Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) and some of his colleagues in Congress are trying to prevent U.S. law enforcement and intelligence organizations from teaching their personnel about the enemy.
Can you imagine not telling Americans about Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party during World War II? Or failing to teach about communism during the Cold War?
And yet today, ten years after we were attacked by jihadi Muslims in the name of Islam, Sen. Durbin and his colleagues are trying to ensure that our intelligence and law enforcement professionals will miss the next attack, just as they missed the preparations for 9/11 taking place right here on American soil.
Under Senator Durbin’s plan, we will be politically correct — and dead. For that will be the inevitable result of not teaching our intelligence and law enforcement professionals the nature of the enemy that attacked us on 9/11 and continues to plot future attacks on America.
Unlike Senator Durbin, I have actually lived in the Muslim world, and have studied Islam with a mujtahed — a recognized Islamic scholar.
As I wrote in my book Preachers of Hate: Islam and the War on America (Crown Forum, 2003), a struggle is underway for the soul of Islam between those who would revive the jihadi roots of the Koran and the hadith, and those who seek a reformation of Islamic traditions.
The reformists face a difficult battle, since they must walk away from a doctrine of violence, anti-Semitism, and persecution of non-Muslims that is openly expressed in Islam’s most sacred texts. They are reviled by hate groups here in the United States and elsewhere who deem them apostates — which is punishable by death! — for not towing to Islamic orthodoxy.
While I certainly wish them every success, we cannot base our national security on hope for a change in Islam.
Instead, we should be teaching law enforcement and intelligence professionals the doctrinal basis for the jihadi movement. They need to understand things such as the doctrine of abrogation, by which earlier “peaceful” statements of the Muslim prophet are cancelled (or “abrogated”) by subsequent calls to violence against non-Muslims.
Al Qaida and like-minded groups who despise our freedoms believe that the call to violent jihad is a “duty” placed upon all Muslims by Islam’s own holy texts. We ignore this at our peril.
The New York Police Department and many state law enforcement agencies have turned to recognized Islamic law experts to put together a training curriculum that examines Islamic law by using authoritative Islamic texts.
I have examined much of this course material. Not only is it scrupulously factual, it demonstrates how Islamic concepts are being used by jihadi groups to recruit terrorists in our midst.
But if Senator Durbin gets his way, future generations of our law enforcement and intelligence professionals will be forbidden from learning the truth. Instead, they will be taught that Islam is “a faith based upon love, not hate” that condemns terrorism, abhors violence, and wants to hold hands with Christians and Jews all night at the campfire.
That is precisely what happened with Major Nidal Hassan. Even though he told his colleagues repeatedly that his Islamic beliefs compelled him to kill Americans, they chose to ignore these warnings for fear of being labeled politically incorrect. Had they taken off their ideological blinders, 13 innocent victims at Fort Hood would be alive with their families today.
Our intelligence and law enforcement professionals are smart enough to understand the difference between the overwhelming majority of ordinary Muslims who do not subscribe to the ideology of Shariah law, and jihadi terrorists like Major Hassan whose goal is to create a world-wide Islamic state based on Shariah.
Muslims are not the problem; Islamic doctrine as exploited by groups such as al Qaida and the Taliban is. And we need to know as much as we possibly can about that doctrine and how it can be defeated.
Seventeen years ago, along with an Iranian dissident ayatollah, I founded the Foundation for Democracy in Iran (www.iran.org), and have been working with Iranian dissidents ever since.
Iranians have been inoculated against the virus of Shariah law because they were its first victims. Iranian-Americans who fled to this country seeking freedom are among our best allies in this struggle to defeat the jihadi terrorist movement, which is today supported by the regime in Tehran among others.
So I deny Senator Durbin the authority or the right to speak on behalf of Muslims. I deny him the right to preach about the doctrines of Shariah law. We must defeat his jihad against the truth-tellers. The lives of our loved ones depend on it.
Ken Timmerman is the Republican nominee for Congress in Maryland’s 8th District, running against CAIR-supported incumbent Rep. Chris Van Hollen. Learn more at TimmermanForCongress.com.
