks. You’ve got, of course, Kobar Towers in 1996, then, after that, in 1998, was the US Embassy bombings in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya (7th August, 1998). Then, in 2000, this was not a truck bomb, this was water-borne, but a suicide boat-bombing, if you will, against the USS Cole in Yemen. And then, of course, finally… 9-11 (the infamous September 11, 2001 NY, NY Twin Towers attack) itself, which was completely and totally a collaborative effort among Al Qaeda, Hizbollah, Iran and, of course, Saudi Arabia.
So Iran has played this role all these years.
Come on up, past 9-11 and into the George W. Bush administration, and the time when we went after Saddam Hussein in Iraq – Operation Iraqi Freedom – and what happened immediately? The George W. Bush administration opened back-door talks with the Mullahs of Iran, prior to the launch of OIS (Office of Immigration Statistics, Homeland Security) in 2003, and said, “Pretty, please.. Don’t interfere. We’re going to take out your enemy, Saddam Hussein, your number 1 enemy. Just don’t interfere and we’ll get rid of them.” And the Mullahs, of course, said, “Yeah, sure. Ok.” And, of course, the moment the borders were over then chaos reigned. Iran flooded what used to be called Iraq with their operatives and began arming and funding Iraqi Shi’ite militias who took a terrible toll with explosives – using EFPs, explosively formed projectiles, IEDs, improvised explosive devices, VBIEDs, vehicle borne improvised car bombs explosives… that just literally tore our troops and coalition partners apart.
So that was Iran in the 2000s. I mean this litany just goes on and on and on. They have never stopped being our enemy, they have never stopped being disruptive in the region. And now, because of the very damaging period of time when Obama, President Barrack Obama, was in the White House here in the United States, Iran not only received huge cash infusions for a weak economy, apparently due to mismanagement, a lot of it due to corruption – huge cash infusions from the United States – but also was given a free reign by the Obama administration to run amok in the Middle East, establish its Shi’ite crescents – and I say it in plural, a couple of them. One, sort of, land across the northern area and another one, if you’ll think of the map, I think (Iran is) intending to circumscribe, to surround, the Arabian peninsula and you see that being done a lot through PROXIES.
And that is the situation today, where Iran not only has Hizbollah, which is probably one of the most deadly light, special forces in the world and I shouldn’t even call them light anymore with the heavy duty weapons and missiles that Iran has provided them with. But other proxies that include, still to this day, Iraqi Shi’ite terror groups and then come around down, if you could visualize, it leads them into Yemen, where the Houthis are their proxies.
So that’s the situation we’re in today – Iran not only seeking a front-line position directly confronting Israel across what used to be called Syria and the Golan Heights – in that area – but intending to surround the entire Arabian peninsula as well thereby threatening two critical waterways. One, the Straight of Hormuz, that leads into the Persian Gulf, and, on the other side, the Bab-el-Mandeb, which leads into the Red Sea and, ultimately, into the Suez Canal, Iran making a play-possibility of threatening or holding threat over both of these. So that’s the situation we’re in right now and, thankfully, Obama’s no longer in the White House but President Donald Trump is and policy has changed.
UnityCoalitionforIsrael.org:
Moving on to sanctions, this is a big deal isn’t it?
