Osama Bin Ladin once said, “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.”
He was referring, of course, to Islam’s eventual victory over the Christian West — a victory that might be achieved militarily or by other means.
Bin Laden was aware that he couldn’t defeat America militarily. He didn’t possess the weapons or the manpower necessary for such an effort.
What he did, instead, was take possession of four American jetliners and turn them into fiery weapons to be used against America. He didn’t plan to defeat America; he planned to show the world that despite outward appearances, America was the weak horse and Islam was the strong horse.
A Very Weak Horse
And almost immediately after 9/11, America began acting like a weak horse. Granted, the U.S used its military power to hunt Bin Laden and eventually, years later, to kill him. However, Americans exhibited what might be called a “weak” understanding of Islam. The Bush administration declared a “war on terror” but at the same time, it launched a campaign to absolve Islam of any connection to terrorism. Meanwhile, educators scrambled to burnish the image of Islam, and textbooks were rewritten in order to present Islam as a paragon of virtue.
During World War II, Army intelligence took pains to understand the ideologies that motivated the Nazis and the Japanese imperialists. During the war on terror, military intelligence was forbidden to explore the ideology of Islam. When Major Stephen Coughlin, the Pentagon’s top expert on sharia law, told his superiors that Islamic law stipulates that jihad is obligatory for all Muslims, he was promptly fired at the behest of Hesham Islam, an improperly vetted special assistant to the Deputy Secretary of Defense.
Apparently, the Defense Department reckoned that it would be “Islamophobic” to cite Islamic sources about what their own faith teaches.
A few years later, the Deputy Attorney General ordered the FBI and other national security organizations to eliminate from their training manuals any reference to Islam that suggest it has a tendency toward violence. It seemed as though our military and security agencies were less interested in winning wars than in winning praise for their sensitivity to the feelings of the “other.”
Terrorists Among Us
Perhaps the most egregious example of the “weak horse” approach to conflict was our inability to stop, or even to notice, the way the Muslim Brotherhood was infiltrating our society.
The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1929, has been designated as a terrorist group and banned by numerous Muslim countries — including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. But in the United States, ever sensitive to being thought Islamophobic, the Brotherhood is allowed to operate freely. It has penetrated our universities, our security agencies, and state, local, and federal government.
The Brotherhood’s activities in America were first exposed in the Holy Land Foundation Trial of 1998. In that year, a federal jury in Texas convicted a group called the Holy Land Foundation for providing support to Hamas, the Palestinian wing of the Muslim Brotherhood and a designated terrorist organization. Twenty-nine other organizations were named as unindicted coconspirators, including the Muslim Students Association, the North American Islamic Trust, the Islamic Society of North America, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
One telling document that was produced in the trial was a 1991 memorandum explaining the “strategic goal” for the Brotherhood in North America. It called for a “civilization-jihadist process” — “a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western Civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their [own]hands…”
Perhaps Osama Bin Laden was familiar with the document, because “destroying the Western Civilization from within … by their own hands” is exactly what he intended on 9/11 when his jihadists turned the planes that American hands had made against us.
Naïve to Death
Of course, all of this did not happen in one day. It took months, if not years, of stealth jihad to get his men into the U.S and to make other preparations. Among other unknowing enablers, the terrorists used American flight academies to teach them the rudiments of flying. The major factor they were relying on, however, was American naiveté. Most Americans knew little about Islam, and most knew nothing about Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. When President George W. Bush told them that “Islam” means “peace,” they accepted it without question. If a news anchor opined that “violence has nothing to do with Islam,” the American people swallowed that, too.
But that was 24 years ago, and things have changed. Nowadays people are more realistic about Islam. Or are they? Right now, New York City is faced with the possibility of another 9/11 — not the kind that brings down skyscrapers, but the kind that brings down societies. As you might guess, I’m talking about the possibility that naïve New Yorkers will make Zohran Mamdani the next mayor of the Big Apple.
Brigitte Gabriel, who has been writing about Islam for nearly two decades, warns that “the same ideology that fueled Al Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks … now threatens to seize America’s largest city through Mamdani — a Brotherhood scion groomed for this moment…”
Mamdani, a self-described communist who is very popular with young people, has already won the Democratic primary election for mayor and seems to have a good chance of winning the general election.
Mamdani, whose radical socialist views are matched by his radical Islamist beliefs, has radical plans for New York City. His socialist-inspired policies — defunding the police, abolishing prisons, banning guns, ending cash bail, and decriminalizing drugs and prostitution — are enough to sink New York City. But when you add his extremist Islamic views, you have a recipe for complete disaster. At Bowdoin College, he cofounded a chapter of the militant Students for Justice in Palestine group, and since then he has marched many times with pro-Hamas protestors. If you have any doubts about his leanings, consider that his campaign recently received a $100,000 donation from Muslim Brotherhood-linked CAIR.
The Big Apple as Little Europe
Under Mamdani, New York City could quickly end up like London, Paris, or Brussels — cities that will soon be fully Islamized if current trends continue. Yet, because of our “weak horse” approach to the cultural conflict with Islam, this openly radical Muslim may soon control the city that has long served as the symbol of American liberty.
If, by their own hand, New Yorkers cast their votes for Mamdani, it will be one more piece of evidence that in the ideological conflict with Islam, we are the weak horse.
But the picture is not entirely bleak. Fortunately, in the military realm we are decidedly the strong horse. President Donald Trump made that clear when he ordered B-2 stealth bombers to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities without, according to Red Crescent reports, killing any Iranians. But it did kill the dreams of many Iranian leaders who thought they were a match for American might.
Whatever show of bravado the Iranian leaders may put on, the B-2 attack almost certainly did much to undermine their confidence in their own ideology/theology. Moreover, Muslims all over the world must be having second thoughts about their conviction that Islam is an unstoppable force. The many successes of stealth jihadists have undoubtedly helped to recruit Muslims to the ranks of the warrior jihadis. But it now looks as though a single squadron of stealth bombers could undo years of stealth jihad activities.
I’ll have more to say on that topic in a future article.
William Kilpatrick is the author of Christianity, Islam, and Atheism: The Struggle for the Soul of the West (Ignatius Press), and a new book, What Catholics Need to Know about Islam (Crisis Publications). His articles have appeared in Crisis, Catholic World Report, The National Catholic Register, First Things, FrontPage and other publications.
