The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS

by Robert Spencer

  And Gehad El-Haddad, a top Muslim Brotherhood official in Egypt, was for five years employed with the Clinton Foundation.78 The Clinton Foundation, of course, is not a government agency, but his involvement with it afforded El-Haddad access to a former president of the United States and his associates, including present and former government officials. In September 2013, Egypt’s military government arrested El-Haddad for his Muslim Brotherhood activities.79

  For all of the furor over Bachmann’s call for an investigation of Muslim Brotherhood influence in Washington, nothing caused as much controversy as her naming Huma Abedin, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s closest personal assistant and adviser. Abedin is an observant Muslim who lived in Saudi Arabia as a child; her brother Hassan works “as a fellow and partner with a number of Muslim Brotherhood members.” Her mother, Saleha Mahmoud Abedin, is a professor in Saudi Arabia and a member of the Brotherhood’s woman’s division, the Muslim Sisterhood.80 Her father, Syed Z. Abedin, was a professor in Saudi Arabia who founded the Institute for Muslim Minority Affairs, an organization supported by the Muslim World League, a Brotherhood organization.81

  Despite this evidence, there was no investigation. Yet, in an article about Abedin and her influence, former U.S. prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy listed a great many strange collaborations between the State Department of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and Muslim Brotherhood organizations, including:

  •The State Department announced that the Obama administration would be “satisfied” with the election of a Muslim Brotherhood–dominated government in Egypt.

  •Secretary Clinton personally intervened to reverse a Bush-administration ruling that barred Tariq Ramadan, grandson of the Brotherhood’s founder and son of one of its most influential early leaders, from entering the United States.

  •The State Department collaborated with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, a bloc of governments heavily influenced by the Brotherhood, in seeking to restrict American free-speech rights in deference to Sharia proscriptions against negative criticism of Islam.

  •The State Department excluded Israel, the world’s leading target of terrorism, from its “Global Counterterrorism Forum,” a group that brings the United States together with several Islamist governments, prominently including its cochair, Turkey—which now finances Hamas and avidly supports the flotillas that seek to break Israel’s blockade of Hamas. At the forum’s kickoff, Secretary Clinton decried various terrorist attacks and groups, but she did not mention Hamas or attacks against Israel—in transparent deference to the Islamist governments, which echo the Brotherhood’s position that Hamas is not a terrorist organization and that attacks against Israel are not terrorism.

  •The State Department and the Obama administration waived congressional restrictions in order to transfer 1.5 billion dollars in aid to Egypt after the Muslim Brotherhood’s victory in the parliamentary elections.

  •The State Department and the Obama administration waived congressional restrictions in order to transfer millions of dollars in aid to the Palestinian territories, notwithstanding that Gaza is ruled by the terrorist organization Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch.

  •The State Department and the administration hosted a contingent from Egypt’s newly elected parliament that included not only Muslim Brotherhood members but a member of the Islamic Group (Gamaa al-Islamiyya), which is formally designated as a foreign terrorist organization. The State Department refused to provide Americans with information about the process by which it issued a visa to a member of a designated terrorist organization, about how the members of the Egyptian delegation were selected, or about what security procedures were followed before the delegation was allowed to enter our country.82

  During the Bush and Obama administrations, it became socially and politically unacceptable even to raise questions about Muslim Brotherhood influence, or to express any skepticism about the politically correct dogmas regarding Islam and jihad. For in Abedin’s case, it certainly was not that the evidence was lacking. It was that the political elites had forbidden any examination or discussion of it.

  Stigmatizing Resistance to Jihad

  The crowning victory in the effort to stigmatize resistance to jihad terror and Islamic supremacism came in February 2012, when the Obama administration purged more than a thousand documents and presentations from counterterror training materials for the FBI and other agencies. This material was discarded at the demand of Muslim groups, which had deemed it inaccurate (by their own account) or offensive to Muslims.83

  This triumph was several years in the making. The movement toward it began in earnest in August 2010, when I gave a presentation on Islam and jihad to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force—one of many such talks I gave to government agencies and military groups in those years. CAIR sent a series of letters to FBI director Robert Mueller and others, demanding that I be dropped as a counterterror trainer; the organization even started a “coalition” echoing this demand, which black activist leader Jesse Jackson and others joined.84

  And indeed, Mueller made no public comment on CAIR’s demand, and so it initially appeared that the effort had failed—although I was never again invited to provide counterterror training for any government agency, after having done so fairly regularly for the previous five years. Although Mueller was publicly silent, the Islamic supremacists and their leftist allies didn’t give up. In the summer and fall of 2011, the online tech journal Wired published several “exposés” by far-left journalist Spencer Ackerman, who took the FBI to task for training material that spoke forthrightly and truthfully about the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat.