Clare Lopez:
Yes, certainly for the Iranian economy which, I’ve said, is fragile no matter, even, the cash-infusions received by the billions from the Obama administration. By the way, “aiding and abetting the enemy in a time of war” – what do we call that? But now, as the Iranian mismanagement of its own economy and massive corruption continues – of course all of the Iranian leadership are fabulously wealthy, for example the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is the “supreme leader” is said to have at his disposal a private hedge fund that totals over $90 billion (with a B) dollars. Lots of this money is tucked away in special accounts in Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, wherever money can be hidden… So, despite all of that, the cash infusions as I said, the mismanagement continues. And so when President Trump decided to pull the US out of the disastrous JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), that nuclear deal that was agreed to back in July, 2015, among what we call the P5 – the permanent 5 – members of the UN Security Council – China, Russia, France, the US and the UK plus one, and the plus one is Germany, and Iran and, of course the IAEA, the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, that agreement President Trump pulled us out of this year in May, 2018, because it was so badly misdirected. It basically, as Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has said, provided a glide path for Iran’s overt nuclear weapons program to achieve nuclear weapons capability while, at the same time, completely ignoring where Iran’s actual nuclear weapons program is, which is covert, hidden literally, sometimes, under mountains, bunkers, tunnels. And so when he abrogated, when President Trump pulled us out of that deal, what followed, kind of automatically, was a re-imposing of some pretty tough sanctions against commercial dealings with Iran. And he extended those restrictions to a secondary level which meant the United States would also sanction any company or party or country that continued to do business with Iran.
Now that was the first launch of re-imposed sanctions, and it’s really caused a lot of grief to the Iranian economy and, unfortunately, to the Iranian people who are having a very tough time economically. But also, of course, the intent is for the regime itself and, in November of this year, 2018, additional sanctions will be re-imposed and these will target the oil and gas sector. The first set targeted commercial sectors like automobiles and parts and other things like that. In November, the sanctions will target oil and gas and that will be a real tough set of sanctions there.
I think what we’re looking at is a phased, or sort of stepped plan, if you will, by the Trump administration to collapse the Iranian regime. Of course, they’re not going to say that. I’ll say that, but they’re not going to. And that the financial aspect of it is the first step. Now it’s obviously not going to be adequate. That regime is not going to come down just with financial measures and sanctions, no matter how tough things get for their economy, the Rial, the Iranian currency, being right now in free fall. I think I saw yesterday it was up to something like 150,000 (Iranian) Rials to the (US) dollar – or something in that range.
But that’s not going to be enough. In the end, it’s going to get very violent, as it must… and the Iranian people, though… their destiny is in their hands. We can help. We can support. But they will decide what their future will be… and that is yet to come.
UnityCoalitionforIsrael.org:
Yes, we’re very concerned for the Iranian people. It seems there are increasing amounts of activists, protestors and other forms of expression of disgust with this thug-ocracy. And we’re really hoping that the people do pull together and find a way to overthrow this regime. Do you see success on the part of the Iranian people who are mostly moderate and lovers of the West?
Clare Lopez:
Yes, I do think that the Iranian people will succeed in overthrowing this Jihad “Thug-ocracy” – that was a great to put it, there. They have been in the streets demonstrating, protesting and now, more recently, going on strike. Since the end of last year – it was late December, 2017 – when these protests began. And they’ve never let up ever since. The important thing about them, this time, by contrast with 2009 when folks might remember Iranian people poured into the streets to object to the obviously fraudulent re-election selection of Mahmoud Achmadinijad to a second term of the presidency there, is that, at that time, in 2009, that was more of a big city, Tehran, other big cities-focused political protest and struggle that pitted named, known, actual the regime figures, Mehdi Karroubi, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who were in no way seeking an end to the regime itself, but pitted them against the regime’s fraudulent elections… but, sort of, no more than that. It wasn’t aimed at overthrowing the regime.
This time, even though the impetus and a lot of the catalysts for the protests and demonstrations is economic, no question about that, the signs and placards people are carrying in the streets very quickly showed that it was not just about the price of eggs. It was very quickly showed that they were demanding nothing less than regime change. They’re shouting slogans like, “Death to the dictator,” “Bar bar Dictatur,” “dictatur” meaning Supreme Leader, Khamenei, “Death to Khamenei” explicitly, lots of graffiti on walls, saying the same thing – “Bar bar Khamenei,” death to Khamenei. And so, not only is it not confined to big cities – it’s all over the country – including, importantly, the ethnic minority periphery.
