•Girls and guns: “Sex is the most primitive assertion of one’s significance; it’s a means to perpetuate one’s name—and genes—into the future. Islamic State strategically uses it as a reward for aggression.”34
These were not mutually exclusive, and there was a measure of truth to many of them. Certainly it was thrilling to be caught up in the excitement of the formative days of the caliphate. Islamic State jihadi Abu Sumayyah said of life in the Islamic State, “Something is always going on—always bombings. By the time it gets to midday, you are in the midst of the fighting. Or totally peaceful day, shower, play some football, play with the lads, football. So many Americans, so many Canadians, so many British guys—guys from all over the place, China, Indonesia.”35
Abu Sumayyah also offers some support for the idea that the Islamic State gained recruits because of Muslims’ grievances against the West: “Mainly my main inspiration to come to Syria was George Bush, Tony Blair, and the presidents of the West and their foreign policy towards Islam—Egypt, Kashmir, Sinai, Yemen, Afghanistan. Guantanamo Bay. Abu Ghraib.”36
When asked why they had joined the Islamic State, however, its recruits return again and again to the appeal of the caliphate.
Restoring the Glory Days
Abu Sumayyah also explained that a key element of what drew him to the Islamic State was the fact that it was a state: “ISIS was a state, not a group—it was an actual state. It runs the affairs of people, like any other state—American, British, French—ISIS is running as a state. It provides food for the poor—like shelter, clothing, charity, clean roads. It does everything a normal state does. Postal services. Everything the people need. This is what attracted me about ISIS. No other groups—al-Nusra, El-Aqsa Brigade, is doing that.”37
As far as Sumayyah and others who joined the Islamic State were concerned, Muslims had not had such a state since March 3, 1924. The Islamic State was a chance to restore the bygone glories of past caliphates and to reverse the catastrophe that the abolition of the caliphate had wrought upon the Muslim ummah.
“I was in a hotel, and I saw the declaration on television,” recounted Musa Cerantonio, an Australian convert to Islam who has frequently exhorted Muslims to work for the restoration of the caliphate. “And I was just amazed, and I’m like, Why am I stuck here in this bloody room?”38
He is still stuck: Australian authorities confiscated Cerantonio’s passport to prevent him from traveling to join the Islamic State.39
BUT THAT WAS WHEN THEY RULED THE WORLD
A year before the Islamic State declared its caliphate, in June 2013, Mohammed Malkawi of the pro-caliphate organization Hizb ut-Tahrir expressed common sentiments among jihadis when he blamed the abolition of the caliphate on a conspiracy of infidels: “After Islam had reached the peak of glory and the Muslims were masters of the world, there came a time when the infidels conspired against the Muslims, who were in a deep slumber. Britain conspired against them, along with Arab and Turkish collaborators and traitors, and ended the Islamic Caliphate and its glory.”40
But with ISIS’s proclamation of the caliphate on June 29, 2014, it was finally time to recover that glory.
A young Muslim in the Chicago area, Mohammed Hamzah Khan, nineteen, along with his sister, who was seventeen, and their brother (sixteen), got farther, but like Cerantonio, didn’t make it. On October 4, 2014, they sneaked out of their home early in the morning and made their way to O’Hare International Airport, intending to travel to the Islamic State. Hamzah Khan left a note for his parents that combined piety with grievance (an extremely common combination among Muslims who are inclined toward the Islamic State and other jihad groups: “An Islamic State has been established and it is thus obligatory upon every able-bodied male and female to migrate there,” he declared. “Muslims have been crushed under foot for too long. . . . This nation is openly against Islam and Muslims. . . . I do not want my progeny to be raised in a filthy environment like this.”41
Khan’s sister contributed her own note: “Death is inevitable, and all of the times we enjoyed will not matter as we lay [sic] on our death beds. Death is an appointment, and we cannot delay or postpone, and what we did to prepare for our death is what will matter.”42 In other words, death while in the process of serving Allah should be one’s highest aspiration.
