Far from being an attack on Islam, the opening lines of the film state clearly: “This is not a film about Islam. It is about the threat of radical Islam. Only a small percentage of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims are radical.” Jasser, a devout Muslim of Syrian descent and a former US Navy lieutenant commander, is the founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy.
He distinguishes between Islam as a private faith and Islam as a political doctrine mandating the worldwide imposition of Shari’a law.
So far, Kelly and his boss, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, have tried to get past the immediate controversy through now familiar public penance rituals expressing regrets.
It has been left to others, most notably Woolsey and Ridge, to make the substantive case for the NYPD’s anti-terrorist policies. In an op-ed in The New York Daily News (and rejected by the Times), the two argue that the NYPD’s undercover terror prevention program, including intelligence-gathering within the Muslim community, has been one of the prime tools allowing the NYPD to foil several credible threats that have arisen from within the community. And given that even one successful terror attack in New York City could claims tens of thousands of lives, the NYPD cannot afford to decrease its intelligence-gathering activities.
THE TIMES omitted any discussion of the thesis of The Third Jihad. Jasser holds up a 15-page document at the beginning of the film, which we eventually learn is a Muslim Brotherhood manifesto for “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within,” through use of front groups, mosques and Islamic centers. The document was uncovered by the FBI in the course of its investigation leading up to the government’s successful prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation terrorist funding case.
Terrorism, intones Jasser, is only one tactic toward the Islamists’ goal of imposing Shari’a across the globe – a goal shared by many groups who are not themselves involved in terrorist activity. CAIR, which is specifically mentioned in the document, is one such group. CAIR was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case, and the FBI broke off all relations with the group at the time.
Abdul Rahman Alamoudi, the founder of the American Muslim Council, who was invited to speak at an ecumenical service in the National Cathedral after 9/11, is another so-called “moderate” Muslim. He is shown in The Third Jihad boasting, “Either we do it now or we do it in a hundred years, but this country will become a Muslim country.”
The current controversy could itself be a chapter in The Third Jihad, which discusses the manner in which Islamist front groups constantly raise the specter of Islamophobia to suppress discussion of radical Islam.
And it works. Paul Berman writes in The Flight of the Individuals about how Western intellectuals have been induced to remain silent on such awkward matters as the historical link between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Nazis, and the Nazi inspiration for present-day Islamists.
What bothers me most about this film is that its thesis states that "Only a small percentage of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims are radical." I have my doubts that is correct. I would say a large percentage - a very large percentage - of Muslims are radical if we define 'radical' as being the belief that Islam will one day rule the world and the willingness to act on it. As regular readers know, we have a regular commenter on this blog who claims to be a Muslim living in the West (yes, I know in what country, although God only knows if she actually lives there) who makes no secret of her aspirations for Islam to control the world. She has threatened me personally - both on comments I have allowed through on this blog and in private emails. Is she typical? Sadly, I think the answer to that question is "yes." 'Moderate Muslim' is an oxymoron as far as I can tell.
For those who have not seen The Third Jihad yet, you may do so here or click on the widget below.
Diana West writes that the real Jihad is against the Bible (and against Israel).
Why Israel? Ye'or asks. "Given the immense territories conquered and Islamized over thirteen centuries of expansion and war," she writes, "why would Muslim countries keep plotting to destroy Israel?" And further: "Why does the immense oil wealth of Muslim nations nourish a flood of hatred that poisons the heart of humanity against such a small nation? Why is Israel considered so alarming?"
The well-read global citizen might regurgitate something about land, modern Zionism and the post-1948 "plight of the Palestinians," but these are stock narratives overwriting the age-old reason. "What Israel possesses," Ye'or explains, "is the Bible."
To appreciate the depth and breadth of this perhaps obvious but seldom pondered explanation, it's essential to realize that Jewish and Christian Bible characters, from Abraham to Moses to Jesus, pop up in the Koran as Muslim prophets who actually preach Islam, not Judaism or Christianity. This is the time-wrinkling, religion-morphing way in which Islam repudiates what it regards as falsifications in both the first (old) and second (new) testaments. Given that the Jewish and Christian religious books long predate the Islamic religious book, it's not surprising that in their Koranic guises the biblical characters "wander," as Bat Ye'or writes, "in uncertain space with no geographical or temporal references." Still, Muslims claim that these same "Muslim" characters lived in "Palestine," Bat Ye'or writes, on the basis of the "Jewish and Christian scriptures that they reject."
It follows from this highly unstable construct that Islam sees the biblical past as Islamic history "usurped" by Jews and Christians. Thus, "the land in which it took place -- though ... never mentioned in the Koran -- is (considered) a Muslim land, and Jewish and Christian holy sites are all (considered) Muslim," writes Ye'or, the pre-eminent modern historian of "dhimmitude," the diminished condition of non-Muslims under Islamic law (Shariah).