  In a typical sally from these exposés, Ackerman reported that “the FBI is teaching its counterterrorism agents that ‘main stream’ [sic] American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers; that the Prophet Mohammed was a ‘cult leader’; and that the Islamic practice of giving charity is no more than a ‘funding mechanism for combat.’ At the Bureau’s training ground in Quantico, Virginia, agents are shown a chart contending that the more ‘devout’ a Muslim, the more likely he is to be ‘violent.’ Those destructive tendencies cannot be reversed, an FBI instructional presentation adds: ‘Any war against non-believers is justified’ under Muslim law; a ‘moderating process cannot happen if the Koran continues to be regarded as the unalterable word of Allah.’”85

  Like virtually all leftist and Islamic supremacist critiques of antijihad and antiterror material from this period, Ackerman’s piece took for granted that such assertions are false, without bothering to explain how or why. Apparently, Ackerman believed that their falsity was so self-evident as to require no demonstration; unfortunately for him, however, there was considerable evidence that what this FBI training material asserted was true. Nonetheless, in the face of Ackerman’s reports, the FBI went into full retreat: in September 2011, it announced that it was dropping one of the programs that Ackerman had zeroed in on.86

  The Islamic supremacists didn’t rest on their laurels. On October 19, 2011, Salam al-Marayati of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) took this campaign to the mainstream media, writing in the Los Angeles Times that “a disturbing string of training material used by the FBI and a U.S. attorney’s office came to light beginning in late July that reveals a deep anti-Muslim sentiment within the U.S. government.” Al-Marayati warned that “if this matter is not immediately addressed, it will undermine the relationship between law enforcement and the Muslim American community—another example of the ineptitude and/or apathy undermining bridges built with care over decades.” He also noted that the FBI was beginning to move on these demands, although as far as al-Marayati was concerned, much more was needed: “It is not enough to just call it a ‘very valid concern,’ as FBI Director Robert Mueller told a congressional committee this month.”87

  The same day that al-Marayati’s op-ed was published, Farhana Khera of M
uslim Advocates, who had complained for years about supposed Muslim profiling and entrapment, wrote a letter to John Brennan, who was then the assistant to the president on national security for homeland security and counterterrorism. The letter was signed not just by Khera but by the leaders of virtually all the significant Islamic groups in the United States: fifty-seven Muslim, Arab, and South Asian organizations, including many with ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, including CAIR, ISNA, MAS, the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), Islamic Relief USA, and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC).88

  The letter denounced what it characterized as U.S. government agencies’ “use of biased, false and highly offensive training materials about Muslims and Islam,” and emphasized that they regarded this as an issue of the utmost importance: “The seriousness of this issue cannot be overstated, and we request that the White House immediately create an interagency task force to address this problem, with a fair and transparent mechanism for input from the Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities, including civil rights lawyers, religious leaders, and law enforcement experts.”89

  This was needed because “while recent news reports have highlighted the FBI’s use of biased experts and training materials, we have learned that this problem extends far beyond the FBI and has infected other government agencies, including the U.S. Attorney’s Anti-Terrorism Advisory Councils, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Army. Furthermore, by the FBI’s own admission, the use of bigoted and distorted materials in its trainings has not been an isolated occurrence. Since last year, reports have surfaced that the FBI, and other federal agencies, are using or supporting the use of biased trainers and materials in presentations to law enforcement officials.”90

  In a November 3, 2011, response to Khera, that—significantly—was written on White House stationery, Brennan accepted Khera’s criticisms without a murmur of protest and assured her of his readiness to comply. “Please allow me to share with you the specific steps we are taking,” Brennan wrote to Khera, “to ensure that federal officials and state, local and tribal partners receive accurate, evidence-based information in these crucial areas.”91

  “I am aware,” Brennan went on, “of recent unfortunate incidents that have highlighted substandard and offensive training that some United States Government elements have either sponsored or delivered. Any and all such training runs completely counter to our values, our commitment to strong partnerships with communities across the country, our specific approach to countering violent extremist recruitment and radicalization, and our broader counterterrorism (CT) efforts. Our National Strategy for Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States highlights competent training as an area of primary focus and states that ‘misinformation about the threat and dynamics of radicalization to violence can harm our security by sending local stakeholders in the wrong direction and unnecessarily creating tensions with potential community partners.’ It also emphasizes that our security is ‘inextricably linked to our values,’ including ‘the promotion of an inclusive society.’”92

  Brennan then assured Khera that all her demands would be met: “Your letter requests that ‘the White House immediately create an interagency task force to address this problem,’ and we agree that this is necessary.” He then detailed the specific actions being undertaken to ensure this, including “collecting all training materials that contain cultural or religious content, including information related to Islam or Muslims.”93 This material wouldn’t just be “collected”; it would be purged of anything that Farhana Khera and others like her found offensive—that is, any honest discussion of how Islamic jihadists used Islamic teachings to justify violence.

  The alacrity with which Brennan complied was unfortunate on many levels. Not only were numerous books and presentations that presented a perfectly accurate view of Islam and jihad purged, but Brennan was complying with demands from quarters that could hardly be considered authentically moderate.

  America was going to war against jihadists while forbidding itself to understand jihad.