As you might know from the geography of Iran, perhaps barely 50% of the population of Iran is Persian. But the other half, or so, is geographically spread out around the periphery of the country and, if you think of that, you’ve got Balochis over in the East border with Pakistan, you’ve got Kurds and Azeris in the north, you’ve got, of course, Arabs in the Khuzestan province down along the Persian Gulf in the South, and many of those ethnic minorities resent greatly being oppressed and ruled, as they see it, from Tehran by Persians. As a matter of fact the Ahvaz Arabs of Khuzestan actually consider themselves OCCUPIED territory! And they said so.
So when the protests spread to those places, then you can see that this is something that covers the entire country and that’s what makes me think, not only is this different than in 2009, but the agenda is very clearly regime change.
And I think that coincides with the agendas of the Trump administration and in particular, of course, Ambassador John Bolton, now the National Security Advisor at the National Security Council, also Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has given a number of really important speeches this year, but, altogether, which indicate, to my way of looking at it any way, that that is the policy of the Trump administration as well.
Now how much is going on behind the scenes, we have no way of knowing. Certainly Amb. John Bolton and former Mayor of New York City and Lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, like Ambassador Bolton has been a long time, decades long, supporter of the Iranian opposition. In particular, the largest, the oldest, the best organized, the most dedicated of Iranian democratic opposition, the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK for short) and its umbrella group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran. I, myself, have been in Paris at their annual rallies which draw a hundred thousand and more people every single year with people like Rudy Giuliani, John Bolton, Tom Ridge, Newt Gingrich and so many more every year.
So that relationship which goes back, as I said, a couple of decades at least if not maybe more, leads me to say that there’s probably more going on behind the scenes of the Trump administration that need to be made public. But, to answer your question, yes, I think the Iranian people will succeed in achieving regime change. And then what happens after that is in their hands.
A History of Jihad, Article 3 of 6 by Clare Lopez, CenterForSecurityPolicy.org
UnityCoalitionforIsrael.org:
What is Israel’s strategic outlook on their being pocketed within all these horrible neighbors of theirs? Turkey, Syria, Iraq, the Gaza terror-state, even Jordan and Egypt sometimes, all seem to be mortally pitted against Israel. Why is this?
Clare Lopez:
What people need to understand broadly is that, in the Islamic world, all Muslims divide the world, conceptually, into two parts. One is called “Dar al-Islam” and that means “place of Islam” or the places where Sharia, Islamic law, is law of the land rules and (the other is called) “Dar al-Harb” – that means “house of war.” That means every other place where Sharia is not yet the law of the land, is not enforced. And it is the obligation, doctrinally, of every single Muslim in the world to work, one way or another, to support Jihad to bring Islamic rule of Sharia to the entire world. That is the obligation of faith to every single Muslim. Now, whether or not they obey it is up to them – not my business.
But, so then when you’re looking at a country like Israel and the Jewish people, whose homeland that is, we have to think about the fact that is now land of “Dar al-Harb” (“house of war”). Not only was that part of the world – you can either call it “Al Sham” or the Levant, it means the same thing – conquered in the very early years by the Muslim armies that burst out of Saudi Arabia in the 7th century, but the people, the Jewish people whose homeland that is, one that has been for 3000 years, were conquered. They were defeated by the Arab armies and became what is known as “dhimmis.” In the Koran, this is described as the “ahl ul-ḏimmah” or the dhimmi people, the subjugated people, those people per Koranical terms, 9:29, which basically says, Fight and kill the infidel. Seek him out wherever he may be. Those who do not obey, I’m paraphrasing here, do not acknowledge Allah, nor the prophet of Allah, Muhammed, nor keep that holy which is supposed to be holy, meaning Islam, Sharia. Even if they be people of the Book, it says, until they pay the Jizyah (that’s a special tax) with willing submission and feel themselves subdued. That is Koranic verse 9:29. “People of the Book” – what does that mean? That means the conquered people of the region, Christians and Jews, who have what is acknowledged to be a revealed scripture, that is, the Bible. And so, when these lands were conquered, and Jewish people and Christians were subjugated to Islam, to Sharia, they got a choice that the pagans, let’s say, of the Arabian Peninsula, did not get, who were offered only, “convert or die.”