The three Khan teens were arrested at the airport, their search for the pure Islamic land and a death worthy of Allah postponed for the time.43
In reporting on the Khans’ aborted flight, the Washington Post gave ample space to their parents to make their case that they had not raised the three children in an “extremist” atmosphere, but were just ordinary, albeit conservative Americans whose offspring had inexplicably gotten “radicalized.” However, the Post story unwittingly provided a glimpse into the world of a devout Muslim upbringing in the United States, in which a young person who has learned hatred and contempt for infidel civilization can easily decide that (in the words of the Muslim Brotherhood motto) death for the sake of Allah is his highest aspiration.
The would-be Islamic State jihadis’ mother, Zarine Khan “has worked for many years as a teacher at a local Islamic school,” and “the Khans tried to shield their children from unwanted influences. They had a TV when the children were younger, but they had no cable service. The TV was used solely for showing DVDs—mainly cartoons and educational JumpStart programs from the public library.”45
TAQIYYA WATCH
“The vast majority of Muslim clerics say the group cherry picks what it wants from Islam’s holy book, the Quran, and from accounts of Muhammad’s actions and sayings, known as the Hadith. It then misinterprets many of these, while ignoring everything in the texts that contradicts those hand-picked selections, these experts say.”
—Associated Press, March 2, 201544
Given the Islamic outlook it’s obvious the family had, those DVDs most likely also included Islamic teaching tools. The Post also tells us that “the children studied at a local Islamic school, which offered a standard U.S. curriculum of English, math and science—but also classes on Islam. . . . All three Khan children also became Hafiz, which means they completely memorized the Koran in Arabic.”46
FROM DELTA AIR LINES TO THE JIHAD
Again and again, those who find the Islamic State’s call impossible to resist turn out to be the most devout young Muslims. Abdirahmaan Muhumed, a Muslim from Minneapolis who had once had a job cleaning Delta Air Lines airplanes at Minneapolis airport, made his way to ISIS only to become one of the first U.S. residents to die in the Islamic State’s jihad.47 He explained: “A Muslim has to stand up for [what’s] right. I give up this worldly life for Allah.” Muhumed said that if some thought of him as a terrorist, he was “happy with it,” and prayed that Allah would “make my mom strong for the decision that I made.”48 Muhumed, a twenty-nine-year-old father of nine children, was killed while fighting for the Islamic State in late August 2014.49
Lack of Opportunity Drove Them to It? Middle Class Kids, Medical School Acceptees Flock to ISIS
Noting that many young Somali Muslims from the Twin Cities had made their way to Iraq and Syria to join the Islamic State, Mohamud Noor of the Confederation of Somali Community in Minnesota made a significant statement: “Most of [those who left] don’t have the resources to even buy a ticket to go to Chicago. So that means there is [sic] some influential individuals who are taking advantage of our youth.”50 Not just influencing them, apparently, but paying for the trips of these poor young people.
