DANIEL GREENFIELD ON ROBERT SPENCER’S NEW BOOK “THE ARAB WINTER COMES TO AMERICA”
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/arab-winter-comes-to-america/print/
It may be warm outside now, but from colder hearts a winter blizzard is blowing. These cold hearts are frozen in the endless winter of Islam that leaves them empty of mercy for even their own daughters.
The title of Robert Spencer’s new book, “Arab Winter Comes to America: The Truth About the War We’re In” may reference the now infamous Arab Spring, but its focus is more on domestic policy than on foreign policy. This is less of an analysis of what went wrong in Egypt and Tunisia, though that is also addressed, than what has gone wrong with how the United States deals with Islamic terrorism at home.
The problem with Jihad is that we don’t talk about Jihad, as Spencer writes. The first and most effective wave of the Jihad was a political assault by Muslim Brotherhood front groups such as ISNA and CAIR against even discussing the threat. When the next wave of terrorist attacks arrived, policymakers, soldiers and law enforcement officers were left blinded and censored.
Today the situation is worse than ever.
Arab Winter Comes to America is less about the past than the present, less about lands abroad than our own streets and cities. The Arab Spring cracked regimes that had sought a middle ground between the unfettered savagery of Islamic law and the modern world. The Arab Winter may take longer to crack the West which is trying to walk the same fine line, suppressing blasphemy against Islam as hate crimes and silencing criticism of Islam as Islamophobia, but the book suggests that it can and it will.
Robert Spencer, a scholar of all things Islamic, dwells less on the texts than on the failure of our own establishment to draw the right conclusions from them. Having faced personal censorship in the US and the UK by governments that should instead have been listening to him, he is ably positioned to describe the process by which groups linked to terrorism preemptively silence those scholars and experts who would denounce them for what they are while using the threat of youth “radicalization” as blackmail.
“The only people who have perfect clarify about who they are and what they hope to accomplish, are America’s foes,” Spencer writes regretfully.
From Nidal Hasan to the Boston Marathon bombings, Arab Winter Comes to America examines wasted opportunities and missed warnings that could have prevented the mass murder of Americans. And even as Obama and his advisers claim that Al Qaeda has been all but defeated, Spencer warns that the real struggle between our civilization and the medieval terror theocracy out of the desert is only beginning.
The Arab Spring was a political and military disaster, but if the Arab Winter of Islam spreads to the West, it could destroy civilization as we know it.
“The jihad attack in Boston shows that our future in this country could be just as bloody as the present of the Muslim world,” Spencer writes, linking together the spring violence in Tunisia, Syria and Egypt and the spring massacre of Americans by Muslim infiltrators in Boston.
“The ideology behind the Boston Marathon bombing was the same ideology ascendant in the Arab Spring uprisings,” he adds.”It is no different from the ideology that motivated a Muslim U.S. Army psychiatrist to slaughter thirteen Americans at Fort Hood… it is identical to the belief system that inspired the 9/11 hijackers.”
Islamic violence is a matter of critical mass. The Islamic violence of the Arab Spring was a Jihad of Muslim majorities while the Islamic violence in Boston and in New York and throughout the West is a Jihad of Muslim minorities. However as we study the changing demographic patterns in the West, it is not inconceivable that we too may one day face the violence of Muslim majorities in our own countries.
Spencer demonstrates that while the violence of Muslim majorities and Muslim minorities may differ in scale and tactics, they originate from the same set of religious impulses. The Jihadists in Cairo and Benghazi, in Boston and New York, may have utilized different tactics of terror, but they believed the same things. And it is this belief that unites them into an army, even when scattered into cells or acting in isolation as lone wolves. It is this violent belief that is being hurled against the ramparts of the West.
Arab Winter Comes to America explores the intersections between propaganda and terror, how supposedly non-violent Islamic groups work to clear the path for their violent cousins and how the Muslim Brotherhood, which took over entire countries after the Arab Spring, embedded its front groups into American political life and is plotting to do the same thing here.
From the UK to the US, Spencer takes us on a dark journey along a river of denial that flows out of the houses of government and through the columns and broadcasts of mainstream media reporters. This river may be far from the waters of the Nile and yet it moves unknowingly to the same current, the tide of bloody genocidal dreams from murderous monsters like Hassan al-Banna and Yusuf al-Qaradawi.
Arab Winter Comes to America warns that understanding the motives that drive our enemies may be our first line of defense. It argues that we cannot begin to fight a war against the enemy that has brought savage carnage into our skies and our cities until we understand his goals and ambitions.
Ideological wars do not begin on the battlefield though they may end there. They are fought in the hearts and minds of men. Arab Winter Comes to America is another contribution to the Counterjihad which Robert Spencer has been fighting for so long. It is not a war that any of us has chosen, but it is a war that we have faced for over a thousand years. And it is not going away any time soon.
The weather outside may carry the warmth of a balmy spring, but as long as a cold wind blows out of the desert where Islam was born, it will continue to freeze souls and minds and whenever a bomb goes off or a Muslim kills in the name of Islam, a chilly strand of that wind blows through our hearts.
This is the oldest war there is; the war between civilization and savagery, between the power of truth and the tyranny of the lie, and between the free man and the vicious slave.
As Robert Spencer writes, “The truth cannot be successfully obscured and bringing it to light is essential to the survival of this free republic.”
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