But because Christians or Jews were acknowledged to have a revealed scripture, the Bible, they were given what’s called “the third choice.” They could stay Christian and stay Jewish, practice their faith, but subject to some extremely stringent, oppressive and humiliating regulations laid out by the second famous Umar in what has come to be known as the Pact of Umar laid out when he conquered Jerusalem in the year 636. And so, under this, the Jewish people, as well as Christians of the area… and, by the way, remember, in that period, the 630s, the entire area of al Sham, or the Levant, from Turkey, think geographically all the way down the literal Mediterranean Sea and all the way over to Egypt and inland as far the Arabian Peninsula and Northern Africa, Egypt, what is today Libya and those countries all were Christian with significant Jewish populations thriving there! Ok? They’re not there any more! Are they? So you look at a place like Egypt and you say, well, in the year 632 when it is said, Muslims believe, that Mohammed died, Egypt had been evangelized by the apostle, St. Mark, and was something like over 90 percent Christian and with many, many also thriving, as I said, Jewish communities. Well, today, Egypt is 90 percent Muslim. Where’d all the Christians go? Where’d all the Jewish people go? Yes, some fled, went into exile or made their way over to the new, established nation state of Israel in 1948, but where did all the Christians and Jews in Egypt go? Well, they didn’t go anywhere. They became Muslims. They converted. As Dhimmi people, according to Koran verse 9:29, those people subjugated – conquered and subjugated – like the Jewish people of what is today the Jewish state of Israel were subjected to these horrifically oppressive rules and regulations.
For example, they couldn’t blow the shofar on the high, holy days, Christians couldn’t ring their church bells, they had to wear certain colors of clothing, they had to wear their hair a certain way… by the way, the yellow star that we all saw Hitler and the Nazis force Jews to wear during the 20th century in Germany under the Nazi regime? He didn’t make that up. Hitler didn’t make that up. That was part of the Pact of Umar! In fact, the Muslims made the Christians and the Jews wear patches – colored patches on their clothing, front and back, coming and going, so that Muslims could see them and abuse them, throw them into the muddy side of the road or whatever!
So, back to Israel then, and your question, because the Jewish people, in the 20th century, had the Chutzpah – had the wherewithal – to take back their own ancestral land and establish their nation-state there on land that had been conquered by Islam, a people, Jewish people, that had been Dhimmis for centuries, now were their own masters of their own nation-state… AND have successfully defended that state against wave after wave after wave of Muslim, Arab armies seeking to annihilate it… so THAT is why, that’s the reason why the forces of Islam could never, ever stop trying to get back any land, not just Israel, but the Iberian Peninsula, the sub-continent of Asia, meaning India, that has ever been conquered or occupied by Islam must forever be considered “Waqf” land endowed by Allah to be Muslim peoples’ – to Islam – called “sacred space.” They HAVE to keep trying to get it back. It’s not about this piece of land or that piece of land. It’s about the entirety of it. It’s about all of it. If it was EVER conquered or occupied by Islam, they have to fight until eternity to get it back. That is the doctrine. That is the law of Islam. Every Muslim knows this.
The only people who DON’T know it are non-Muslims – people who haven’t studied.
So that is why the unrelenting offensive and pressure against the state of Israel. It comes from the north from the border, from Lebanon where Hizbollah… or you may as well call it “Hizbollah Land,” it comes from up on the Golan Heights where Iran has been trying to edge closer and closer, but Israel has been very forthright in stating that they will not allow Iranian forces, or their proxies (meaning Hizbollah and other militias) to approach their borders.