  Brennan also attempted to distance Islam and the concept of jihad from contemporary Islamic terrorism long before he told Farhana Khera that he would give her everything she wanted. In August 2009, Brennan noted that Barack Obama did not see the struggle against al-Qaeda “as a fight against jihadists. Describing terrorists in this way, using the legitimate term ‘jihad,’ which means to purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal, risks giving these murderers the religious legitimacy they desperately seek but in no way deserve.”94

  Brennan declared at New York University Law School in February 2010:

  As Muslims you have seen a small fringe of fanatics who cloak themselves in religion, try to distort your faith, though they are clearly ignorant of the most fundamental teachings of Islam. Instead of finding the inherent dignity and decency in other human beings, they practice a medieval brand of intolerance. Instead of saving human lives, as the Quran instructs, they take innocent life. Instead of creating, they destroy—bombing mosques, schools and hospitals. They are not jihadists, for jihad is a holy struggle, an effort to purify for a legitimate purpose, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing holy or pure or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women and children.”95

  Going even farther, he said on May 26, 2010, in an address at the Center for Strategic and International Studies: “Nor do we describe our enemies as jihadists or Islamists because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam meaning to purify oneself or one’s community.”96 In a press release the next day, CAIR “expressed appreciation” for Brennan’s remarks.97

  In the same speech, Brennan added: “And there is nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women and children. Indeed, characterizing our adversaries this way would actually be counterproductive. It would play into the false perception that they are religious leaders defending a holy cause when in fact, they are nothing more than murderers, including the murder of thousands upon thousands of Muslims.”98

  So many warriors of jihad throughout history would have disagreed with Brennan, and one reporter in 2010 had the temerity to challenge him on this point. A Washington Times interviewer asked Brennan: “Can you give me an example of a jihad in history? Like, has there ever been a jihad…an armed jihad anywhere in history? Has it ever existed for real, or is it just a concept?”99

  When Brennan responded, “I’m not going to go into this sort of history discussion here,” the interviewer explained: “But it’s important to frame the concept, because we want to say that what al-Qaeda is doing is not jihad. They say it is.” The interviewer then paraphrased for Brennan the jihadist claim, as repeated by al-Qaeda cofounder Abdullah Azzam, that the idea that the spiritual jihad was the “greater jihad” had no basis in Islamic theology: “Abdul Azzam has said, in fact, ‘there’s not even a greater jihad.’ [Azzam has said] that that’s just a myth—that hadith didn’t even really happen.”100

  Azzam claimed, the interviewer continued, “that there’s only armed jihad. Ayatollah Khomeini said ‘there is only armed jihad,’ and it would be useful to be able to characterize or to contrast what they’re doing and what they claim against a legitimate armed jihad in the past.”101

  Rather than explain on what grounds he found these usages of the word “jihad” as armed struggle to be illegitimate from an Islamic standpoint, Brennan said abruptly: “I think we’ve finished. I have to get going,” and left.102

  Brennan was instrumental in the Obama administration’s recasting of the defense against terror as a localized struggle against al-Qaeda.

  The Migrant Influx

  Meanwhile, after September 11, European nations began admitting tens of thousands of Muslim immigrants, such that by 2017, many European cities had majority-Muslim enclaves, and the Muslim population of Europe was in the millions and growing much more quickly than the
non-Muslim population.

  The influx picked up sharply in 2015. German chancellor Angela Merkel, keen to alleviate the humanitarian crisis in Syria and the surrounding regions, opened Germany’s doors to hundreds of thousands of Muslim migrants. Other Western European countries did as well. Yet while there was no doubt that some of the refugees were grateful for the hospitality they were being shown, others clearly weren’t. All of the Islamic jihadis who murdered 130 people in Paris in a series of jihad attacks in November 2015 were putative refugees who had recently been welcomed into Europe.103 Germany’s domestic intelligence agency admitted in July 2017 that hundreds of jihadis had entered the country among the refugees, and that twenty-four thousand jihadis were active in Germany.104

  Muslim migrants in Europe were also responsible for an appalling epidemic of rape, sexual assault, theft, petty crime, and looting. In the first half of 2016, migrants in Germany, who were overwhelmingly Muslim, committed 142,500 crimes, an average of 780 every day. This was a significant increase from 2015, during which migrants committed two hundred thousand crimes during the entire year.105

  On New Year’s Eve, December 31, 2015, Muslim migrants committed as many as two thousand mass rapes and sexual assaults in Cologne, Stockholm, and other major European cities.106 Such assaults weren’t limited to that day alone; Sweden was called the “rape capital of the world” because of the notorious activities of Muslim migrants.107 Muslim migrants made Malmö, once a peaceful city, crime-ridden and hazardous.108

  In Sweden, Muslim migrants from Afghanistan were found in 2017 to be seventy-nine times more likely to commit rape and other sexual crimes than native Swedes. Migrants and refugees committed ninety-two percent of rapes in Sweden. Rapists in Sweden have come from Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Eritrea, Syria, Gambia, Iran, Palestine, Chile, and Kosovo, in that order; rapists of Swedish background do not exist in sufficient numbers to make the top ten, and all the nations on that list except Chile and Eritrea are majority Muslim.109