Author: Robert Spencer
Publication: FrontPageMagazine.com
Date: April 18, 2007
URL: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=27902
According to former Detroit Public Schools
Superintendent Eddie Green, Kifah Jayyousi is "a great guy, one of the
nicest people I've ever met." While Green was superintendent, Jayyousi
oversaw the Detroit school district's capital improvement program, which had
a $1.5 billion budget.
Jayyousi is now charged, according to the
Detroit Free Press, with "conspiring to kidnap, maim and murder by providing
money, recruits and equipment for Islamic struggles in Bosnia, Kosovo and
Chechnya from 1993 to 2001." He could get life in prison.
Christopher Paul, a martial arts instructor
at a mosque in Columbus, Ohio, is also a terrific guy. Ahmad Al-Akhras, vice
chairman of the Council on American-Islamic Relations chapter in Columbus,
said: "From the things I know, he is a loving husband and he has a wife
and parents in town. They are a good family together."
Yet now Paul, a Muslim, has been charged,
according to Associated Press, with "providing material support to terrorists,
conspiracy to provide support to terrorists and conspiracy to use a weapon
of mass destruction." He is accused of training with Al-Qaeda in the
early 1990s, training people for violent jihad attacks on targets in Europe
and the United States, and more.
But another one of Paul's friends, Hisham
Jenhawi, was skeptical: "I don't think it's even close to his personality
to act upon something like that. He's a very kind person. You would meet him
on the street and he would want to hug you with the heart that he has."
One of his neighbors, Mike James, added: "He seemed like a nice guy,
always waving…"
This kind of thing is nothing new. A friend
remembered Gokhan Elaltuntas, a Muslim who carried out a suicide bombing on
a synagogue in Istanbul in 2003: "We went partridge hunting together.
I still cannot believe how such a quiet person could have been involved in
an incident like this." A friend of Naveed Haq, the jihadist killer who
murdered one and wounded five at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle
in July 2006, described him as "pretty much just a normal guy….He
was the kind of guy when you talked to him he was always laughing."
According to a Southern California friend
of Raed Albanna, who killed 132 people in a suicide attack outside a medical
clinic in Iraq in 2005, "He was into partying. We hit some pretty wild
clubs in Hollywood." Frank Lindh, the father of John Walker Lindh, a.k.a.
Suleyman Al-Faris, the convert to Islam from Marin County who joined the Taliban
and was captured in Afghanistan fighting against American troops, has said:
"In simple terms, this is the story of a decent and honorable young man
embarked on a spiritual quest."
Great guys all. Some partied and some embarked
on a spiritual search, but they all ended up in the same place, committing
acts dedicated to furthering the cause of jihad, or facing charges of having
done so.
One clue to this phenomenon may come from
jazz musician Tarek Shah, who recently pled guilty to providing martial arts
and hand-to-hand combat with weapons training to Al-Qaeda operatives. In 2004
Shah told a man he thought was a fellow jihadist but who turned out to be
an undercover agent, "I could be joking and smiling and then cutting
their throats in the next second."
Or they may be genuinely decent fellows. It
was the Nazi genocide mastermind Heinrich Himmler who told a group of SS leaders:
"Most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lying together,
five hundred, or a thousand. To have gone through this and yet -- apart from
a few exceptions, examples of human weakness -- to have remained decent fellows,
this is what has made us hard. This is a glorious page in our history that
has never been written and shall never be written…"
Were these SS mass murderers really decent
fellows? To their friends and family, they probably were. After all, they
weren't interested in undifferentiated mayhem. They were adherents of a totalitarian,
genocidal ideology that convinced them that the murders they were committing
were for a good purpose. As far as they were concerned, their goals were rational
and good, and the murders were a means to that goal. It was not just a noteworthy
achievement, but a necessity, for them to remain "decent fellows,"
for they were busy trying to build what they saw as a decent society. That
their vision of a decent society included genocide and torture did not trouble
them, for it was all for - in their view - a goal that remained good.
Today's jihad terrorists are likewise the
adherents of a totalitarian, genocidal ideology that teaches them that murders
committed under certain circumstances are a good thing. And those murders,
here again, are not committed for their own sake, but for the sake of a societal
vision hardly less draconian and evil than that of Hitler, but one also that
portrays itself as the exponent of all that is good - as the Taliban showed
us. But the continued reference to such people as "terrorists" pure
and simple, and the refusal of the media and most law enforcement officials
to examine their ideology at all, only reinforces the idea that these people
are raving maniacs, interested solely in chaos for its own sake. The society
they want to build, and the means besides guns and bombs that they are using
to build it, so far remain below the radar screen of most analysts. These
people are just "terrorists," interested only in "terror."
And so we're continually surprised when they turn out to be nice guys after
all. Decent fellows. Like the SS.
Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history,
theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of six
books, seven monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic
terrorism, including Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World's
Fastest Growing Faith and the New York Times Bestsellers The Politically Incorrect
Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad.