And then, of course, from across the Sinai and from Gaza – Hamas! The fact that Hamas and the Palestinian Authority cannot get along, cannot unite, cannot present a united front, is a secondary consideration. The number one consideration is that, as Muslims, both of those, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, are obligated by the doctrine of the faith to continue fighting to get back that land.
So that’s maybe a little bit long-winded way of explaining what’s going on, but until people understand that that’s WHY this is happening, from all sides and unrelentingly, we won’t have the right policies to push back.
Turkey’s Aspirations for a Global Islamic Caliphate
A History of Jihad, Article 4 of 6 – by Clare Lopez of CenterForSecurityPolicy.org
UnityCoalitionForIsrael.org:
And that’s one of the problems with Recep Erdogan, through Turkey, he’s taking the role of a Caliphate-type Muslim leader, is he not, and reintroducing some of these older concepts of Islam and Islamic rule, is that true?
Clare Lopez:
To get to Turkey, let me move then, from the immediate neighborhood around Israel to Turkey.
So, for many centuries, certainly after the land that is today called Turkey was conquered again by the armies of the Muslims, in the early years of the 7th and then into the 8th century, of course, eventually Byzantium, the Christian eastern part of the empire fell with Constantinople, of course, being conquered in 1453. It fell and has been conquered for Islam. Since they were conquered initially by Sunni forces and later on, 1500 or so, re-conquered, with wars back and forth, back and forth. The Persians were conquered by the Sunnis as well and eventually re-conquered by Shi’ites, but as far as Turkey goes, it’s always been a Jihad state ever since it was overrun by Muslims.
There was a respite in the 20th century. There was a break, if you will, in recorded history when, after World War 1, Turkey had been defeated by taking the wrong side in that war but one of their military officers by the name of Mustafa Kemal, eventually he took the name Ataturk, a nickname meaning “father of the turks,” (did) take the power and what was left of sort of the rough state of Turkey we see today. And he decided that one of the reasons that Turkey had been defeated, the Ottoman Empire had been defeated and its land holdings lost, most of them, was because they had not modernized and the West had modernized. And so Kemal Ataturk, as he came to be called, forcibly tried to drag Turkey, kicking and screaming, into the 20th century. He modernized many things: administration and infrastructure and education and all sorts of things, but also imposed secularism of the government and publicly – in the public space.
Now, he succeeded for a time and the army of Turkey actually had to intervene four times in the 20th century to make it stick, but that’s why many of us who were born in the 20th century think of Turkey from that time and think of it as somehow secular. Well it was never secular! The government imposed a secular governance on the people, who were deeply conservative Muslims, by force – under Ataturk and his successors and the Turkish army.
But during that time, underground, in particular, the hinterlands of Anatolia, the people… the Muslim people of Turkey resented that imposition of secularism and modernism. They wanted no part of it! And they actively worked to change that. There were cells and home study circles and things like that where the people were indoctrinated and taught to be good Muslims. Don’t go with this secularization, modernization stuff.
And so, finally, as Erdogan, the current president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, rose to power towards the end of the 1990s, he came up the political system as mayor of Istanbul where, by the way, he did a fairly good job as an administrator and mayor of Istanbul, he later became Prime Minister of Turkey and now, since 2014, he’s the President. He came up through that underground system of learning to resent the Ataturk agenda. He came up taught and mentored by people whose number one objective was to overthrow Ataturk and everything he stood for.
So when Erdogan finally got his chance to come to power, now we see who he really is. He’s a devout, practicing Muslim! And his whole objective is to bring Turkey back to an Ottoman Jihad state! That’s the leadership, including Erdogan, of Turkey today. The officials are openly talking about re-instating Jihad. They’re literally using the word to re-instate Jihad against the Kurds, against Cyprus, against Greece, against the Balkans, even against Austria, if you can imagine. Because the new, young chancellor of Austria, Sebastian Kurz, has closed some mosques and is kicking out some of their Imams.