Are Muslims being driven to join the Islamic State by the prospect of financial gain? John Kerry, Obama administration spokesperson Marie Harf, and many others have declared repeatedly that poverty is driving people to terrorism, and that giving them economic opportunities is what will end the appeal of terrorist groups. In line with this, Mohamud Noor explained why former Delta employee Abdirahmaan Muhumed threw in his lot with ISIS: “He had so many challenges, lack of opportunities in life. Those are the things that h
ave driven him to be who he is.”51
Yet many Islamic State jihadis had plenty of opportunities in life. A Muslim in Britain, Nasser Muthana, had been accepted into four medical schools, but turned them all down to travel to the Islamic State—because, he said, “jihad is obligatory.”52 Another Muslim from Britain, Muhammad Hamidur Rahman, who like Muthana was killed fighting for the Islamic State, came from a prosperous middle class background—but according to his father, he “said he wanted to become a shaheed [martyr] for the sake of Allah.”53
Andre Poulin: “Mujahedeen Are Regular People”
The idea that poverty drives young Muslims to terrorism was directly contradicted by the story of a middle class youth from Canada named Andre Poulin, who after his conversion to Islam began calling himself Abu Muslim. In a video that became an Islamic State recruitment tool, Poulin emphatically ruled out the idea that he was driven to join the Islamic State because of “challenges” or “lack of opportunities in life.” Abu Muslim declared: “It’s not like I was some social outcast, wasn’t like I was some anarchist or somebody who just wants to destroy the world and kill everybody. No, I was a regular person. And, mujahedeen are regular people, too.”54
Poulin, who was in his twenties when he made the video, explained: “Before I come here to Syria, I had money, I had family, I had good friends, I had colleagues. You know I worked as a street janitor—I made over $2,000 a month at this job. It was a very good job, a very good job. And even though I wasn’t rich beyond my wildest imaginations, you know I was making it. It was good, and you know I always had family to support me, and I had friends to support me.”55
What, then, was lacking? Life, he said, was not “religiously fulfilling.” He asked his fellow Muslims in Canada and elsewhere in the West how they could think that they were pleasing Allah while paying taxes to a government that used them “to assist the war on Islam.”56
Poulin appealed to Muslims in the West to join him: “We need the engineers, we need doctors, we need professionals. Every person can contribute something to the Islamic State.”57 But they didn’t have to make the journey if it were difficult: he said that Muslims should all aid the Islamic State in some way. “If you cannot fight, then you can give money. And if you cannot give money, then you can assist in technology. And if you can’t assist in technology, you can use some other skills.” He promised that if they did come with their families to the Islamic State, “your families will live here in safety just like back home.”58
FBI Director Comey has noted that the Islamic State is trying to lure “both fighters and people who would be the spouses . . . to their warped world.”59 The lusty young jihadis of the Islamic State especially want to draw potential spouses to their domains. Aqsa Mahmood, a young Muslim woman who was born and raised in Scotland and then made her way to the Islamic State, tried to recruit other young Muslim girls from the West with the promise, paradoxically enough, of stability and prosperity: the recruits would get, she promised, “a house with free electricity and water provided to you due to the Khilafah and no rent included. Sounds great, right?”60
Belying this talk of safety and security, however, the Islamic State recruitment video featuring Andre Poulin ends with footage of his bloody corpse and praise for him as a martyr of Islam.61 Apparently the slick ISIS propagandists have decided that the lure of martyrdom is superior to the appeal of safety, in line with the Qur’an’s declaration: “Not equal are believers who sit home and receive no hurt and those who fight in Allah’s cause with their wealth and lives. Allah has granted a grade higher to those who fight with their possessions and bodies to those who sit home. Those who fight he has distinguished with a special reward” (4:95).
INTERFAITH DIALOGUE
A convert to Islam from Britain, Sally Jones, made her way to the Islamic State and took to Twitter to threaten her former coreligionists: “You Christians all need beheading with a nice blunt knife and stuck on the railings at Raqqa. Come here. I’ll do it for you!”62
Jake Bilardi: “With My Martyrdom Operation Drawing Closer, I Want to Tell You My Story”
The case of Jake Bilardi (who after converting to Islam adopted the name Abdullah al-Australi—that is, “the Australian slave of Allah”), a young Australian convert to Islam who was killed in a jihad suicide attack in the Islamic State in March 2015, is also instructive. Far from being underprivileged or lacking in opportunities, Bilardi described his middle class upbringing in “affluent Melbourne” as “very comfortable.”
The trajectory of Bilardi’s life is also disquieting evidence that the hard-line Leftist slant of public school education, not just in the United States but all over the West, is not only endangering the future of the free world, but even serving as a recruitment tool for the global jihad.