The land of Israel itself -- whose "every region, town and village is mentioned in the Bible with historical and chronological precision" -- is thus "sacrilegious" to Muslims, she explains. "They observe with destructive rage this unfolding return of history that they claim as their own. ... Any confirmation of the veracity of the Bible is seen as an attack on the Islamic authenticity of the Koranic figures taken from the Bible."
Here's Hamas 'Prime Minister' Ismail Haniyeh exhorting his 'people' to 'jihad and martyrdom' on Hamas' al-Aqsa television station last week.
Note how he ties the 'Palestinian' cause in with Afghanistan and Sudan - in case there's anyone out there who still doesn't believe that the US and Israel are fighting the same enemy.
Guess which two countries don't recognize their internal terror threat
This is from Caroline Glick's weekly column in Friday's JPost:
Disturbingly, the establishments in the two countries most actively targeted by global jihad - the US and Israel - remain in deep denial about the challenges of homegrown jihadist fifth columnists. The US remains in denial even though the majority of recent jihadist attacks and attempted attacks against the US were carried out by American citizens.
The US's denial of the nature of the jihadist threat was demonstrated in all of its politically correct glory this week with President Barack Obama's address to Indian students at St. Xavier University in Mumbai. In response to a student's query about his view of jihad and jihadists, Obama praised Islam as "one of the world's great religions." He went on to claim that the overwhelming majority of Muslims view Islam as a religion of "peace, justice, fairness and tolerance."
Obama's message was not only deceptive and off point, it was deeply insensitive to his audience. Two years ago this month, Mumbai was the site of a massive jihadist commando attack against targets throughout the city, and Mumbai's residents are still grappling with the wounds of that attack.
Obama's statement also ignored the US's contribution to that attack. The suspected mastermind of the Mumbai massacres was a US citizen named David Coleman Headley from Obama's hometown of Chicago. Moreover, Headley (formerly Daood Sayed Gilani) served for many years as a double agent. A convicted drug dealer, he was sent to Pakistan as a Drug Enforcement Agency agent. While there, he trained at Lashkar-e-Taibe jihadist training camps.
Obama failed to note that perhaps due to his work at the DEA, US law enforcement officials ignored testimonies from two of Headley's former wives in 2005 and 2007 that he was a member of Lashkar-e-Taibe, the India-focused Pakistani al-Qaida affiliate run by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency.
Rather than address these issues, or the fact that the US has refused Indian extradition requests for Headley, Obama vacuously told students that it is the job of young people from all religions to reject extremism and violence.
Headley, of course, is just one of many American jihadists who has enjoined the fruits of America's politically correct denial of the homegrown Islamic threat. In the months following the September 11 attacks, the US Department of the Army actively courted Awlaki as part of its Muslim outreach program. Awlaki, then George Washington University's Muslim chaplain, was wooed despite his documented links to three of the September 11 hijackers.
AS ISRAELIS wake up to the reality of al-Qaida in Nazareth, our leftist establishment remains in denial about its role in enabling this reality. [Sheikh Nazem Abu Salim] Sahfe's [pictured. CiJ] Shihab al-Din mosque was established as a triumphalist mosque adjacent to the Church of the Annunciation in the lead up to the millennium. At the time, the Vatican launched a vocal protest against its construction.
In the hopes of winning over the likes of Sahfe, then-prime minister Ehud Barak and then-foreign minister and public security minister Shlomo Ben-Ami rejected the Vatican's objections. They even donated the land for the mosque from the Israel Lands Authority.
Safhe returned the favor by interrupting Pope John Paul II's homily at the Church of the Annunciation during his March 2000 visit with a call to prayer. Months later, the Shihab al-Din mosque was one of the focal points for inciting the anti-Jewish riots in the Arab sector in October 2000.
Today, leftist judges together with leftist politicians and opinion makers block all efforts by politicians and the public to acknowledge and address the growing lawlessness and jihadist bent of Israel's Muslim minority. Fear of the politically correct Supreme Court has deterred authorities from outlawing the Islamic Movement. Efforts to contend with illegal land seizures and building have been blocked by the leftist media, pressure groups largely sponsored by the New Israel Fund and the courts. Even symbolic measures like the government's recent bid to require non-Jewish immigrants to pledge loyalty to the state have been viciously attacked by Israel's leftist establishment as fascist and racist.
But as Europe is belatedly acknowledging, these politically correct commissars must be sidelined if the free world is to withstand the growing threat of homegrown jihad.
Even the Europeans are awakening to reality - as Glick demonstrates. But at precisely this moment, the Americans are becoming Europeanized and Israel is following suit. Read the whole thing (there's much more) and wake up!
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
Jonathan Rosenblum has a great piece in the weekend's JPost on the controversy over the use of the video The Third Jihad for training New York City police officers. Rosenblum argues that the claim of 'Islamophobia' is being used as an offensive weapon to counteract the fight against terrorism. 