So Jihad is the word of the day. You can see, already, the offensive operations of Ankara (Turkey) into Syrian battle space, where they claim they’re going after Kurds, of course, because they’ll do anything to prevent a contiguous Kurdish entity from forming, especially anywhere near to the Turkish border, but, by the by, as they are marching (and there are tanks, ground troops & planes of Turkey inside that battle space in Syria right now), they are coming up against, literally, not just Kurdish allies of the United States that we have backed and funded, trained and armed, but United States troops themselves. And so, between what we must call erstwhile NATO allies, Turkey and the United States, relations have gotten very, very bad. It’s not just Israel, which is the United States number one and the most important ally and the only functioning democracy in the region, but it goes a lot more broadly than that against the United States and our national security interests, too.
Turkey is doing all of that over there and is, of course, the home away from home for Hamas officials who have been ousted from Egypt after the military coup d’état of 2013 that brought (with a great deal of popular support, it must be said), but, nevertheless, a military coup that brought Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to power in Egypt, many Muslim Brotherhood figures fled. They found their safe haven and their home away from home, which I’ve called it, not just in Qatar, by the way, in the Persian Gulf, but also in Turkey. That’s the headquarters of Hamas today outside of the immediate Middle East, if you will, outside of Gaza. It’s Turkey. And Turkey is doing everything it can to help and support Hamas against Israel – and that is American national security interests in the region as well.
I could talk more about what Turkey is doing right here in the United States where it is actively, directly collaborating with the United States’ Muslim Brotherhood to spread Jihad and Sharia in America but that’s maybe the topic for another interview. But that is what they’re doing here, as well.
So Turkey can hardly be considered an ally in NATO or of the United States in any way anymore. As a matter of fact, here in the Center for Security Policy which can be found online at CenterForSecurityPolicy.org or a shorter URL is SecureFreedom.org, you can find a whole list of the monographs, books and also papers that we have published here in the center. One of the most recent releases earlier this year is called, Ally No More, and it’s the collective work about 10 different authors, at least. It might even be more than that in the book. And it’s showing what Turkey has become under Erdogan and the AK Party – that is, by the way, the Justice and Development Party – you see those words, you know automatically that is a Muslim Brotherhood party. Those are code words. “Justice” means Sharia law. He founded it, by the way. Erdogan founded that party. And so the book, Ally No More, describes the entire development of the rise of Erdogan, support from Hamas, enmity to Israel, enmity to the United States, collaboration with the Muslim Brotherhood and many other things, but Ally No More, is available for your listeners who might be interested.
A History of Jihad, Article 5 of 6 – by Clare Lopez of CenterForSecurityPolicy.org
UnityCoalitionForIsrael.org:
We’ve seen your book, “Ally No More: Erdogan’s New Turkish Caliphate and the Rising Jihadist Threat to the West,” available on Amazon. It focuses on President Erdogan’s Islamic beliefs and how his influence against American constitutional values is far-reaching. Has President Trump’s team properly labeled the enemy of Jihad and are they doing anything about it?
Clare Lopez:
No, not yet, unfortunately. Unfortunately too many of the right people and advisors who are actually knowledgeable about these things have been stiff-armed and kept away from the new Trump administration, which is doing, by the way, many, many good things. I don’t mean to be bashing the Trump administration, with all the success they’ve had, certainly at home with the economy but abroad as well, but I do mean to say that I’m hopeful the administration officials will turn to actually naming and defining the enemy. And it’s not “radical” anything. It’s not “extremist” anything. It’s not “Islamists” anything. It is the forces of Jihad – any and all who fight Jihad in order to impose Sharia, Islamic law, on the rest of the world. That’s the enemy. And you have to say that out loud. No more euphemism and no more, you know, squishy talk. It is the forces of Islam that seek to impose Sharia on the world. That’s who we’re fighting.
And, by the way, I’m reading right now a little bit of a plug for a book. It is Robert Spencer’s new book called, The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS. It is a SICKENING nearly 1400 year old litany of the attacks by the forces of Islam against the entire rest of the world that is not Islam. Remember again, “Dar al-Harb,” “Dar al-Islam.”