Jake Bilardi was a conscientious young man who had co-founded a children’s charitable organization, Soccer for Hope, to get soccer balls to poor children in Uganda.63 But his education led him onto a path that his elders who admired him for his social conscience would never have expected. Shortly before his death, he wrote a lengthy blog post explaining the evolution of his thinking, his embrace of Islam, and his decision to become not only a jihadist but a suicide bomber.64 Bilardi’s post begins with a direct denial of the poverty-causes-terrorism claim and a forthright declaration that he soon plans to carry out a “martyrdom operation”—that is, to kill himself while murdering infidels:
With my martyrdom operation drawing closer, I want to tell you my story, how I came from being an Atheist school student in affluent Melbourne to a soldier of the Khilafah preparing to sacrifice my life for Islam in Ramadi, Iraq. . . .
My life in Melbourne’s working-class suburbs was, despite having its ups and downs just like everyone else, very comfortable. I found myself excelling in my studies, just as my siblings had, and had dreamed of becoming a political journalist. . . .
Bilardi explained that he had a fascination with Islamic culture and Muslim countries from an early age, and when he started hearing about the war on terror he was skeptical of the mainstream narrative: “I saw the foreign troops burning villages, raping local women and girls, rounding up innocent young men as suspected terrorists and sending them overseas for torture, gunning down women, children and the elderly in the streets and indiscriminately firing missiles from their jets. Who was I to believe was the terrorist?”
Bilardi praised Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and retailed a great deal of jihadist polemic about alleged American atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan and supposed Israeli enormities against the Palestinians, echoing the usual Leftist justifications for supporting the Palestinian jihad against Israeli civilians, saying with unintentional irony that “the true problem was, not Israel, nor Israelis but the religious ideology that governed them”:
I began to support the violent resistance in the Gaza Strip, recognising that it was this resistance that kept small pockets of Palestine from the hands of the Jews, even if it does mean that they are frequently hit with airstrikes. Also, the presence of a base to attack Israel from the west was always a sign of hope, especially considering the current aggressive advance of the Islamic State from the East and as well as the bayah [pledge of allegiance] to the Khilafah by the mujahideen in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula potentially allowing for attacks from all directions to liberate Palestine.
In this way, Bilardi said, he “transitioned from being a reluctant-supporter of Islamic militant groups in different lands to become certain that violent global revolution was the answer to the world’s ills.”
Education for Treason
The young jihadi’s thinking offers an intriguing study of how the Leftist, anti-American perspective that dominates public school textbooks today warps young minds:
In the course of my research I decided to delve deeper into the bloodstained history of the world. I learnt for the first time in great detail, the scale of the atrocities committed against the native population of the Americas by both the British and Spanish coloniali
st forces. About how both nations attempted to completely wipe out the natives in order to build their own respective civilisations, slaughtering millions of innocent people, intentionally spreading disease amongst them and raping the native women in an effort to breed-out the present race. I also learned more about the similar systematic genocide in my own country, Australia, the stories they choose to leave out when you’re in history class at school.
Of course they don’t really leave such stories out; they are practically all that is taught nowadays, particularly when it comes to Islam and the Crusades:
I learnt about how the Crusaders rampaged across Europe and the Middle East, seeking to eliminate Islam from the region and restore the rule of the Catholic Church.
In reality, the Crusaders never had any intention of eliminating Islam from the region and made no attempt to do so.
Jake Bilardi went on to repeat a great deal more Leftist agitprop—sounding for all the world like a typical public school student of the early twenty-first century who has swallowed uncritically the worldview of his teachers. This hatred of America and the West meshed nicely in his mind with denial about the Islamic State’s atrocities—really the jihadis are the victims of an oppressive and unjust West:
Whenever America goes to war now, they claim it is simply humanitarian intervention. Take their recent airstrikes against the Islamic State, they hyped-up the story of the Yazidis trapped on Mount Sinjar, making unsubstantiated claims of genocide before admitting the situation was greatly exaggerated and it was not much of an issue. But this correction came after the first missile had been fired and therefore, they were already in, so . . . ‘Well, we can’t pull out now’ . . . Now as a result, every day the Americans are firing missiles at innocent Muslims in both Iraq and Sham.
The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS Page 10
