The Redhunter

3) Political jihad: Mollification of the public - One, reassure the public that there is nothing to worry about, and two, promote acceptance of Islam in general and their verison in particular. They want us to turn to their approved sources for information about Islam.

4) Intelligence jihad: Infiltration of the country - The first step is to control the Islamic community in the target country. They do this by trying to gain control of the mosques, Muslim community centers and the like. The next step is to encourage their members and sympathizers to join Western governments, intelligence agencies, police units, and military.

5) Subversive jihad: Behind enemy lines and protected by its laws - As long as they obey the laws of the target government, they are relatively safe. As Phares put it during an interview on NBC after 9-11: "The safest place on Earth to hide from the dragon is inside its belly."

6) Diplomatic jihad: Controlling foreign policy - "Arabists" in the US State Department have been a problem for some time. Because we listened to Saudi advice we became convinced that the Taliban weren't really so bad, we missed al Qaeda because they didn't want us to know the truth about how close OBL's philosophy was to Saudi Wahabism, we let Hezbollah take over Lebanon, and we stalled too long over Sudan and let a genocide develop.

Other Wahabist Infiltration Strategies

Sometimes the apologists simply try to discredit their critics. Ismael Royer of CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations) made it his mission to track and attempt to discredit academics such as Daniel Pipes and Walid Phares, as well as human rights activists such as Charles Jacobs.

Phares has been called as an expert witness in for the prosecution at the trials of many accused of terrorism-related crimes. He related sevaral stories about how the defense tries to conceal the nature of the material the police investigators found:

In every single case I witnessed and in all cases I reviewed (on both sides of the Atlantic), one pattern is dominant. There is a clear and firm attempt by a political faction to deny essential information and education to juries, prosecutors, and judges. The Wahabi lobby did all it could to block basic facts from reaching the United States and the western justice system regarding jihadism. In each case, where the defendants were tried for alleged terrorism, the defense and their experts would claim that Salafism is not jihadism and that jihad is not violent.

The Wahabists have also tried to exploit racial tensions by recruiting black Americans. Bin Laden and other jihadists have a somewhat strange attitude towards race. On the one hand, they talk about a war against the "white man". Yet in Sudan they favor the Arab Muslims over black Muslims of Darfur and the south. Yet again in the US they try to recruit blacks and influence the Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam. As Phares tells it, "the ultimate scenario of al Qaeda and it's sisters are for many U.S cities to look more like Sarajevo, Beirut, and Belfast at the peak of urban wars." In future installments we will explore this further when we talk about what bin Laden hoped would happen after 9-11.

Why We Missed bin Laden

The reason we missed the threat posed by al Qaeda, Phares says, is because the Wahabis had successfully penetrated the US to the degree that "before Sept 11, if the government had issued national "warnings" of potential "jihadists attacks" even by al Qaeda, it would have been faced with a barrage of apologists accusing it of bashing Islam." It is hard to see how he is wrong, given that even after Sept 11, when the President talks about "Islamic Facsists", he is criticized by at least one prominent democrat. In fairness, had President Clinton declared a "War on Jihadism", Republicans and conservatives would have dismissed it as an attempt to "wag the dog".

The failure to see the danger went beyond politics and the government, however. The media completely dropped the ball, discussing terrorism but not jihadism or any form of Islamic radicalism. The worse, Phares says, was PBS, which actually showed more programs endorsing the aplogists than all of the broadcast and cable networks combined.

Phares disagrees with the 9/11 Commission that our failure to prevent the attacks of that day were a failure of imagination. He sees it more as a failure to educate Americans on the danger of jihadism. And the reason we failed is that penetration by the Saudi Wahabists successfully pulled the wool over our eyes.

Next up: Brotherhood Success Stories

Walid Phares relates how the Muslim Brotherhood has tried, with varying degress of success, to infiltrate Middle Eastern societies and take control of governments.

Update

If you doubt that Salafist infiltration is taking place in the West, consider this editorial by Paul Belien of the Brussels Journal, titled "The Islamicization of Antwerp", which appeared in today's Washington Times. Following are the first few paragraphs (emphasis added)

The decisive battle against Islamic extremists will not be fought in Iraq, but in Europe. It is not in Baghdad but in cities like Antwerp, Belgium, where the future of the West will be decided.

I recently met Marij Uijt den Bogaard, a 49-year-old woman who deserves America's support at least as much as Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Ms. Uijt den Bogaard was an Antwerp civil servant in the 1990s, who spent many years working in the immigrant neighborhoods of Antwerp. There she noticed how radical Islamists began to take over. "They work according to a well-defined plan," she says.

One of the things Ms. Uijt den Bogaard used to do for the immigrants was to assist them with their administrative paperwork. Quite a few of them came to trust her.

About three years ago, young men dressed in black moved into the neighborhoods. They had been trained in Saudi Arabia and Jordan and adhere to Salafism, a radical version of Islam. They set up youth organizations, which gradually took over the local mosques. "The Salafists know how to debate and they know the Qur'an by heart, while the elderly running the mosques do not," she said They also have money. "One of them told me that he gets Saudi funds." Because they are eloquent, the radicals soon became the official spokesmen of the Muslim community, also in dealing with the city authorities. Ms. Uijt den Bogaard witnessed how the latter gave in to Salafist demands, such as the demand for separate swimming hours for Muslim women in the municipal pools.

Read the whole thing.