And so, what I want to see and what I hope to see in the Trump administration is an honest use of the English language to say what this is. Who is the enemy? That’s not happened yet. The right advisors have not yet gotten to a point of being able to brief and to influence the administration.
And, to give them their due, their hands are quite full with threats emanating from abroad: North Korea, Iran, the Middle East and so forth. But I’d really like to see them be able to master this language, to understand what it is that’s coming against us. And by “us,” I mean Israel, the United States and any other part of the “Dar al-Harb,” any other part of the world that is not yet subjugated to Islamic law. We’re in this together. At least that’s the way Islam looks at it and we need to as well.
So, I’m very hopeful that something we call “the great purge” which occurred in the Obama administration (some of it began earlier in the Bush administration) and which was the systematic, official purging of all US government training courses, language, official writing used in speech, any terms that would accurately describe the enemy, any words that connected Islamic terrorism (we call it terrorism, they call it Jihad) – that would connect that to its inspiration in Islamic law, doctrine and scripture, was systematically scrubbed and removed from all government usage, training and courses.
And so what you have since at least 9-11, are generations now, at least one or more, of all of our top officials – diplomatic officials, military officials, intelligence community officials – who rose up through the ranks. And the only way they could rise up through the ranks is by denying the truth of the inspirational role of the Islamic doctrine for Islamic terror. They weren’t even allowed to use those words. If they used those words, they were out. They never got promoted. And so everybody we see right now in the upper ranks of our national security – diplomatic posts, military, as I said, intelligence community – are people who slipped through the vetting process by denying the Islamic roots, the Jihad wars that we’re fighting today.
So we’re in an exceptionally dangerous period where our top leadership was willing, number one, to use euphemisms, to deny the truth of what was happening, down through the vetting process to obtain rank, be promoted but that have never yet had the great purge reversed so that appropriate training by people like Robert Spencer – the experts – Steve Coughlin who is a senior fellow here at the Center for Security Policy and has written and talked so much, used to teach, just like Robert, the US government. John Guandolo, who is one of this country’s top experts on the Muslim Brotherhood, Bill Warner, the same. You get these people back into the training curricula of the US government. Until that happens, we’re fighting – if we’re fighting – deaf, dumb and blind. And it hasn’t happened yet.
So what we’re very hopeful of is that the Trump administration will heed, hear, listen and reverse that great purge so that proper training, proper education can get us to a place where our leadership actually knows what its doing and can lead us to successful defense of Western civilization and, of course, the United States and our Republic and its Constitution.
UnityCoalitionForIsrael.org:
Because of this disparity between the truth and this “purge” of the truth (by the Bush and Obama administrations), do you see anything arising within the Muslim world for reform…?
Clare Lopez:
(laughter) I think we’ve had quite enough of reform within the Muslim world! “Reform,” the word, means “taking back to its origins” – “to its roots.” That’s what reform means. It doesn’t mean turning something into something it’s never been and never will be.
But, as I said, the Islamic world has already had a number reforms. The very first one was under the first Caliph, Abu Bakr, right after, it’s believed, Muhammad died in 632, a lot of the tribes on what came to be called the Arabian Peninsula tried to break away. They’d been conquered. So the first reform within Islam was carried out by Caliph Abu Bakr who led what are called the Ridda Wars, “Ridda” meaning “apostasy – breaking away from Islam. So he had to re-conquer and herd all those tribes back under the black flag of Islam. That was the number one reform.
