What in the world motivated the Christmas Airline Bomber, 23 year old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the son of a wealthy banker in Nigeria, to attempt to suicide bomb Northwest Airlines flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit on December 25, 2009, a key Christian holiday? What motivated Abdulmutallab to want to kill 278 fellow passengers and a crew of eleven? It wasn't poverty. It wasn't material deprivation. So what was it?
The same thing that drove the Fort Hood Shooter, Arlington, Virginia, born Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed twelve and wounded another 30 in a Soldier Readiness Facility at the world's largest American military base in Fort Hood, Texas, on November 13th, 2009. A world view preached by the same man--Las Cruces, New Mexico, born Moslem imam Anwar al-Awlaki, who was one of the Christmas bomber's trainers in a secret terrorist camp in Yemen and who also acted as an email counselor to the Fort Hood shooter.
Both the Fort Hood Shooter and the Christmas Airline Bomber's acts were very, very sane. But the roots of their sanity lie in a belief system that is alien to us. A belief system that we have been fighting since at least 1993 when the first attempt on the World Center was made. That attempt was made by sane, rational, idealistic men. Men who believed in a compelling and widespread weltanschauung, a world view that wants to liberate all of humanity. A consistent philosophy that wants to bring all of humanity justice and happiness. Militant Islam. A belief system that will continue to target you and me. A belief system we have to know if we are to counter it.
Our nation performs its unique role in the world when it maintains its tolerance, when it maintains its ability to draw the best from cultures and peoples all over the planet and to bring them together in a common enterprise. But militant Islam uses that tolerance against us. In the Middle East and Asia, it hides behind civilians, stores its weapons in schools, mosques, and hospitals, and uses what one of the most influential interpreters of Islam in the modern world, the Ayatollah Khomeini, mockingly called "Your concerns, your 'humanitarian' scruples" against us.
And this is more than sane. It is endorsed by militant Islam's value system. The Ayatollah Khomeini was very blunt in his opinion of our moral posture. Said he, "Your concerns, your 'humanitarian' scruples, are more childish than reasonable." Why? Because in the eyes of Islam's militants, the very ethical concepts on which our society is based, concepts we consider universal, are corruptions based on lies. Those concepts include secularism, democracy, freedom of speech, tolerance, and the value of human life.
Today the Ayatollah Khomeini is considered the George Washington of Iran and the founding father of Iran's vision of a global Islamic revolutionary movement. His portrait appears 30 feet high on walls all over Tehran and is carried in street demonstrations. And many of the adherents to the Ayatollah's revolution feel that it is a moral obligation to take their revolution worldwide. Even those militants in the Islamic world who spurn the Ayatollah as a Shiite--a heretic--agree with his ideas.
Says the Ayatollah, "The idea of turning the other cheek has been wrongly attributed to Jesus (peace be unto him); it is those barbaric imperialists that have attributed it to him. Jesus was a prophet, and no prophet can be so illogical. ...To turn the other cheek...is the logic of the indolent, the logic of those who do not know God and who have not studied the Qu'ran." What, then, is the moral thing for just men to do? Again, over to the Ayatollah, "the leaders of our religion were all soldiers, commanders, and warriors. They put on military dress and went into battle in the wars that are described for us in our history; they killed, and they were killed. The Commander of the Faithful himself [Mohammed] (upon whom be peace) would place a helmet on his blessed head, don his coat of chain mail, and gird on a sword." Why? Why this call to war and to the kind of shootings Nidal Malik Hasan carried out at Fort Hood and the kind of suicide missions Abdulmutallab tried to execute in the air above Detroit?
For the sake of idealism. For the same kind of lofty motive that drives us all too often to use war and violence. The same kind of ideal for which even our anti-war, our humanitarian, and our human rights movements struggle. To save the world. Said Osama bin Laden's spiritual inspirer, Sayyid Qutb, "Western civilization has nothing else to give humanity....The dominance of Western man has reached its end. The time has come for Islam to take the lead." Not just for the sake of power and greed--though greed for loot, greed for the riches you can snatch from the bodies and homes of those you kill, is preached as holy in the Qu'ran. But in the militant's view, Islam must lead the world for the very soul of mankind. As Sheikh Abd Al-Rahman Al-Sudayyis, Imam of the Al-Haraam mosque in Mecca, tells worshipers: "Western civilization's credibility as the one capable of leading the world to happiness and man to stability - is shaken... Only one nation is capable of resuscitating global civilization, and that is the nation [of Islam]...While the false cultures sink in the swamp... The Islamic message... is to save the human race."
The Ayatollah Khomeini is more specific about how militant Islam must save you and me. Here's a collection of his quotes on the subject: "Any nonreligious [i.e. non Islamic] power, whatever form or shape, is necessarily an atheistic power, the tool of Satan; it is part of our duty to stand in its path and to struggle against its effects. Such Satanic power can engender nothing but corruption on earth, the supreme evil which must be pitilessly fought and rooted out. To achieve that end, we have no recourse other than to overthrow all governments that do not rest on pure Islamic principles, and are thus corrupt and corrupting, and to tear down the traitorous, rotten, unjust, and tyrannical administrative systems that serve them. ...The leaders of the USSR and of England and the president of the United States are ...infidels....Every part of the body of a non-Moslem individual is impure, even the hair on his hand and his body hair, his nails, and all the secretions of his body. Any man or woman who denies the existence of God, or believes in His partners [the Christian Trinity], or else does not believe in His Prophet Mohammed, is impure (in the same way as are excrement, urine, dog, and wine). ...All of humanity must strike these troublemakers [the governments of the West] with an iron hand.... Islam has obliterated many tribes because they were sources of corruption [i.e. sources of non-Islamic influence]....we will stand against their whole world and will not cease until the annihilation of all them. Either we all become free, or we will go to the greater freedom which is martyrdom. Either we shake one another's hands in joy at the victory of Islam in the world, or all of us will turn to eternal life and martyrdom. In both cases, victory and success are ours."
Violence is not the only hitch to militant Islam's view of your liberation and mine. The system that militant Islam wants to impose is a global government whose holiness and godliness are based on the form of governance Mohammed invented in the city of Medina from 622 AD to 630 AD, the form of governance Mohammed then transplanted to Mecca in 630. Mohammed ran a strict military dictatorship with a well defined policy on protest and dissenters. Protesters and dissenters were killed. Usually while they slept in their own bed. One woman, a poetess who disapproved of Mohammed's raids on caravans and of the lust with which Mohammed's men divvied up the loot, was killed in her bed with her five children surrounding her. The assassin was kind enough to take the baby suckling at her breast and put it aside before he plunged in his sword.
And two slave girls were killed for singing a satirical song about the one true prophet of Allah, Mohammed. When they tried to escape execution they were pursued with war horses and trampled to death. No wonder Mohammed called himself "The Prophet of War" but never once used the term "prophet of peace."
Today's Islamic militants believe this form of government is sacred. It is man's way of living out the laws that God himself conferred on us. Those laws were embodied in the minute-to-minute life of a Prophet who said "Jihad is ordained for you." A prophet who built a military structure designed for global conquest. For bringing all of humanity the light of truth. The light of a blood-obsessed founding document, the Qu'ran.