There were others. But let me mention at least one more that is important. And that was the reform led by Muhammad Ibn Wahab in the late 1700s (the 18th century). Ibn Wahab saw at that time that a lot of what doctrinal Islam would call abuses that had crept into the practice of the faith including things like the keeping of grave sites, cemeteries and other things, the praying to deceased leaders (Imams) of Islam and intercessors with Allah, which, by the way is simply the Arabic word for “God.” I don’t know if people know this but Arabic speaking Christians in the Middle East pray to “Allah.” Allah simply means God, just like in Spanish it’s “Dios” just like in French it’s “Dieu.” In Russian, it’s “Bohkh.” So Ibn Wahab saw these abuses and determined to “reform” Islam and bring it back to its true practice from the beginning. And so he was another of the great Islamic reformers.
Now, I know that today when people talk about “reforming” Islam, they don’t mean that. They don’t mean taking it back to its roots and purifying it of its abuses the way Martin Luther did the Catholic church when the protestants (Lutherans) broke away. That’s not what they mean. They mean can’t Islam become Western? Well, no! What a silly thought! Of course it can’t become Western. The doctrine of Islam was codified by the 10th century when the scholars of Islam, in agreement with one another which is called “Ijma,” the interpretation that they did which is called “Ijtihad,” on the Sunni side of things, at least, was finished by the 10th century. That’s when the Koran was codified. That’s when the Sharia was codified. After that it was locked down. It’s in stone. Not one single word changes – ever. And it cannot! Because, if you are Muslim, you believe, of course, that the Koran is the literal word of God. It was given, they believe, through the arch-angel, Gabriel, to Mohammad who was illiterate but then recounted it to people who could write – and they did write it down – and all those various verses were collected up and, eventually as I said, codified into what we have today as the Koran by the 10th century.
It hasn’t changed since and it’s not going to.
Nor is Sharia (Islamic law) which is also codified by the 10th century by consensus of the scholars. Consensus of the scholars means the leading Mushtahih, the leading scholars of the day, and from then until now have always, without exception, been in agreement in their collective whole – I don’t mean fringe elements – but in the collective whole – always been in agreement on the revelation of the Koran, as they see it, and on the immutability of the Sharia.
So anybody who talks about “reforming” Islam, number one, doesn’t know the history of Islam and how many reforms there’ve already been – we don’t really need any more. I would name Abu Bakr Al Bhagdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, as another major Islamic reformer of our time. Why? Because he did the same thing that Ibn Wahab and (the original) Abu Bakr did: (he) tried to bring to bring Islam and Muslim people back to their roots, back to their faith. This is why Abu Bakr Al Bhagdadi and the Islamic State went after so many Muslims! Because they were “faithless.” They were “disobedient.” They were “lax.” They were not “practicing.” So his first job was to round up the stray, fallen away, disobedient Muslims just like Abu Bakr did! Just like Ibn Wahab and the Wahabis have done! That was the number one job – reform Muslims – bring them back to the true practice of the faith.
And then, after that, turn outwards with a unified force to face the infidels – that’s the rest of them, non-muslims.
So we’ve had enough of reform, in my opinion. We don’t need any more. And, if anybody thinks for one second that Islam is going to change, or become something it’s never been, think again! It’s not! It’s just, simply, not.
UnityCoalitionForIsrael.org:
Wow. I stand corrected. And thank you for doing so. Any final word?
Clare Lopez:
I’ll just repeat our contact information where I would really encourage people to have a look at website of the Center for Security Policy – that’s centerforsecuritypolicy.org and, again as I said, there’s that securefreedom.org. They go to the same place and there you will find a wealth of resources. Not just our monographs and books, which I’ve mentioned – many papers that have been written not just by us but by other scholars with whom we work and whose papers and work we promote. Also Frank Gaffney’s daily Secure Freedom Radio interviews – he, typically, every day of the work week does about 4 interviews per day. Sometimes he’ll use the whole hour for just one person but, typically, four interviews per day, that’s at securefreedomradio.com. All of that may be found at our websites and I would like to encourage people to go have a look.
Esther Levens:
Oh, I think it’s superb! Thank you so much, Clare.
Clare Lopez:
You’re welcome, both, and thank you for having me. Please, let’s think about getting together again. I’ll be happy to.
